Bad Land, Jonathan Raban
Bad Land, Jonathan Raban
List: $22.95 | Sale: $16.07
Club: $11.47

Bad Land
An American Romance

Author: Jonathan Raban

Narrator: Paul Bellantoni

Unabridged: 12 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/25/2022

Synopsis

Seduced by the government’s offer of 320 acres per homesteader, Americans and Europeans rushed to Montana and the Dakotas to fulfill their own American dream in the first decade of the twentieth century.Jonathan Raban’s stunning evocation of the harrowing, desperate reality behind the homesteader’s dreams strips away the myth—while preserving the romance—that has shrouded our understanding of our own heartland.

About Jonathan Raban

Jonathan Raban is the author of Soft City, Arabia, Old Glory, Foreign Land, For Love and Money, Coasting, and Hunting Mr. Heartbreak. He won the W. H. Heinemann Award for Literature in 1982 and the Thomas Cook Award in 1981 and 1991. He has also edited the Oxford Book of the Sea. He lives in Seattle.

About Paul Bellantoni

Paul Bellantoni, a classically trained actor, is a former opera singer in the US and Europe. He voiced all the fight efforts for Wenwu in the Marvel movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and made his animated feature debut in the Annie Award-nominated Ruben Brandt, Collector. Thrilled to be narrating audiobooks, he excels in character voices, accents, and captivating passionate storytelling. He was the singing voice for the Cowardly Lion of Oz ornament from Hallmark, and is the voice for Uatu, The Watcher in the Marvel Super War videogame. He has voiced lead characters in the English versions of several Netflix and Hulu series, and has appeared in many videogame franchises, including Dungeons & Dragons, League of Legends, Hearthstone, Black Desert, Genshin Impact, and Shenmue. He sang lead roles in opera companies throughout the US and Europe for over a decade, appears on the cast recording of "The Ballad of Baby Doe" with Central City Opera, as well as a solo CD of arias "Heroes & Villains" with the Moravian Symphony. He made his solo recital debut at Carnegie Hall as a winner of the Koussevitzky Prize.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Ciara on February 07, 2008

I picked this book up on the advice of the gossip monger of Terry, Montana. Terry is my favorite town ever, but I can't live there because there are no jobs and the wind would cause me to go insane, run away and live in a creek bed with my horse, and then drown in a sudden summer storm in a flash fl......more

Goodreads review by Diamond on February 21, 2023

Review yet to come!......more

Goodreads review by Pam on April 14, 2022

Raban calls the Northern Pacific Railroad a latecomer. The story of the families it brought westward as homesteaders is historically the very end of such things. Its life as a railroad depended on bringing people and then supplies to places like the areas in eastern Montana that the author talks abo......more

Goodreads review by Kathleen on March 09, 2011

Strange that there isn't a genre of literature devoted to place. Sure, there are "travel" books, but these tend to suggest dalliances, adventures that are measured in days, passports, tourism. But I find myself increasingly drawn to books and authors that explore locations as biographers would explo......more

Goodreads review by Elizabeth on December 15, 2012

When I first moved to South Dakota, a bookseller friend recommended this book as an avenue to understanding the people and the place that has now been my home for over a decade. Raban writes as an outsider seeing the Great Plains through personal discovery of the land, artifacts, historical records,......more

Quotes

“As good a book as I have read about rural America in a very long time…Reminds the reader how much America has always been nourished by the optimism of its immigrants.” New York Times Book Review

“A vivid and utterly idiosyncratic social history of the homesteading movement in eastern Montana that went boom and bust during the first three decades of this century…This seemingly informal yet careful blend of chronicle and personal reportage is social history at its best.” Publishers Weekly

“Raban shows a travel writer’s eye and a social critic’s sensibilities while probing the land, homesteaders’ journals and letters, and the reminiscences of their descendants. Recommended.” Library Journal

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