Gretel Ehrlich does for the state of Wyoming what other writers have done for other states: Terry Tempest Williams for Utah, Robert Michael Pyle for Washington, Bernd Heinrich for Maine, Jennifer Price for California, Scott Russell Sanders for Indiana. She has given it a space on the literary map. In this book she makes no really brilliant discoveries, which isn't surprising given that she is a relative newcomer to the ranch life she attempts to describe. She can be faulted, I think, for her idealized depiction of the lifestyle and landscape on a Wyoming ranch, and she never addresses some of the hard issues, such as reconciling the ranchers' alleged intimacy with the land with their pillage of that same land. But the prose is beautiful, and her insights about people and landscape are sound. I would tentatively recommend this book, but if you haven't read anything by Terry Tempest Williams, read her books first.

My first images of Wyoming were formed as a boy, watching "The Virginian" on TV. It was a landscape of gently rolling hills and a mild climate where you could go around in shirtsleeves pretty much all the time. Well, of course, Wyoming bears no resemblance to a Southern California back lot, as I learned when I finally went there as an adult. The climate is not benign, and the land has a scale that can make you and your problems seem very small indeed.

Gretel Ehrlich writes about the true Wyoming of vast, lonely spaces, and brutal, bone chilling winters. In her book, it is a place to lose oneself and then find redemption in the rhythm of life lived in a hard place. She writes about the people that live in this place and their relationships.She writes of lonliness and endurance, friendship and new beginnings.

The highlight of the book, for me, is "The Rules of the Game", an appreciative essay on Rodeo. I've not read anything like it. Ms Ehrlich's description finds the beauty in this celebration of both individual skill and achievement, and the power and grace of teamwork. It's a lovely piece in a wonderful book.

I discovered this book while working as a tour guide in Wyoming, and found that it captured the spirit of the place beautifully. Ehrlich is an outsider-turned-insider, which I learned from her writing and from accounts of Wyoming natives who knew her and indeed respect her. Her accounts take you to shepherding and into a Native American sun dance ritual; fascinating stuff and there's much more. Her prose is highly poetic. My wife and I have recommended this book to many people over the years, and each person has thanked us profusely for the advice. That includes a New York native who moved to Montana, and he, too feels that this book captures the heart of the region.

This was a pretty interesting book. Timmy's family doesn't have a lot of money, and after a bad winter they lost quite a few animals. They cannot afford to keep their ranch. Timmy does all she can do to save her ranch, but she doesn't know how much she can do without much money. None of her family wants to leave the ranch, but pretty soon there isn't going to be a choice.

I am an elementary school librarian in Colorado and this is a terrific book for anyone who loves the outdoors and the west. The passages at the beginning of each chapter are wonderful descriptions of the changing wildlife and environment. The story is compelling and the characters are real and likeable. I don't usually post reviews like this...but I really like this book and encourage others to read it!

First of all, I would just like to say that I was forced to read this book for my English class. Second of all I would like to say that if you don't have to read this book, by all means to not read it! Erlich is a pity-hungry, pathetically lonely, and not to mention, a horrible writer that does not deserve to write books. I really didn't have a problem with this book to begin with until I realized that the book was horrible and full of useless information that no one really cares about. So, if you want to know about getting hit by lightning, don't read this book because there isn't too much real stuff about that. If you want to know about things like: Erlich being sad and whatever other bits of information she wants to talk about including hermaphrodite animals, starfish, and her stupid problems with the beach, read this book!

It began promisingly enough. But I was left wondering what the story meant to achieve.

Though intrigued by Ehrlich's battle to live normally and make sense of what had happened to her with the strike of lightning that put her life in jeopardy, I found this book increasingly mired in a wandering, vague search for a point.

Not to say that I didn't learn a lot; but there was room for a whole heck of a lot more. And the reader gets a sense of profound isolation because Ehrlich provides very little in the way of any human subject but herself. Perhaps this was intentional, as she surely must've felt alone in her trials many times, but it was frustrating nonetheless.

And, as with about any Gretel Ehrlich piece I've read, I found her preoccuption with sex to be overwhelming to the story at hand. She is obsessed at times with the topic, and though it was essential to, say, Heart Mountain, I felt it was rather distracting in A Match to the Heart.

(By the way, I gave this book to a friend of mine who studies lightning and appreciates a good read, and she, too, found it to be lacking.)

