Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Wallace Stegner
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Wallace Stegner
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Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West

Author: Wallace Stegner

Narrator: Mark Bramhall

Unabridged: 17 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/12/2010

Categories: Nonfiction, History

Synopsis

Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner recounts the remarkable career of Major John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of the Southwest Indian tribes. This classic work is a penetrating and insightful study of Powell's career, from the beginning of the Powell Survey, in which Powell and his men famously became the first to descend the Colorado River, to his eventual ouster from the Geological Survey. In masterful prose, Stegner details the expedition, as well as the philosophies and ideas that drove Powell.A prophet without honor who had a profound understanding of the American West, Powell warned long ago of the dangers economic exploitation would pose to the West—and he spent a good deal of his life battling Washington politics to get his message across. Only now may we recognize just how accurate a prophet he was.

About Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) wrote many books of fiction and nonfiction, including Crossing to Safety and the National Book Award–winning The Spectator Bird. Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972.

About Mark Bramhall

Mark Bramhall has won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration, more than thirty AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has repeatedly been named by AudioFile magazine and Publishers Weekly among their “Best Voices of the Year.” He is also an award-winning actor whose acting credits include off-Broadway, regional, and many Los Angeles venues as well as television, animation, and feature films. He has taught and directed at the American Academy of Dramatic Art.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kev

On my top 10 of 10,000. No one can claim sufficient understanding of the expansion of the West in the late 19th & early 20th centuries without having read this. Stegner is a beautiful writer and you'll love this book. John Wesley Powell not only led the historic Explorations of the Grand, Green and......more

Goodreads review by Karen

This book is not an easy read. It was written in the 1950s and is a scholarly work. That said it is not difficult to read, just slow if you want to think about what is packed into this book. John Wesley Powell gained fame as the first man to run the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. He was so......more

Goodreads review by Dax

This should have been much more boring than it was. Other than Part I, which covers Powell's exploration of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, the majority of this book centers on Powell's career leading the US Geological Survey. In that role, Powell essentially held the ultimate power in......more

Quotes

“Stegner’s most exciting work.” San Francisco Chronicle

“The surrender of self-righteousness would be an enormous boon to the environmental cause. Acknowledging the unedited, complicated, utilitarian John Wesley Powell as an ideological parent would be a big step in that laudable direction, and it is this step that Worster’s thorough and empathetic biography makes possible.” Los Angeles Times

“No library of western/southwestern materials can be without this book.” Books of the Southwest

“This book goes far beyond biography, into the nature and soul of the American West. It is Stegner at his best, assaying an entire era of our history, packing his pages with insights as shrewd as his prose.” Ivan Doig, American novelist

“Narrator Mark Bramhall, like the great river, starts a little slow but becomes more and more animated as the huge rapids and steep canyon walls begin to conquer the men and the boats. Bramhall’s sonorous and sandy voice varies in volume and speed to match the mood of the oarsmen as they face starvation and uncertainty about how much more danger lies ahead.” AudioFile

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