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A New York Times Editors' Choice for Book of the YearWinner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers AwardWinner of the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award"No one has evoked with greater power the marriage of land and sky that gives this country both its beauty and its terror. "--Washington Post Book WorldIn 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures, countless homesteaders--many of them immigrants--went west to make their fortunes. Most failed. In Bad Land, Jonathan Raban travels through the unforgiving country that was the scene of their dreams and undoing, and makes their story come miraculously alive.