In this book, Ehrlich uses many different techniques that all work together to make a good book. Basic ground rules of writing command us to ?show, don't tell? and keep the reader as involved as possible in the story. In general, Ehrlich uses special techniques where the story of her journey might become too abstract, too metaphysical, or too obtuse, or too personal to sustain us as readers. Here are a few techniques I found interesting.

If I understand Ehrlich's intent, this is a book about a journey. But the journey isn't just a physical journey (Wyoming to California to North Carolina to California then back to Wyoming), it's also a spiritual, religious and emotional journey. In this sense then, this is partly a book about ideas.

Interestingly, Ehrlich does not begin the book with a big set of ideas. She begins in the present tense, a voice and tense of intimacy and immediacy. She places us at the beginning in a dream or a dreamstate she experienced at the moment of the lightning strike. It seems to me, this sets Ehrlich up nicely to deal with the potential problems of a ?talky, head-game? narrative. My guess is she knows she's got a long journey ahead of her, filled with speculation, thoughts, feelings, readings, science facts, and what not, so she looks for devices to keep the narrative grounded and interesting. Her first technique is the present tense opening. Another technique she uses is to concentrate her details on the natural world. Although we learn about the physics of lightning, Ehrlich spends countless paragraphs describing every species of plant and animal one can encounter in California or Wyoming. With such a heavy dose of color, shape, sound and smell details I never encounter the accumulated feeling that I am too much absorbed in the narrator's head.

Ehrlich's attention to the sensory details around her help us trust her as a narrator on subjects we don't understand. We trust her when she tells us how kelp smell, how fish look and feel, how the birds fly, the feeling of snow between her toes. Likewise, when she tells us something about lightning, about it's electrical charge, about the currents it follows, or tells us something about Tibetan philosophy, we believe her. Her credibility as an observer of nature carries over to her explanation of abstract or unobservable phenomenon. This makes the whole story much more believable, richer, and more concrete to us readers.

In one section, Ehrlich talks about a legend she read about a lighting victim always being thirsty. In the next paragraph she switches to a scenic description of her filling water bottles because she's always thirsty. She goes on to cite some more similarities between her situation and the legend she read. This works to her advantage as a credible narrator because now, in other places, I will subconsciously project the description of other legends onto her.

In Chapter 24, Ehrlich comes right out and tells us why the book is structured the way it is. She says it is shaped like a convection cloud, and that inside the narrative would zigzag like lightning. When I read this page, I admit it did make the structure of the book clearer to me, but I have to admit I don't like it. First of all, she says she dreamed this. I don't believe it. It seems incredible that in the middle of this search for peace and health, she would dream about the structure of a book. This bothers me most because, now I doubt all her dreams. When is she really dreaming and when is she dreaming for the convenience of putting something interestingly metaphysical at just the right place in the book.

By contrast, the surgery scene is told mostly in straightforward scene. We hear the dialogue, see the things she sees without too much reflection and very little mysticism. This strikes me as a wise move, because by that point in the book, I needed a break from thinking too hard. It was nice to get a straightforward dose of scene, something fascinatingly interesting, yet at the same time as presented in scene form, it remained very present and accessible to me. I enjoyed just sitting back and watching the show. This let me catch my breath before hurtling into the thicker and thicker mix of narratives coming together at the end of the book.

All in all, Ehrlich pulls off a masterful collection of writing techniques to tell a compelling story.

After seeing an exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Sacred Mountains in Chinese Art," essayist Gretel Ehrlich (The Solace of Open Spaces) decided to travel to China to pick up the trail of a once flourishing Buddhist culture. And since the Chinese phrase for going on a pilgrimage means "paying one's respect to the mountain," she wanted to climb Emei Shan, a sacred milieu.

Questions of Heaven charts Ehrlich's spiritual journey that also includes a visit to a panda refuge and an encounter with an elderly musician who has revived some folk and ceremonial music from eighth and ninth century China designed to bring people into harmony with nature. The author's high expectations are dashed when she reaches the summit of Emei Shan and finds three Las Vegas-like hotels. Nonetheless like a good Buddhist, she practices an inner calm that enables her to write about many moments of beauty. Ehrlich also learns some interesting things about the spiritual practice of transformation.

