Product Description

In the true stories, essays, and poems of Leaning into the Wind we meet the real women of the High Plains today. Included are reflections on cowboys, tractor-driving lessons, outhouses, ranch marriages, and family legacies.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #451111 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780395901311
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Hearts of the West are unburdened in Leaning into the Wind, an anthology encompassing a wealth of experiences from farmers, ranchers, rangers, and other women who live and work in America's ofttimes harsh, sometimes beautiful high plains states shoehorned between the Mississippi and the Rockies. A New York newspaper writer transplanted to a hog farm on the "baking brown plains" sees a sagging trailer, rubbish, and waist-high weeds where her exuberant husband sees only promise. Waking on a bed of sweet straw after sobbing hysterically, she finds "dozens of piglets curled around me, nestled against my hips, tucked under my outspread arms, piled like a halo around my head." Other contributors wax poetic, describing an old pickup truck that "wanders down the road like a drunken goose" or steam coming off a newborn lamb in the chill night air. The selections tend toward rough-edged and gritty, but all are heartfelt.

From Library Journal
The editors of this anthology spent several years collecting writings by women of the High Plains states: North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming. The final product contains the work of over 200 authors. Poems and short prose fragments are gathered into chapters by general themes, such as working with livestock or family life. This collection showcases the voices of a wide variety of women of the Plains, allowing them to share their visions and experiences of the American West. The writing is generally good, but a smaller number of longer pieces would have given individual authors a chance to express themselves more fully. Recommended for regional collections.?Gwen Gregory, New Mexico State Univ. Lib., Las Cruces
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Essays, stories, poems, and a few recipes by women from the High Plains. Some years ago memoirist Hasselstrom, librarian/horsewoman Collier, and publisher Curtis, residents of Wyoming, put out a call throughout the northern plains, asking for ``authentic'' and ``clear'' views of women's lives there. Their emphasis was particularly on the authentic: Protesting perhaps a little too much, they opine that the West has been popularized to the point where ``a New York stockbroker slips on pointy-toed boots in psychedelic colors to dine with a lady in a fringed skirt and mocassins,'' and real cowpokes are ashamed to be seen wearing cowboy hats for fear they'll be mistaken for these poseurs. They've turned up plenty of authentic work here. The collection suffers only from a predictable level of repetition, inasmuch as many of the 125 contributors (including teachers, housewives, cattle and sheep ranchers, and writers) turn to the same themes: the loneliness of ranch life, the smell of new-mown hay, the bitterness of an Alberta Clipper wind in the thick of winter. For all the sameness, though, many of the pieces--few by previously published writers--are very fine, among them NellieWesterskow's remembrance of her first year of marriage, in 1921, when she and her husband were so poor they ``had to share the only fork until Nels found another at an abandoned homestead when he was out riding.'' Garnet Perman's ``Evolution of a Country Woman'' is a good-natured enumeration of all the things that a ranch wife has to know (such as the fact that ``sheep have an IQ three points below that of wormwood''). Morgan Songi offers a lyrical account, noting that in the ``crystal mornings after an ice storm'' the beauty of the land makes up for the isolation of farm life. A fine example of regional anthologizing. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

As real as the western women who inhabit the land
As a ranch woman who lived many years in South Dakota, the anthology truly amazes me for its capacity to speak clearly about the heart and souls of plainswomen. The women wrote their stories with passion that credits the authenticity of their varied subjects. The authors exposed the west in black and white, yet showed the gray complexities. The land, as one writer said, holds you in a way nothing else can. The reader learns that an appreciation and respect for the land is paramount if one is to cope with extreme weather, cyclical income--often below the cost of doing business, relationships made uneasy by common community knowledge of generations living in the same place. Individuality, as shown by the diverseness of the authors' experiences, is the key to holding one's own in an oftimes hostle environment. Truly the weak don't survive. "Leaning..." shows the strength and fortitude necessary for life on the high plains and also the compassion brought on by the witnessing of a prairie in bloom, an astonishing star lit sky or the newborn's arrival. One sees clearly the growth that can come from intimate association with life and death. The honesty of life is on every page.

Loved most of it
It got a bit repetitive though - I mean, ALL those stories of calving were a bit excessive. I bought this book during my first visit to the High Plains last week on my spring break in South Dakota. I enjoyed most of the stories - I didn't think they were all particularly and equally wonderful, but with so many writings you will have likes and dislikes. I did wish, however, that I could talk to some of these women and let them know that not all vegetarians and animal-rights activists hate ranchers. We're not all hippy-dippy airheads who don't know the real story of animal farming - the hard work and even love that goes into the raising of animals. It's just a difference of opinion regarding the sanctity of _all_ life. I felt attacked, quite a few times, while reading this book. Overall though, there were very inspiring stories and quotable quotes - "Pay a holy kind of attention" !!! Loved that one.

Heart-wrenching, yet inspiring; history with soul.
To start this book is to start a trip into one's own past. Whether we now live in the country or in a city, many of the stories told here are within our own familys' histories; I can feel my own German immigrant grandparents, farming on the plains of Eastern Colorado, within these pages.

The sheer eloquence of these plains women - their poetry and tales - tells much of the strength of the human spirit. I wept with them as they tell of the rigors of drought and the Depression; laughed with them as they tell of childish pranks; and prayed with them as they lived through weather we can only imagine today, snugged, cocooned, and protected as we are from the elements.

I would wish every high school American history teacher would include this in their curriculum. To have history not only educate, but entertain, is a rare treat. It is our roots that make us strong - just as the wheat that grows upon these same high plains.

The format is outstanding for its message: short essays and poems. One can chew off just as much as is right at any one time, without feeling that the tale has been interrupted. The eloquence of these prairie women, the beauty of their imagery, was a constant delight - even when their eloquence was manifested purely by sheer simplicity.