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Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land
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Product Description
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #740312 in Books
- Published on: 2008-02-19
- Released on: 2008-02-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 384 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In this clouded memoir, Irvine, former development director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), pursues her tortuous trajectory from a loosely Mormon upbringing to strident environmental activism. Irvine writes from the fresh grief of her father's suicide: a fierce atheist with a Mormon pedigree, her father divorced her mother when Irvine was 10, drank heavily and gradually grew estranged from his family before shooting himself in the heart. With her mother and sister, Irvine grew up a Jack Mormon (one whose belief in the Church of the Latter Day Saints has lapsed), endured a brief marriage with a yuppie vegetarian and found true love with a lawyer named Herb, with whom she moved to San Juan County, Utah. As Irvine, a grant-proposal writer, and Herb both worked for the SUWA, their advocacy for public lands pitted them in uncomfortable opposition to the pro-development, cattle-friendly interests of their largely Mormon neighbors. Irvine structures her memoir cannily around the four eras of local Native American prehistoric culture (Lithic, Archaic, Basketmaker and Pueblo), each reflecting a period of migration and settlement in her own life. However, her work is filled with so much tertiary detail that emotional resonance is rare. Still, her views on wilderness preservation ring passionately and her research is sound. (Feb.)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* The Mormon ranchers of Utah’s red-rock country hate environmentalists as much as coyotes, and believe women belong at home with their children. As a wilderness advocate and renegade Mormon, Irvine is, therefore, apprehensive about living in contested San Juan County with her ardent public-lands-use attorney lover. As she hikes breathtakingly beautiful, ruins-studded canyons, she vividly imagines the lives of the long-vanished hunter-gatherers and contrasts their ways of being with ours. Bold and original in her thinking, candid and lyrical in expression, Irvine launches a penetrating critique of Mormon sovereignty, the persistent oppression of women, the longing to belong versus the need to be one’s self, and the environmental havoc wrought by cattle ranching, “extreme recreationists,” and the federally sanctioned, post-9/11 rush to extract fossil fuels from protected public lands. Haunted by her complicated heritage as a descendant of one of the original Mormon Saints as well as nonconformists––especially her grandmother Ada, an artist who found meaning in the desert’s mercurial beauty, and her father, who lived to hunt and died at his own hands––Irvine suspensefully chronicles the rancor and stress of advocacy work and a bewildering health crisis. Forthright and imaginative, sensitive and tough, Irvine joins red-rock heroes Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams in breaking ranks and speaking up for the living world. --Donna Seaman
Review
"As raw and stinging as a fresh burn . . . It's hard to imagine a personal history more transporting than this one, with its rigorously original prose (not a single cliche in 300-plus pages), emotional detail and bibliophilic departures into the musty caverns of American history." -- Los Angeles Times
"Bold and original in her thinking, candid and lyrical in expression, Irvine launches a penetrating critique of Mormon sovereignty, the persistent oppression of women, the longing to belong versus the need to be one's self, and the environmental havoc wrought by cattle ranching, "extreme recreationists," and the federally sanctioned, post-9/11 rush to extract fossil fuels from protected public lands . . . Forthright and imaginative, sensitive and tough, Irvine joins red-rock heroes Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams in breaking ranks and speaking up for the living world." -- Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review
"Irvine braids together threads of Mormon history, her own family's stories and her quest for illumination, creating a singularly elegaic and astringent memoir of dissent." -- Chicago Tribune
"Irvine's language is lovely, her stories compelling." -- Mother Jones online
"Nestled amid the descriptions of the stark, red-rock desert of the Colorado Plateau, speculation about ancient inhabitants, and reflection on Mormon migration west is Irvine's own story, which she unfolds gradually while moving seamlessly between past and present . . . beautifully written." -- Library Journal
“Fierce . . . the most vivid ground-level report from this war zone that I have ever read.”—Grace Lichtenstein, The Washington Post
“A story as raw and stinging as a fresh burn . . . Trespass might well be Desert Solitaire's literary heir . . . it's hard to imagine a personal history more transporting than this one, with its rigorously original prose (not a single cliché in 300-plus pages), emotional detail and bibliophilic departures into the musty caverns of American history. And then there are the lessons and metaphors Irvine weaves into her stricken, conflicted narrative. One can learn a great deal from "Trespass" about desert botany and geology, the politics of land management and the arcane lore of Mormonism.” —Judith Lewis, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“[Irvine] braids together threads of Mormon history, her own family’s stories and her quest of illumination, creating a singularly elegiac and astringent memoir of dissent . . . “—Donna Seaman, Chicago Tribune
“I hate that question that ends up on so many Q&As: If you could have five authors, living or dead, to a dinner party, who would you invite? How the hell should I know? Is James Joyce a picky eater? These things are important. Then I started reading Amy Irvine's Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, and I not only wanted to invite her over, I wanted to get myself a gun and kill a goose for dinner . . . This is my kind of woman.” —Jessa Crispin, Bookslut