After reading a Gretel Ehrlich essay in the recent BEST SPIRITUAL WRITING, 2000, this book was a disappointment. For me, the best travel writing requires a sense of entrance into the subject. Describing her three-year visit to Bhutan in her 1999 memoir, BEYOND EARTH AND SKY, Jamie Zeppa explains the difference between arrival and entrance: "Arrival is physical and happens all at once. The train pulls in, the plane touches down, you get out of the taxi with all your baggage. You can arrive in a place, and never really enter it; you will get there, look around, take a few pictures, make a few notes, send postcards home. When you travel like this, you think you know where you are, but, in fact, you have never left home. Entering takes longer. You cross over slowly, in bits and pieces. You begin to despair: will you ever get over? It is like awakening slowly" (p. 101). Although Ehrlich's collection of five essays is interesting and informative, it lacks a sense of entrance into China.

In May, 1995, Ehrlich travelled to Western China and Tibet to climb four sacred Buddhist mountains (p. 1). "Mountains," she tells us, "were thought to connect heaven with earth, spirit with body" (p. 8). She explains, "I had come to China to pick up threads of a once flourishing Buddhist culture and thought I could find it in their sacred mountains" (p. 4). During a cab ride to Emei Shan, however, Ehrlich fears she has arrived "a thousand years too late" (p. 3). "Bumping along," she also wonders: "Are mountains really mountains? Are mountains a form of enlightenment? "Are rivers mountains running? Can we walk through them? Why do mountains walk through us?" (p. 9). These questions remain unanswered. Hoping for a spiritual experience, Ehrlich only discovers "tourist sites," "gaudy" (p. 33), "dank and dirty" hotels (p. 35), "blaring karaoke music" (p. 36) and "tourist monks" (p. 24), all of which leaves her with a "sense of defeat" (p. 70).

In addition to climbing Buddhist mountains, Ehrlich also went to China "to see where and how the animals lived, if their culture had survived" (p. 39). Her search for pandas leads Ehrlich to "dirty, cement stalls" (p. 48), leaving her feeling "sick at heart" (p. 49). However, Ehrlich's journey is not without its moments of sanctuary ("Lijiang"), and her narrative is filled with many informative digressions into China's political and religious history.

G. Merritt

If you are looking for a book about the current state of buddhism in China, this is not for you. The four stars are given to its enjoyable prose, not to the information it conveys.

Well intentioned as she might be, Ms. Ehrlich apparently did not have a chance to understand the current revival of buddhism in China, being a tourist whose knowlege and DREAM about China was only from books and a few exemplary persons she knew. Recent accounts from oversea Chinese pilgrims painted a different picture. I suppose that with the brisk pace in which everything is carried out in China these days, many things can change in four years. Moreover, it would be surprising if the communists do not learn that in order to make these pilgrimage sites attractive to oversea devotees, at least a semblance of religious atmosphere has to be fostered. It wasn't surprising to read of the accounts of monks whose only practice in the evening was to watch TV. Those are the vestige of the turmoil and destruction of the Cultural Revolution. I only feel sorry that Ms. Ehrlich did not have a chance to read the corpus of works, in Chinese, that aptly and vividly delineate the deplorable state of buddhism in China in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. These deplorable sacrileges no doubt still exist but now there are many young and well-educated monastics who enter the order for authentic and admirable purposes. It is them that carry the standard of the revival of buddhim silently, unknown to the westerners--which is good, in the current political atmosphere.

Ms. Ehrlich also did not (or does she) know that there is now a Buddhist college in Emei and that the abbot of one of its monasteries was a highly revered monk who had just passed away in his 90s (if I remember correctly) last year.

To the contrary of the first reviewer, I do not find Ms. Ehrlich's accounts condescending, I only find some of the accounts inaccurate. There are major and serious problems in China and Ms. Ehrlich's insight of the materialistic obsession of the Chinese and the huge toll it levies on the environment is quite correct, although I am much more optimistic then she was. As I told my friends who complained about the filth and disorder of the Chinatown in Manhattan, what touches me more is the dynamic undercurrent of lives there. As a student, I have toiled for a few months in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant (although not in Manhattan) and have learnt that an outsider who carries too much delusion and expectation lacks the capacity to appreciate life as it is without being too judgemental. Afterall, what is the meaning of pilgrimage? Isn't it simply an amplification of the point of contact between our own minds and the great minds of the bodhisattvas embodied in these mountains? The mountains are in the mind and in essense has nothing to do with how the itinerary is run. A pilgrim with such a "mindset" will always possess the capacity to be touched even in the most arduous and grotesque circumstances.

But then again, I am an oversea Chinese who is yet to set foot on China myself. In that regard, take my words only as a biased perspective and go see for yourselves, although if you are a westerner, that experience might always be one from the outside, sadly...