Over the past 150 years, people have flocked to the Pacific Northwest in increasing numbers, in part due to the region’s beauty and one of its most exceptional features: volcanoes. This segment of the Pacific Ring of Fire has shaped not only the physical landscape of the region but also the psychological landscape, and with it the narratives we compose about ourselves. Exceptional Mountains is a cultural history of the Northwest volcanoes and the environmental impact of outdoor recreation in this region. It probes the relationship between these volcanoes and regional identity, particularly in the era of mass mountaineering and population growth in the Northwest.   O. Alan Weltzien demonstrates how mountaineering is but one conspicuous example of the outdoor recreation industry’s unrestricted and problematic growth. He explores the implications of our assumptions that there are no limits to our outdoor recreation habits and that access to the highest mountains should include amenities for affluent consumers. Each chapter probes the mountain-based regional ethos and the concomitant sense of privilege and entitlement from different vantages to illuminate the consumerist mind-set as a reductive—and deeply problematic—version of experience and identity in and around some of the nation’s most striking mountains.

Exceptional Mountains: A Cultural History of the Pacific Northwest Volcanoes

History

Weltzien, O.Alan

Americas

University Of Nebraska Press

In his controversial 1998 book Fiber, Rick Bass introduced a troubling dilemma of the literary artist and activist: How can any nature writer engage in celebration of the natural world in the face of environmental degradation? Perhaps, Bass speculated, the "activist is the artist's ashes," the identity that emerges finally from charred remains of a "pure" devotion to the art of nature writing. In The Literary Art and Activism of Rick Bass, the first comprehensive collection of literary criticism to address Bass's work, fifteen scholars elucidate the development of social, political, and personal issues in Bass’s fiction and nonfiction.

Literary Art and Activism of Rick Bass

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

University of Utah Press

John McPhee, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for Annals of the Former World, is considered one of the most distinguished writers of literary nonfiction. Coming into McPhee Country is the first comprehensive anthology to address his significant body of work. The first section, 'The Evolving Writer,' examines his work from a biographical point of view, explaining background and influences that affected his development as a writer. The second section, 'McPhee and the Natural World,' focuses on his representations of the natural world and explores his work from the framework of both wilderness and urban environmentalism. The final section, 'The Writerly Challenges of McPhee,' discusses his rhetorical choices in structure and style and demonstrates how his seemingly artless presentation is literary in every sense of the word. Overall, this volume salutes McPhee’s enormous and enormously varying oeuvre and confirms his stature as a major American writer.

Coming into McPhee Country: John McPhee and the Art of Literary Nonfiction

As author Ann Ronald notes, "Simultaneously a paean to his father and a personal memoir about a changing landscape caught by a ‘rising tide of affluence,’ Alan Weltzein’s A Father and an Island:Reflections on Loss, echoes my own Pacific Northwest youth—the endless saltwater summers, the quirky behavior of a bookworm, the sweet sharp tang of blackberry cobbler, the fierce games of badminton, the beachcombing days of discovery, the blessedness of parents well loved. Anyone who’s grown up in and around Puget Sound will find familiar memories triggered on every delicious page. Some sweet,some nostalgic, some downright sad, they’re all here in this poignant remembrance of things past." Northwest author Mary Clearman Blew writes, "In this moving tribute to his father and his family’s home on a Puget Sound island,Alan Weltzein returns us to a time when summers were glorious and children played all day long on beaches that were still unexploited and unrestricted—a pleasure to read." Weltzien's memoir is an essential book for Northwest Letters.

A Father and an Island: Reflections on Loss

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

Sandhill Pr

Review\n"Rescuing a major American author from an undeserved obscurity, Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage is an extraordinarily informative and seminal work of original scholarship. Exceptionally well organized and presented, [this book] is an especially and unreservedly recommended addition to community, college, and university library American Biography and American Literary Studies collections.” 
—Midwest Book Review\n"This book makes plain that Savage's work is worthy of a great deal more critical attention than it has received…Weltzien has a thorough command of his subject and has augmented his own analyses with impressive archival work and original interviews with Savage’s family, friends, and collaborators. Savage West is a significant and welcome contribution to scholarship on western American literature, Montana literature, and environmental literature.” 
—Michael P. Branch, author of Rants from the Hill and How to Cuss in Western\n“Weltzein's biography puts Thomas Savage, a writer of great power and immense insight, back on the American literary map. The first book-length study to explore Savage’s work in light of his conflicted sexuality—and thus an important contribution to American gay and lesbian literary studies--it sets the standard for future studies of Savage’s West.” 
—David Peterson, associate professor of English, University of Nebraska at Omaha\nThomas Savage (1915—2003) was one of the intermountain West's best novelists. His thirteen novels received high critical praise, yet he remained largely unknown by readers. Although Savage spent much of his later life in the Northeast, his formative years were spent in southwestern Montana, where the mountain West and his ranching family formed the setting for much of his work.\nO. Alan Weltzien's insightful and detailed literary biography chronicles the life and work of this neglected but deeply talented novelist. Savage, a closeted gay family man, was both an outsider and an insider, navigating an intense conflict between his sexual identity and the claustrophobic social restraints of the rural West. Unlike many other Western writers, Savage avoided the formula westerns— so popular in his time— and offered instead a realistic, often subversive version of the region. His novels tell a hard, harsh story about dysfunctional families, loneliness, and stifling provincialism in the small towns and ranches of the northern Rockies, and his minority interpretation of the West provides a unique vision and caustic counternarrative contrary to the triumphant settler-colonialism themes that have shaped most Western literature. Savage West seeks to claim Thomas Savage's well-deserved position in American literature and to reintroduce twenty-first-century readers to a major Montana writer.

Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage

Arts & Literature

University of Nevada Press

Thomas Savage (1915-2003) was one of the best of the Intermountain West novelists for several decades of the twentieth century. His thirteen novels received high critical praise but low sales throughout his career. Although he spent much of his later life in the Northeast, his formative years were spent in southwestern Montana, and the Mountain West and his ranching family formed the background of much of his work. O. Alan Weltzien's insightful and detailed literary biography chronicles the life and work of this neglected but deeply talented novelist. As a closeted gay family man in the rural West, Savage was both an outsider and an insider, navigating an intense conflict between his sexual identity and the claustrophobic social restraints of the rural West. Unlike many other Western writers, Savage abjured the formula westerns so popular in his time and offered instead a realistic, often subversive version of the rural West. His novels tell a hard, harsh story about dysfunctional families, loneliness, and stifling provincialism in the small towns and ranches of the northern Rockies, and his queer West provides a unique vision and a caustic counter-narrative contrary to the triumphant settler-colonialism themes that have shaped much Western literature. Savage West seeks to restore Thomas Savage's well-deserved position in American literature and to reintroduce twenty-first-century readers to a major Montana writer.

Univ of Nevada Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Weltzien, O.Alan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Weltzien, O.Alan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Weltzien, O.Alan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Exceptional Mountains: A Cultural History of the Pacific Northwest Volcanoes

Literary Art and Activism of Rick Bass

Coming into McPhee Country: John McPhee and the Art of Literary Nonfiction

A Father and an Island: Reflections on Loss

Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage

Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage