Book Description
"Peopled with the kinds of characters most novelists only dream of"(Christian Science Monitor), this classic account of American frontier living captures the rambunctious spirit of a pioneer who set out in 1909 to prove that a woman could ranch. Stewart's captivating missives from her homestead in Wyoming bring to full life the beauty, isolation, and joys of working the prairie.
Customer Reviews:
Pioneer grit.......2007-08-01
Genuine substance and sincerity describe Stewart's letters from the early twentieth century while homesteading in this remote corner of Wyoming. Whereas most women would not even consider putting down roots in such an isolated area, Mrs. Stewart was determined to make a life for herself in this territory. And she did just that. It took a special kind of person to live in this far-removed landscape.
Her writing, subject matter and approach to life were most admirable. Hard working and always enthusiastic for adventure, she writes of various encounters with surrounding neighbors and experiences into the countryside. If she had any dull moments on the ranch they must have been few and far between.
Very optimistic about life, Mrs. Stewart affirms, "...all my own efforts have always been just to make the best of everything and to take things as they come."
To further quote, "It has always been a theory of mine that when we become sorry for ourselves we make our misfortunes harder to bear, because we lose courage and can't think without bias."
A wonderful read furthering an appreciation for life in the homesteading era.
So good, I thought it was a contemporary novel!.......2007-01-29
I listened to the audio version of this book and after the first part, I went online to check to see if this was actually taken from real letters or just a modern novel. It was so interesting and so well-written that I couldn't believe it wasn't the creation of a novelist. But no, they are the authentic letters of an incredible woman. Ironically, she apologizes in her letters, for writing too much. If only she could have known that a century later, people around the world would be wishing she wrote even more.
If you choose the audio book, try to get the Sound Room Publishers version, narracted by Kate Fleming. It is far superior than Blackstone Audio's version read by Rebecca Burns (who does a good job, but whose voice is too much like a young girl's to express the wisdom and experience that Fleming projects).
Great to read about yesteryear.......2005-08-24
I really enjoyed reading. Letters written by the author and not altered. Would have been fun to read the letters she received.
A wonderful glimpse of life on the praire........2004-03-16
What a delightful and uplifting book. I have always been under the impression that life was so dreary for these folks who were homesteaders. But instead, I have been able to see from one perspective how joyous the experience could be. What a wonderful life Elinore made for herself and everyone else. She obviously knew how to make something out of nothing. A young widow who worked as a laundress and then a housekeeper just so she could experience homesteading. Wonderful! Just the sort of spirit needed to be successful. The cast of characters that surrounded her stories are amazing. What a lovely picture of how people helped out each other. It's almost unheard of in todays "get out of my way" society. This is a book I shall keep and reread often. I am so glad that it came my way.
Extraordinary!.......2001-04-16
I hardly know where to begin. I have nothing but unstinting praise for these letters and the book, except for . . . well, I'll get to that in a moment. Elinore Stewart's writing is a model to be followed by anyone of any time or place on any subject. Clear as a bell, concise yet comprehensive, replete with localisms and skillfully rendered frontier humor, it makes one want to toss the PC and reference library into the trash and move to some unspoiled wilderness. Yet, a caveat. When you finish the book you feel you know this indomitable woman. Then it suddenly strikes you that you don't. Who was Elinore Pruitt Stewart? Where was she born, grow up? Who was the railroader who fathered her daughter, and most of all, what happened to her?
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Letters of a Woman Homesteader (Dover Books on Americana)
Elinore Pruitt Stewart
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
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Suite Francaise
ASIN: 0486451429 |
Book Description
"Warmly delightful, vigorously affirmative." — The Wall Street Journal. Told with vivid gusto by a young, fiercely determined widow, this towering classic of American frontier life paints a candid portrait of her work, travels, neighbors, and harsh existence on a Wyoming ranch in the early 1900s. Includes 6 original illustrations by N.C. Wyeth.
Book Description
Generations of readers have delighted in Elinore Pruitt Stewart's Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1914) and Letters on an Elk Hunt (1915), among the most engaging accounts of life in the American West. Stewart related her adventures on an isolated Wyoming homestead with such vividness, gusto, and sympathy that she has become the woman homesteader. Until now, however, little has been known about her except what she chose to reveal in her published letters.
Old friends and new acquaintances alike will welcome this book combining Stewart's previously unpublished or uncollected letters with Susanne K. George's extensive research. Here is as full and candid a portrait as wella re ever likely to have of The Woman Homesteader: the illness, disappointments, and grinding hard work that lay behind her genial public persona; the family, neighbors, and correspondents who peopled her letter-stories and shared her life.
George has discovered in Elinore Pruitt Stewart a story fully as rewarding as any told by the Woman Homesteader herself. In an afterword George considers Stewart's use of fictional devices and her growth as a writer as well as her place in American letters.
Customer Reviews:
Interesting, Informative, and it grows on you. .......2006-07-06
When I first began this book I was very disappointed. I finally got in far enough to get to the letters. Even if you never read the pages leading up to the letters or the summation at the end, you will gain from reading it. Elinore must have been a great person to know. I felt like I did know her even though it was soon evident that she was coloring up her letters for publication. She kept me reading and I did what I set out to do. I learned about the woman homesteader in the west and her everyday life.