“A fierce and lyrical memoir.”—Orion
“An unusual hybrid that combines memoir, natural history, Western history, anthropology, and an examination of the Mormon religion . . . Luckily, [Irvine’s] clear, detailed prose will help ground readers as they try to keep up with the leaps of her fertile mind . . . a loud, bracing, honest cry from the wilderness.”—Jenny Shank, New West
“Irvine delivers a distinctive, affecting meditation on loss—an amalgam of personal history, natural history, and a search for spirituality . . . in unexpected places. “—Carmela Ciuraru, More
“Bold and original in her thinking, candid and lyrical in expression, Irvine launches a penetrating critique of Mormon sovereignty, the persistent oppression of women, the longing to belong versus the need to be one’s self, and the environmental havoc wrought by cattle ranching, “extreme recreationists,” and the federally sanctioned, post-9/11 rush to extract fossil fuels from protected public lands . . . Forthright and imaginative, sensitive and tough, Irvine joins red-rock heroes Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams in breaking ranks and speaking up for the living world." —Booklist, starred review
“Irvine's language is lovely, her stories compelling. She shares deep insights.”—Julia Whitty, Mother Jones
“Compelling [and] beautifully written.”—Maureen J. Delaney-Lehman, Library Journal
“Irvine structures her memoir cannily around the four eras of local native American prehistoric culture (Lithic, Archaic, Basketmaker and Pueblo), each reflecting a period of migration and settlement in her own life . . . her views on wilderness preservation ring passionately.”—Publishers Weekly
"Trespass is a flare shot up amid troubling forces and asks us not to imagine a new West, but instead to re-envision ourselves as its inhabitants." —Robert Redford
“Trespass is a book full of transgressions because Amy Irvine has dared to examine the nature of orthodoxy, be it religion, environmentalism, or marriage. What saves this book from simply becoming an indulgence is her fidelity and love for all things beautiful and broken, especially the redrock desert of southern Utah. If erosion is the face of a changing landscape, Amy Irving has written erosional prose. This is a transformative memoir that dances between shadow and light.” —Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place and Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert
“The most lingering, destructive myth to come out of the American West has been the notion that sense of place is somehow derived from fierce independence. Amy Irvine knows better. Her beautiful prose, infused with the staggering breadth and texture of the Southwestern landscape, reminds us that home is a hunger. It is the hope for a life re-imagined, for relationships that stretch across centuries, full of tangle and sweat and heartbreaking possibility.”—Gary Ferguson, author of Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone and The Great Divide: A Biography of the American West
“Amy's writing is designed in the image of a landscape: desert writing, writing about bones and wind and stone. Some people try to write about this country, but their words are only dry and austere, as if that is all that is here. Amy's words truly dwell here. They deal as poetically with her father's suicide as they deal with facets of weather, with the myriad details of archaeology, geology, botany. This is not a natural history book in any common sense. It has the rhythm of arid writing: passing steadily from place to place, quick and then slow, here and then there. And it has the personal richness of a land where the rocks are made of blood.” —Craig Childs, author of Secret Knowledge of Water
“Amy Irvine’s Trespass is a harrowing and angry book, which ultimately wins us over by sheer, naked honesty. It is accurate to think of much of life in terms of damage control and Irvine eloquently presents her defense of the western landscape and the integrality of her own life.”—Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall
“There is heartbreak and there is love. The land can do that. There are the canyons gouged between the people who share the land. And there is writing as warm and harsh as the ground that birthed it. Amy Irvine has written a brilliant book about a place beyond our reach but within our dreams.”—Charles Bowden, author of Blood Orchid
Customer Reviews
lyrical insights on the way to wisdom
This is an eloquent, lyrical, and insightful account from the frontlines of the struggle to redefine our relationsips to Western landscapes. With a foot in both the Mormon ranching world of her ancestors and the world of conservation activism she has adopted, Amy Irvine struggles to reconcile her divided heart and loyalties. Although the struggles described are contemporary, this is really an old tale made fresh. The great writer Wallace Stegner said that the history of the American West is the struggle between "boomers" and "stickers." Boomers are those who came to make a quick killing and end up on easy street - the conquistadors, gold miners, land scalpers, and good ol' boy developers. Stickers, or "nesters," are those who try to understand the limits and needs of the land and live within them. But the division is too simple. In our consumer culture we all exhibit the behaviors of boomers and yet we all want to feel we are at home and in good relationship. This difficult struggle to sort out the conflicts and find balance is central to Amy's account. Ultimately, this is a quest for wisdom told with courage and compassion.
Edgy and sophisticated
I couldn't put it down. Irvine's writing is real and eloquent. She masterfully blends history, community and raw emotion into a riveting tale of life in a small, southern Utah town.
Trespass is sure to become a modern western classic.
A Fantastic Memoir
Ms. Irvine's book speaks to the soul. It carries a message of loss and hope, of death and life, and of the virtues of solitude and togetherness. Her portrait of her mate, Herb, the so-called "Lion Man" who embodies the wildness of the red rock desert she loves, is particularly intriguing. Highly recommended.
