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OGALLALA ROAD: A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND RECKONING
Author:
Bair, Julene
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Class:
636.0109
Age: Adult
Language: English
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LC: S589.757
Print Run: 25000
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ISBN-13: 9780670786046
LCCN: 2013036969
Imprint: Viking
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Pub Date: 03/06/2014
Availability: Out of Print Confirmed
List: $26.95
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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278 pages ; 24 cm
H 9.31",
W 6.13",
D 0.99",
1.05 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
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Bibliographies:
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Awards:
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Booklist Editors Choice
Booklist Starred Reviews
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Starred Reviews:
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Booklist
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TIPS Subjects:
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Agriculture
Ecology/Environment
Sustainable Living
Social Life and Customs
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BISAC Subjects: |
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women
NATURE / Natural Resources
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LC Subjects:
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Agricultural conservation, Kansas
Agriculture, Environmental aspects, Kansas
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women
Bair, Julene, Homes and haunts, Kansas
Family farms, Kansas
Farm life, Kansas
Kansas, Social life and customs
NATURE / Natural Resources
Ogallala Aquifer
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SEARS Subjects: |
Agriculture, Environmental aspects
Bair, Julene, Homes, Kansas
Conservation of natural resources, Kansas
Family farms, Kansas
Farm life, Kansas
Kansas, Social life and customs
Ogallala Aquifer
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Reading Programs: |
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| Annotations |
| Publisher Annotations | 12/04/2013 |
| Julene Bair has inherited part of a farming empire and fallen in love with a rancher from Kansas's beautiful Smoky Valley. She means to create a family, provide her son with the father he longs for, and preserve the Bair farm for the next generation, honoring her own father's wish and commandment, "Hang on to your land!" But part of her legacy is a share of the ecological harm the Bair Farm has done: each growing season her family-like other irrigators-pumps over two hundred million gallons out of the Ogallala aquifer. The rapidly disappearing aquifer is the sole source of water on the vast western plains, and her family's role in its depletion haunts her. As traditional ways of life collide with industrial realities, Bair must dramatically change course. Updating the territory mapped by Jane Smiley, Pam Houston, and Terry Tempest Williams, and with elements of Cheryl Strayed's 'Wild,' 'The Ogallala Road' tells a tale of the West today and points us toward a new way to love both the land and one another. |
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| Starred Reviews: |
| Booklist | 03/01/2014 |
| In this thoughtful consideration of life at a crossroads, Bair tackles questions about single parenthood, romance, and the monumental task of determining the future of the family farm. Bair grew up steeped deeply in Kansas farming, but her life has taken her far away in more ways than one. A woman facing midlife alone with a teenage son, she finds herself falling into an unexpected love affair at the same time her father's death forces changes to the family farm. In the midst of the more prosaic tasks of land management, she recounts her long concernswith the demands farming places on the land, especially the Ogallala aquifer. Threaded throughout each chapter are her travels along the Ogallala's path as she puzzles out the changes the water table has suffered and challenges old agricultural traditions that continue to persist in defiance of logic. Bair's measured approach to her family's ultimate decision about the farm provides readers in a nonrural setting with a thoughtful look into America's heartland. Book groups should find much to discuss here, from love to family to the big questions we all must face about how we live now. Mondor, Colleen. 278p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2014. |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 03/01/2014 |
