Ranching Traditions: Legacy of the American West

Great Book. Fast service from te seller and in great shape. The book itself has the brest photos and great stories of some great ranches and ranchers.

I saw this book at my doctor's office, and ran home to order it. The photographs are beautiful while being very accurately descriptive of ranching life. I also enjoyed the dialog in the book, which is the perfect balance to a "mostly picture book."

This is a fiercely ambitious book with hundreds of color photographs, plus essays on ranch life by thirteen authors, all with established Western credentials. The photographer, Kathleen Jo Ryan, unlike many who have published books of Western photography, grew up on a ranch and knows her subject from firsthand experience. The contributing authors include the likes of Gretel Ehrlich (The Solace of Open Spaces), David Dary (Cowboy Culture), humorist, novelist, and cowboy poet Baxter Black (Hey, Cowboy, Wanna Get Lucky), and William Kittredge (Hole in the Sky). While it has many photographs that celebrate the vastness and beauty of the rural West, it also focuses on the people who own and work on ranches, identifying always the men and women who appear in the pictures and their jobs. The last section of the book is a long photo gallery of ranchers with a few words from each expressing their love of the life they have chosen. In the book's wish to represent ranch work truthfully, it goes further than similar books, with sequences of photographs showing the births of calves, some with and some without assistance. There are also sections on rodeo, entertainment, and cowboy poetry. Unlike books that chiefly romanticize the West and the life and work of the cowboy, this book has a point of view that is more related to ranch-owning and ranching as a business. Championing traditional values and opposed to the modern spread of soul-less agribusiness, it represents ranchers as they see themselves. At almost 300 pages, it's a hefty book, weighing in at about five pounds. With Kodak as a primary corporate sponsor, it's also a celebration of photography itself.