This anthology introduces such detectives as Sam Spade, Ellery Queen, and Perry Mason.

The Great American Detective (Mentor Series)

Literature & Fiction

Kittredge, William

Krauser, Steven M.

Short Stories & Anthologies

Signet

The Klamath Basin is a land of teeming wildlife, expansive marshes, blue-ribbon trout streams, tremendous stretches of forests, and large ranches in southern Oregon and northern California. Known to waterfowl, songbirds, and shorebirds, the Klamath Basin's marshlands are a mecca for birds along the Pacific Flyway. This gorgeously illustrated book is a paean to the beauty of the Klamath Basin and at the same time a sophisticated environmental case study of an endangered region whose story parallels that of watershed development throughout the west. A collaboration between two photographers and a writer, Balancing Water tells the story in words and pictures of the complex relationship between the human and natural history of this region. Spectacular images by Tupper Ansel Blake depict resident species of the area, migratory birds, and dramatic landscapes. Madeleine Graham Blake has contributed portraits of local residents, while archival photographs document the history of the area. William Kittredge's essay on the conjunction of conflicting interests in this wildlands paradise is by turns lyrically personal and brimming with historical and scientific facts. He traces the water flowing through the Klamath Basin, the human history of the watershed, and the land-use conflicts that all touch on the availability of water. Ranchers, loggers, town settlers, Native Americans, tourists, and environmentalists are all represented in the narrative, and their diverse perspectives form a complicated web like that of the interactions among organisms in the ecosystem. Kittredge finds hope in the endangered Klamath Basin, both in successful restoration projects recently begun there, and in the community involvement he sees as necessary for watershed restoration and biodiversity preservation. Emphasizing that we must take care of both human economies and the natural environment, he shows how the two are ultimately interconnected. The Klamath Basin can be a model for watershed restoration elsewhere in the west, as we search for creative ways of solving our intertwined ecological and social problems.

Balancing Water: Restoring the Klamath Basin

Business & Money

Blake, Tupper Ansel

Blake, Madeleine Graham

Economics

University of California Press

"William Kittredge writes about the West," Raymond Carver once wrote, "with pity and terror and love. His work is singular and unforgettable." And in this extraordinary, much-awaited memoir, he explores one of our primary national mythologies through the history of his own family. The Great Basin is a sagebrush desert extending from Oregon into Nevada and California, ringed by mountains and crossed by oasis valleys--and, until white men arrived in the latter half of the nineteenth century, home to the Klamaths, the Modocs, and the northern Paiutes. By then their destruction was inevitable, as was a future of Manifest Destiny and massive ranches. One of these--the MC, later known as the Warner Valley Stock Company--was William Kittredge's birthright and curse. He was born, in 1932, into a frontier childhood of natural beauty and cowboys all around; and for him, unlike the vast flocks of migrating waterfowl, this was a place to be rooted forever, among people who for three generations had owned it all. But gradually everything changed, as surely as horses gave way to the tractors that drained the swamps and transformed the land, and as the distances between fathers and sons and husbands and wives came to be measured in resentment and silence. This is the story of a great pioneer family's decline and fall, and of a childhood dream that turned into an adulthood of dislocation and loss, the end of a way of life. But it is also Kittredge's account of coming to terms with this complex inheritance and to a new, deeper, understanding of both himself and the West. Based on his experience and our collective past, Hole in the Sky is an epic of American life.

Hole In The Sky : A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Alfred.A. Knopf

Hailed as one of our finest writers about the American West, William Kittredge now brings all his experience and intelligence to bear on the wider, and wilder, West of our civilization. In certain respects, The Nature of Generosity continues the story of Hole in the Sky, the acclaimed memoir of Kittredge's early life on his family's vast ranch in Oregon; but it also ranges freely, and exhilaratingly, around the world and through recorded time. A travel book of sorts--from New York and Venice to the Andalusian hills of García Lorca, from the cow towns of Montana to the caves at Lascaux--it is driven by the quest to reconcile childhood simplicities with the complex, urgent, adult questions about who to be, and how, and why. Drawing on our various histories--biological, cultural, psychological--Kittredge celebrates diversity as the cornerstone of our social possibilities, examines the freedom and responsibility this entails, and suggests that our culture's habitually selfish, combative behavior is far from being in our best interests--or, indeed, in our nature. Less geographical than philosophical, at once learned and curious, observant and personal, The Nature of Generosity is a revolutionary, and practical, magnum opus.

The Nature of Generosity

KNOPF

William Kittredge's stunning memoir is at once autobiography, a family chronicle, and a Westerner's settling of accounts with the land he grew up in. This is the story of a grandfather whose single-minded hunger for property won him a ranch the size of Delaware but estranged him from his family; of a father who farmed with tractors and drainage ditches but consorted with movie stars; and of Kittredge himself, who was raised by cowboys and saw them become obsolete, who floundered through three marriages, hard drinking, and madness before becoming a writer. Host hauntingly, Hole in the Sky is an honest reckoning of the American myth that drove generations of Americans westward -- and what became of their dream after they reached the edge.