| In her memoir, The Ogallala Road, Julene Bair chronicles the last days of her family's Kansas farm, as well as the bittersweet love affair that feeds her hope of saving the place her folks called home. She makes the case that modern farming practices are inexorably eroding the vast resources her ancestors took for granted, and she mourns the unraveling of the tapestry that once bound together her family, their history and the land they shared. Twice divorced and worried about her teenage son, Jake, Bair returns to her family's farm for a visit and meets Ward, a rancher from nearby Smoky Valley. Lonely in middle age, she is thrilled to have a man in her life again, as well as a role model for Jake. Together she and Ward dream about building a life together and working the land Bair has inherited from her parents. From the beginning, however, Bair knows that Ward does not share her passion for land preservation. She begins to wrestle with her family's part in draining the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides the only source of water for the Western Plains. Eventually, she supports more sustainable use of this precious water source--even as she realizes that her actions will drive a wedge between her and Ward. Bair's memoir is a moving and honest account of a woman trying to reconcile parts of herself that seem irreconcilable--daughter, mother, lover, landowner, environmental advocate. In searching for unity within herself, she discovers what she truly values. Marianne Peters. 288pg. BOOKPAGE, c2014. |
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| Kirkus Reviews | 01/15/2014 |
| A gifted writer describes the ebbs and flows of the arc of a romantic relationship while exploring her own bond to the American heartland. Bair (One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter, 2000) explores her inner emotional life in this spare memoir that eventually becomes equal parts Robert James Waller romance novel, William Least Heat-Moon road show and agricultural expose memorializing the painful legacy of the independent American farmer. The author begins with her memories of a childhood on the farm in remote Kansas. Returning home after years in metropolitan San Francisco, Bair felt like a stranger in a strange land until she met Ward, a laconic, closeted intellectual rancher who ignited a fire in this single mother. In subsequent sections, we experience Bair's combative relationship with her son, Jake, to whom Ward represented a potential last chance at a father figure. Coming home, Bair worked with her family to preserve the large industrial farm that had become their family legacy but was faced with the harsh reality that their livelihood contributes to the rapid depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies over a quarter of America's irrigated land with water--not to mention the fact that the farm's fate was being decided on the eve of the ethanol boom. Bair offers an unblinking look at a woman's place in a patriarchal culture. "A father for Jake, a farmer for Dad," the author laments. "That's why the time I'd spend helping Dad during Jake's toddlerhood had seemed so healing. I had proven I could be that farmer if I wanted to, and Dad had accepted that I could. I rejected all those sexist implications, asserted my own truths, became equal in my own right, but look at me now." A lyrical but somewhat distracted narrative that can't decide whether it's a love story, a meditation on our lives on this planet or an attempt to follow Upton Sinclair into the depths. 288pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2014. |
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| Library Journal | 04/03/2014 |
| Essayist and writing teacher Bair (One Degree West) examines whether or not you can ever really go home again, and, if you do, whose life do you lead: your parents' or your own? Concerned about the rapacious depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer by farming families like her own as well as the industrialization of farming, Bair fights to honor her agrarian heritage while preserving the harsh beauty of the High Plains. VERDICT Bair provides a crash course on the huge ocean (the Ogallala Aquifer) that lies below the heart of America, but mixes many themes. Her tale of romantic misadventure overshadows her concerns about sustainability at points. 288p. LJ Reviews Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2014. |
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| Publishers Weekly | 12/02/2013 |
| Nostalgia for the family farm in arid western Kansas vies with a deep consternation about the draining of the Ogallala Aquifer by crop irrigation in Bair's (One Degree West) ardent, deliberative narrative. The work returns to fateful events in the year preceding the reluctant, yet seemingly inevitable, selling of Bair's parents' farm in 2006: then in her early 50s, Bair was raising her teenaged son, Jake, by herself in Laramie, Wyo., where she had quit her job at the university in order to write fulltime. She meets a sexy, caring Kansas rancher, Ward Allbright, an event that seemed marvelously providential despite his conservative views; the two begin to plan a future together, taking over the Bairs' 3,500-acre dryland wheat and irrigated farm. The farm was largely being managed by her Bair's brother, Bruce, and required vast, unsustainable quantities of water from the fast-draining Ogallala Aquifer (she estimated that more than 4,000 gallons of water was needed for every bushel of corn harvested). Farmers used this sole source of water without any sense of its being finite. After researching geological maps that showed its perilous depletion, Bair began to speak publicly and write about the dire situation. Bair's thoughtful work underscores the dilemma now facing farmers on the High Plains. (Mar.). 278p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2013. |
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9780670786046,dl.it[0].title
| Review Citations |
| New York Times Book Review | 04/27/2014 |
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