For those of us who love the desert Southwest, it captures the sense of place. The odd mix of characters inherent in Nevada, each multi-dimensional. Compelling story and central characters - I was glued to it. Interesting thoughts on a monk's spiritual pursuits and, of course, temptations. I hoped at times for it to soar even higher into the abstract, but then remembered how grounded in material reality is this setting, and how palpable is the balance between inner peace (the open land) and corruption (the people) there. Felt the ending a little awkward, but still I praise. Read it!

Blunt, no-nonsense prose conveys a dark vision of the modern struggle to maintain religious commitment in this novel set outside Las Vegas. After finalizing plans to use nearby Shoshone land as a nuclear waste disposal site, the Department of Energy has begun efforts to drive out local residents, including the two eponymous monks who live at a Cistercian hermitage in the area. St. Ed, troubled by the monastery's failure to attract postulants and by his bishop's orders to give into the DOE without a fight, wants to make his order more responsive to contemporary society. Brother S, attracted to Bureau of Land Management employee Amy Chavez, finds his vows tested when St. Ed abandons the Cistercian rules and allows Amy to enter the hermitage as a postulant. As the deadline to vacate approaches, the ensuing chaos leads to a tragic act of violence, simultaneously pointless and inspirational, that infuses a note of hope into the novel's bleak tone. Bergon (Shoshone Mike) mixes non-preachy spiritual meditations with an all-too-believable plot; while he's fair to all characters, he leaves no doubt whose side he is on. A solid read that treats faith seriously and doesn't offer easy answers about its place in today's world.

St. Ed is the crusty, foulmouthed founder of a Trappist hermitage in the Nevada desert; Brother S (for Simon) is the one monk in fifteen years who has stuck it out. He has found the monastic peace he sought, keeping bees, irrigating the vegetable garden, and studying church texts. Brother S is disturbed when Ed more or less advertises the hermitage by appearing on a Vegas talk show; he is disturbed in a different way when he rescues a stranded female ranger from the Bureau of Land Management. But everyone - the ranger, Ed, Brother S, local desert rats, and the nearby Shoshone Indians - is more than disturbed when the United States Department of Energy swoops down upon the desert, intending to run its inhabitants off and install a nuclear-waste repository. The author beautifully captures the self-congratulatory hypocrisy of government officials who call themselves "environmentalists" while plotting the destruction of the environment, and worse. And he dwells upon the attractions of the contemplative life so seductively that, for once, you hope the guy will not get the girl.

I usually avoid Westerns because its hard to find any that don't follow the Louis L'Amour/Zane Grey formula tripe.

This one is an exception. It is truly original and captivating from start to finish. You won't go wrong with this one.

This book is probably the best Western novel that I have ever read. Its only competitor in my experience is the "Ox-Bow Incident." However, Bergon's novel, which is based upon a real event, is still better.

The action, which is set around the Nevada town of Winnemucca in the year 1911, revolves around the pursuit of a Shoshone Indian family from Idaho accused of killing some white men. Told from the perspective of several major characters, including the Winnemucca Sheriff, a Basque immigrant, and the Shoshone Indians, this novel really shows the ugly underside of the West that never appears on the movie screen or in Louis L'amour's novels.

This is novel is not a celebration of the old West, but it is a page-turner and well worth adding to your library.

I used The Wilderness Reader in teaching a course in stewardship and field ecology for teachers. I found that the book contained a wide variety of different types of environmental writing and that all of the selected pieces were excellent examples of the genre. Several of my elementary school teachers even read parts of the reader to their students.

There is not much new that I can add which has not already been said of the Journals. Simply put, fantastic! I have read some excellent books regarding the Lewis and Clark Expedition, but reading the actual journals themselves makes one feel as though they are right there alongside them. Names such as John Colter, the Fields brothers, George Drouillard, Peter Cruzatte, Touissant Charbonneau and his wife Sacajawea, John Ordway, George Shannon, and many of the others in the journal become so familiar, it's as if the reader is a "fly on the saddle" (so to speak) during the entire expedition. Every chapter, every leg of the journey, has something relating to the hardships, sacrifices, conjectures, speculations, survival strategies, Indian confrontations and appropriate manners of behavior, along with wonderful descriptions of landforms, Indian culture, animals, plants, climate, etc. A truly gripping, meaningful look at early western U.S. exploration. DeVoto's introduction and editing is extremely well done.

This is an excellent book. It is hard to imagine the hardship these men had to endure on their trip across the nation, but by reading this book you get some kind of idea. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is even slightly intrested in the history of the Lewis and Clark expedition. This book tells it exactly how it happened, from the men who were there. I strongly believe that books like these should be required reading in schools....who knows what this country would be like today had it not been for those brave men.

Fascinating personal day-by-day account of the journey of Lewis and Clark through the Louisiana Territory. As you read, you feel yourself slowly seeing the American west as it was seen by those who first wrote of its magnificence, the customs of the natives, the wildlife, and climate. You see it for what it was, and for its possibilities. This edition has been edited from the individual journals of both Lewis and Clark and some of the others. It has been made more compact by putting in only passages that tell the story, but with no sentence restructuring or spelling corrections. Sometimes this requires you to figure the meaning out, but is never a big problem. The chapter length was perfect for reading a chapter a day which means 33 days. The only bad chapter was 31, which was a summary of one leg lifted from DeVoto's The Course of Empire, which I felt was harder to understand than the journals. The appendix includes Jefferson's Instructions, list of personnel, and specimens returned.