Hole in the Sky: A Memoir

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

The Nature of Generosity is at once a natural sequel to the acclaimed memoir Hole in the Sky and an entirely unique masterwork from one of the finest writers of the American West. Taking as his topic the "ordinary yearning to take physical and emotional care," William Kittredge embarks upon a literary and philosophical grand tour that explores the very core of who we are. Whether he's recalling a childhood in Oregon, touring Europe, or studying photographs of Japanese gardens in a bookstore in New York City, Kittredge's connections are as unexpected as they are inspiring. Shattering the myth that survival of the fittest means "survival of the violent, or the cruelest, or the selfish," Kittredge imagines a world in which altruism dominates--and offers ample evidence that this is not an unreachable utopian ideal.

In 1934, Rossie Benasco's cowboy lifestyle culminates in a thousand-mile drive through the Rocky Mountains into Calgary, a journey that leads him to Eliza Stevenson and a desire to spend the rest of his life with her on a Montana ranch.

The Willow Field

United States

Thorndike Pr

For part of each of the last twenty years, much-loved essayist and fiction writer William Kittredge has ventured to the storied desert landscape of the American Southwest and immersed himself in the region's wide-ranging wonders and idiosyncrasies. Here Kittredge brings all this experience to bear as he takes us on a rewarding tour of the territory that runs from Santa Fe to Yuma, and from the Grand Canyon on south through Phoenix and Tucson to Nogales. It is a region where urban sprawl abuts desert expanse, where Native American pueblos compete for space with agribusiness cotton plantations, and where semi-defunct mining towns slowly give way to new-age hippie gardening and crafts enclaves. As part-time resident and full-time observer, William Kittredge acquaints us with one of the country's most vital and perpetually evolving regions. Populated with die-hard desert rats on the banks of the Colorado, theoretical physicists in Albuquerque, Hopi mothers and their daughters, and renegade punk-rock kids sleeping in the streets, Southwestern Homelands is a book as much about the legacies of a territory's colorful past as it is about the alternately exciting and daunting complexities of its immediate future.

Southwestern Homelands (National Geographic Directions)

Travel

Travel Writing

National Geographic

In Waste Land, photographer David T. Hanson presents a picture of our environment that is unfamiliar and deeply disturbing. It is, however, a picture that must be looked at and contended with if our environment is to survive. In the words of the writer Wendell Berry, Hanson has "given us the topography of our open wounds." Waste Land is a powerful book that will not permit us to turn our backs on the declining state of our environment. During the past fifteen years of his career as an artist/photographer, Hanson has documented-- often in aerial photographs that are deceptively, inexorably beautiful-- some of the devastations that humans have inflicted and continue to impose upon the environment. Each of the four photographic series in this book provides a different look at the consequences of our actions. Waste Land opens with a series of photographs of strip mines in Colstrip, Montana that Hanson created in the early 1980s, a series he describes as "a chronicle of entropy, an elegy for a lost landscape." Beginning with photographs depicting trailer parks and company houses-- void of any human presence-- the vantage point moves upwards through images of the community's mine, power plant, and industrial site, to aerial shots that become increasingly abstract. Ultimately, the series reveals Colstrip as arena and metaphor for the use, misuse, and abuse of power. Hanson's Minuteman Missile Sites series focuses on one aspect of the American industrial and military landscape: bleak aerial views of silos, each containing a missile with a destructive potential nearly a hundred times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. These images disclose some of America's secret landscapes; they mirror in both form and content the military's applications of photography for surveillance and targeting. The harrowing centerpiece of this book is Hanson's Waste Land series. In 1982, from some 400,000 toxic sites throughout the U.S.A., the Environmental Protection Agency listed 418 as highly hazardous and in need of urgent attention. In only a few years, that number more than tripled. Waste Land is a study of sixty-seven of the most dangerously polluted waste sites in the United States. In this series of triptychs, Hanson juxtaposes an aerial photograph, a modified topographic map, and an EPA site description exposing some of the elaborate legal strategies that corporations and individuals have used to avoid taking responsibility for the contamination-- or the cleanup. The book's final sequence is devoted to Hanson's recent series, ironically entitled "The Treasure State": Montana 1889-1989. Here, the photographer begins with an aerial view of a site that affects one of Montana's imperiled species, and overlays each image with a sheet of glass, discreetly etched with the name of the impacted animal. Perhaps the most visually abstract series in the book, "The Treasure State" features haunting, intensely colorful images that lure the viewer in, only to be struck by the realization that a vital and sustaining element of this landscape is on the brink of disappearing. Waste Land includes an Afterword by Mark Dowie, author of 1995's Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century. In his text, Dowie explores the historical mutability of our country's policies toward the environment. The book also features poignant commentary by Susan Griffin, William Kittredge, Peter Montague and Maria B. Pellerano, and Terry Tempest Williams. "The power of these photographs is in their terrifying, because undeniable, particularity....What we can see in these vandalized and perhaps irreparable landscapes we are obliged to understand as symbolic of what we cannot see: the steady seeping of poison into our world and our bodies."--Wendell Berry, in the Preface to this book

Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape

Arts & Photography

GRIFFIN, SUSAN

Williams, Terry Tempest

Dowie, Mark

Berry, Wendell

Hanson, David T.

Montague, Peter

Pellerano, Maria B.

Individual Artists

Aperture

Having grown up on his family's cattle ranch in eastern Oregon, Kittredge directly confronts the contradictions and myths that lie at the heart of the Western experience: male freedom and female domesticity, the wild and the tame, self-interest and love of the land.

Owning It All: Essays

Graywolf Pr

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Books by Kittredge, William