Is this woman for real?.......2005-03-05
This book chronicles Pruitt's life as a Wyoming homesteader and ranch wife in letters to a former employer and friend. Pruitt is hired as a housekeeper by a Scottish rancher named Stewart in Wyoming, and eventually marries him, but she is determined to homestead her own plot of land, so she claims some land contiguous to her husband's. Mrs. Stewart's letters detail her life on a remote ranch with a great deal of vigor. In fact the word "vigor" seems to characterize Stewart herself who sets off on long jaunts by herself, just to see the countryside. She often takes her children on these trips and when things go wrong, the children and Stewart must rely on the rough kindness of other Wyoming pioneers. Thus, she is saved from a spending a freezing night in the snow by Zebulon Pike and is fed by a disreputable character who turns out to know her husband. She assists at wedding and births, visits the Mormons where she finds the "second" wife is not happy, and generally has a wonderful time in turn-of-the-century Wyoming. Stewart has a marvelous sense of humor, an indomitable spirit and a great love for the beauty of nature. However, she is so relentlessly upbeat that one wonders if she is telling the whole truth. Diaries of other pioneer women reveal a rather different picture of life in the west where women were often left alone for extended periods of time to run the ranch, handle the kids, do all the housework, raise the garden, feed the chickens and livestock and do all the other tasks associated with ranching. Many of these women didn't enjoy settling new country, but Stewart apparently loves it. The root of her optimism is that she is trying to get other women to homestead. Her message seems to be "If I can do it, so can you." Her letters reflect 19th century feminism which not only revolved around suffrage but also taught that women could be independent and successful. With women like Stewart settling the state, it is not surprising that Wyoming was the first state that gave women the right to vote. This book is fun to read and informative though I don't think it represents the experiences of a majority of pioneer women. It, like its author, is iconoclastic in its sheer joie de vivre.
Book Description
A continuation of Letters of a Woman Homesteader, Letters on an Elk Hunt is set in the same corner of southwestern Wyoming, the time is the fall of 1914, and (despite the title) Mrs. Stewart is far less concerned with elk hunting than with people—old friends and new acquaintances—and with the land in which she found so much beauty. Her letters, as Jessamyn West said of the earlier volume, "are, in fact (though not that alone), a collection of short stories." She added that "what makes these letters so good are not these stories, but the character of the storyteller, of Elinore Stewart herself. Her letters endure and give pleasure because she does what the great letter-writers do: she reveals herself. . . . It is the woman in this vanished landscape, the homesteader with her enormous vitality, humor, and tenderness who holds our attention." Jessamyn West's wish to know more about the author herself is fulfilled in the foreword to Letters on an Elk Hunt—an appreciative biographical sketch, incorporating material from some of Mrs. Stewart's unpublished letters as well as the reminiscences of her children.
Elizabeth Fuller Ferris, of the Wilderness Women Project, Missoula, Montana, is the writer and producer of Burntfork, a film for public television funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities based upon the life of Elinore Pruitt Stewart.
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Letters of a Woman Homesteader
Elinore Pruitt Stewart
Manufacturer: BiblioBazaar
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ASIN: 1434627985
Release Date: 2007-06-18 |
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Letters of a Woman Homesteader
Elinore Pruitt Stewart
Manufacturer: Echo Library
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ASIN: 1406830534 |
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- One star for every pound of solid FACT
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Lee's Ferry: From Mormon Crossing to National Park
P. T. Reilly
Manufacturer: Utah State University Press
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ASIN: 087421260X |
Book Description
The Colorado River and its deeply entrenched canyons create a lengthy barrier to travel in the interior West. From the mid-19th until the mid 20th century, one of the few places between California and Nevada where wheeled vehicles could cross it was at the mouth of the Pahreah River, between Glen Canyon and the river's steep drop toward Grand Canyon.
Lee's Ferry was a primary link between Utah and Arizona. Mormons looking for new lands for colonization first developed the site. John D. Lee and parts of his family seeking an inconspicuous spot after the Mountain Meadows massacre, first took up residence at what they called Lonely Dell. As river exploration and adventure increased, the place became as improtant to those using the river as to folks crossing it.
Customer Reviews:
One star for every pound of solid FACT.......2005-09-30
This book is a sea monster of a book. It's enormous. It will rise up and devour anything else ever written on Lee's Ferry. Be careful where you place it on your shelf.
It's a huge, heavy brick of a book. Buy enough copies and use it as a building material. Take one with you as firestarter for a ten-year expedition. Or, read it.
Pick it up, intending on only leafing through it, and then find yourself unable to put it down, find yourself trapped in an absorbing, fascinating, well-researched, well-written Bible of information.
This book is a must for anyone interested in Lee's Ferry, Arizona--a ferry crossing on the Colorado River where sooner or later every single cowboy, outlaw, Indian, and zealot in the Old West passed by.
