Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

I don't often read nonfiction books that make me laugh out loud, but this one did. Egan is something of a gonzo journalist, taking on the vast subject of the American West and finding in it cause for both wonder and humor. The book is a collection of 14 essays, in which the author travels to places in 11 different states, giving readers plenty of local history, descriptions of dramatic landscapes, and a portrayal of "custom and culture" that reels under colliding visions of what the West should be. At every turn, he has an eye for ironies that both reveal and entertain.After an introduction that takes place at a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he begins his journey in New Mexico and Arizona, then moves northward, swinging through Colorado, Montana, and the Great Basin states, ending in California. There is much about cowboys, cattlemen, and Native Americans. We also visit London Bridge at Lake Havasu, an ostrich ranch outside Denver, the pit left behind by the Anaconda copper mining company in Butte, the casinos of Las Vegas, and the site of an appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the back of a road sign in Sunnyside, Washington. There are accounts of fishing in the Bitterroots of Idaho, river rafting on the American River above Sacramento, and hunting for Anasazi petroglyphs in the canyons of the Escalante in Utah.Meanwhile history comes alive from a colorful and sometimes jaundiced perspective in stories of the conquistador Don Juan de Oñate's conquest of the Indians at Acoma in New Mexico, the massacre of a wagon train of settlers by Mormons at Mountain Meadows, Utah, in the 1860s, and the California Gold Rush. There are historical figures who make vivid appearances, including Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Lewis and Clark, and Brigham Young. The most affecting story is the author's retelling of Chief Joseph and the fate of the Nez Perce. Egan gives us a whirlwind trip across a vast area of the U.S. He touches on themes that are common in books about the west -- the follies and vanities of those who have defied the realities of its arid climate, laid waste to natural resources, decimated its wildlife, and attempted to eradicate its native populations. While there is much to lament in what it reveals of the devastation brought by settlement of the West, it also seeks earnestly for signs that the spirit of the West still survives and can eventually thrive. I highly recommend this book as an addition to any bookshelf of Western nonfiction. As a companion volume, I also recommend Frank Clifford's "The Backbone of the World," which recounts a similar journey by a journalist across the states that lie along the Continental Divide.

I am an Australian who has never been to the United States, so I might be coming at this book from a different perspective to many.I thought the writing was wonderfully evocative, both in the positive descriptions (eg. the Western landscape) and the negative descriptions (eg. the stupidity of cows). I got a real sense of the beauty of the land.I thought the social and political aspect of the book was also really interesting because it took a view of American history which doesn't assume that you know who Thomas Jefferson was, but still requires some intelligence from the reader. Rather than just rubbishing traditional Western lifestyles, Egan engages with and explores them. He then offers some possible future solutions which are interesting and seem practical.I found the way Egan combined natural and political and social and demographic history into one whole comprehensible theory fantastic.

Egan's 14 chapters on various locales of the interior West slowly, but completely, demolish the mythology of perhaps the most mythologized part of the United States -- the West, or more properly, the West that is east of the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades.Those politicians and groups who are out to "save the West" from city dwellers, newcomers and environmentalists will not like this book, but everyone interested in the West will find Egan's description and commentary arresting.

As a native Californian who has visited most of the places in Egan's book, I can say he got it right. This is one of the best books I've read this year because it cleverly mixes sociology, history, travel book and future-predicting. Between this book and Tony Horwitz' Confederates in the Attic (which is a similarly mixed book about the South) I learned a lot about the South and the West. Now if only someone would take on Northeast and the Midwest...

After reading 'A Good Rain' a number of years ago, I couldn't wait for Egan's next book. And I was not disappointed. Egan casts aside the romantic visions and fanatasies about the real West, and gives his readers a large dose of reality and fact. As with his previous book, I felt myself both incredibly drawn by his accounts, descriptions and history of his subjects - while at the same time agonizing for the atrocities carried out by my predecessors. Egan's prose perfectly captures the geography of the west in a way few authors have been able to.'Lasso the Wind' falls under the "must read" category for anyone living, working or studying in the West...regardless of whether they are a 5th generation rancher or a 1st generation Sierra Club volunteer.