If you're interested in a much thinner book that you can read in a night or two, try W.L. Rusho and C. Gregory Crampton's "Desert River Crossing," or Joanna Joseph's "Lee's Ferry & Lonely Dell Ranch Historic Districts: A Walking Tour Guide."
But if you want an avalanche of fact, if you want a town-destroying tidal wave of knowledge, if you want to be bludgeoned to death with valid, pertinent, astounding history, lore, and information, then pick up a copy (if you're strong enough) of "Lee's Ferry: From Mormon Crossing to National Park," by P.T. Reilly, expert riverman and writer.
Your chiropractor will thank me.
Book Description
Most Americans strongly favor equality of opportunity if not outcome, but many are weary of poverty's seeming immunity to public policy. This helps to explain the recent attention paid to cultural and genetic explanations of persistent poverty, including claims that economic inequality is a function of intellectual ability, as well as more subtle depictions of the United States as a meritocracy where barriers to achievement are personal--either voluntary or inherited--rather than systemic. This volume of original essays by luminaries in the economic, social, and biological sciences, however, confirms mounting evidence that the connection between intelligence and inequality is surprisingly weak and demonstrates that targeted educational and economic reforms can reduce the income gap and improve the country's aggregate productivity and economic well-being. It also offers a novel agenda of equal access to valuable associations.
Amartya Sen, John Roemer, Robert M. Hauser, Glenn Loury, Orley Ashenfelter, and others sift and analyze the latest arguments and quantitative findings on equality in order to explain how merit is and should be defined, how economic rewards are distributed, and how patterns of economic success persist across generations. Moving well beyond exploration, they draw specific conclusions that are bold yet empirically grounded, finding that schooling improves occupational success in ways unrelated to cognitive ability, that IQ is not a strong independent predictor of economic success, and that people's associations--their neighborhoods, working groups, and other social ties--significantly explain many of the poverty traps we observe.
The optimistic message of this beautifully edited book is that important violations of equality of opportunity do exist but can be attenuated by policies that will serve the general economy. Policy makers will read with interest concrete suggestions for crafting economically beneficial anti-discrimination measures, enhancing educational and associational opportunity, and centering economic reforms in community-based institutions. Here is an example of some of our most brilliant social thinkers using the most advanced techniques that their disciplines have to offer to tackle an issue of great social importance.
Customer Reviews:
A very technically demanding read........2002-05-02
It's very interesting how the experts here tore apart The Bell Curve with minimal effort by taking a look at the data in a sensible/ rigorous way. One author assumed that all the data was correct as given and challenged its relevance.
Most importantly, one of the articles used the mathematics associated with these social experiments and asked "Do these numbers really show you what you think they do?" In all of my exhaustive reading about this subject, this book is the first that I have read that specifically addresses that point.
While lots of people have dismissed the proponents of genetic inferiority as an explanation for the "failure" of blacks in the USA, the rebuttals have invariably failed to contront the reasoning of the authors, preferring to dismiss them out of hand as "racist."
One thing that was lacking in this book is a more detailed analysis of the disparity between ethnic groups of the same race-- and yes, they do exist, contrary to what you would believe from reading the newspapers. For this, one of two Thomas Sowell books is a good read. The first: "Race and Culture." The second: "Knowledge and Decisions."
Unfortunately, the use of lots of technical jargon is going to put this fine piece of literature out of the reach of the vast majority of the hoi polloi.
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ICOM 14th Triennial Meeting The Hague: 12-16 September, 2005: Preprints (2 Vol. Set)
ICOM Committee for Conservation
Manufacturer: Earthscan Publications Ltd.
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ASIN: 1844072533 |
Book Description
The triennial meetings of the ICOM Committee for Conservation are now widely regarded as the most significant global events in the conservation calendar. These meetings offer conservation professionals a unique opportunity to discover the current status of research and practice across the full range of conservation disciplines at the highest level.
These preprints of the 14th Triennial Meeting, held in 2005 in The Hague, The Netherlands, offer an unrivalled collection of 137 refereed papers and thirty-four posters, selected for their quality by the organizers of the meeting.
Also included with the 14th Triennial Meeting Preprints is a CD-ROM version, featuring Title, Author, and Keyword searches of the papers plus full-color illustrations.
All those involved in any aspect of conservation will find the whole series of ICOM-CC Preprints an essential and valuable component of their library. It will also be of interest to any museum professional with either responsibility for or an interest in the field of conservation.
Books:
- Living In Hell: A True Odyssey of a Woman's Struggle in Islamic Iran Against Personal and Political Forces
- Lost In Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia
- Love Is Stronger Than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls
- MADAME SADAYAKKO. The Geisha Who Bewitched the West.
- Mango Elephants in the Sun: How Life in an African Village Let Me Be in My Skin
- Marine Sniper: 93 Confirmed Kills
- Mathmaticians are People, Too: Stories from the Lives of Great Mathematicians
- Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History
- Me and Rumi: The Autobiography of Shams-I Tabrizi
- Memories of a Catholic girlhood ; How I grew ; Intellectual memoirs, New York, 1936-1938
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Covered Wagon Women, Volume 1: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1849 (Covered Wagon Women)
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