The Rogue is a bird's eye veiw of growing up in the period before the depression and during the depression,on the Rogue River. It's autobiograghical story of the author's childhood and adolescencse. His father wanted to move to the Rogue River to get away from the city and had actually found an ideal estate to accommplish that task. Inquiring from the seller whom he later purchased the property from,some old gold miner,who owned the property some years, he said that he acquired it because a fortune teller in San Francisco said that there was gold in that land. A lot of interesting stories, espescially how the one room school house worked. I always wondered about that. I love the life they lived, nothing like today. The book ends about Mr. Ohrt going back to the Rogue as an adult, probably looking for what he remembers,a slower pace, a better life, closer to the land. I have to criticize the author(He is a good friend of mine) for not giving the Fortune Teller her due. Maybe there was gold in them hills

In "The Rogue I Remember," Wally Ohrt has shown that rare talent among writers for telling an historic tale in a way that usually distinguishes fiction. Because fiction is make-believe, I tired of it long ago because a certain a certain sameness ultimately prevails. After all, how many ways can a pattern of themes be respun before they repeat? Ohrt has shown the truth in the old addage, 'truth is stranger (and more interesting) than fiction.' In "The Rogue," he makes history, and especially regional history, well worth the read.

Understanding a different place and time through the reflective narrative of the author makes absorbing history delightful. Reading the book will make you want to go find the Rogue of Mr. Ohrt's childhood, but it is not to be found. We can only experience this fascinating place through the reflections of somebody fortunate enough to have lived there and sensitive enough to have preserved the memory. Thanks, Dad!

Simply the best work available on Indian Removal, in my opinion. It is highly regarded among academic historians. Wallace did a tremendous job of writing clearly and making the plight of the Indians understandable to anyone. It is short, it is lucid, it is interesting reading. Plus, it is balanced. This is not a work that treats Indians as childlike, passive victims, but it does convey the injustice and unnecessary hardships to which they were subjected. It also does not portray the government and non-Indian Americans simply as aggressors. It's an important work for understanding what happened to the tribes. It won't take a lot of your time, so do yourself a favor and read it.

An Indian activist or just an amature historian, everyone should read this book. Though short, it gives an excellent narrative of the removal of Indians and their trama from the East by the American government. This book is amazingly well written and is for both students (like myself who read it in a class) or for casual readers. Please concider this book to find out more about the emerging stories of what really happened to Native Americans.

Jackson J. Benson has in this volume produced a superb literary biography of one of America's most underrated writers. The book in many ways reflects some of Stegner's own qualities as a writer. Stegner, in his biography of John Wesley Powell, BEYOND THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN, emphasized that it was a biography of his professional, not personal, life. Although Benson does not neglect Stegner's personal life, the stress is very definitely upon his literary, academic, and environmental work. Benson does let us get to know Stegner the person, with his own quirks (he dislike of the sixties and youth counterculture, his love of Vermont, his avoidance of extremism, his love of community as opposed to rugged individualism), but unlike many modern biographers, he is not intent upon baring Stegner's inner life, warts and all. Benson, like Stegner, strives towards balance. In this he succeeds admirably.

Stegner vividly emerges in this biography as a profoundly principled, disciplined, committed, and morally courageous individual. The product of an impoverished childhood, later recounted fictionally in his semi-autobiographical novel THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN, Benson chronicles Stegner's drive to become a writer. In a sense, the book covers an uneventful life. Stegner did not do a great deal beyond write, teach, and speak out on a variety of environmental issues. Benson explores his friendships with mentors such as Bernard DeVoto and Robert Frost, to friends both famous and unknown, to students such as Ernest Gaines, Wendell Berry, and Ken Kesey.

Although primarily focused on Stegner's literary output as both a fiction writer and historian, Benson deals extensively with Stegner's work as a conservationist. Of all the major writers of the past century, Stegner almost certainly was more involved in environmental causes than any other. He did this not only through his writing, such as in his great biography of John Wesley Powell, but in his activities as part of the Sierra Club and in numerous environmental efforts, including working briefly as an advisor to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall.

Most of all, this book created a portrait of a writer and human being worthy of respect. Stegner emerges as a good man, someone the reader would have enjoyed knowing. At this point in time, I have read only Stegner's book on Powell and ANGLE OF REPOSE, but between those two books and this excellent biography make me want to read a great deal more.

Wallace Stegner wrote about ordinary people trying to make sense of day-to-day existence. He wrote with an extraordinary clarity of description and dialogue that is best matched by the clear, keen air of the Western high country where he grew up. The reader will find no hyperbole in his books and no gratuitous violence or sex. He or she will find sorrow there and the ways of handling it that humans use to try to make sense of it. His books are explorations of the canyon lands of sorrow and of the ascent to the connections with other humans that require the forgiveness that makes our best solace in the face of regret. Professor Benson senses these themes and uses them as organizing principles in presenting Stegner's works as they map his life. The book is balanced in its presentations with no room for heroes, anti-heroes or villains of the stock variety, a reflection of both the author's scholarship and his subject's own approach to characterization. Jackson Benson's book, too, is the harvest of ten years research done carefully, using many contemporary sources including interviews with Wallace Stegner himself before his premature death after an auto accident in 1993. Professor Benson's writing style is fluid, clean and selfless as he gives us a portrait of a man who chronicled changes in America between the last of the frontier cowboys and the invention of cyberspace. It is the picture of a writer of the American West whose themes apply equally well anywhere on the globe that humans inhabit. This book is a fine introduction to Stegner's work for those who have never read him and a delightful comment, containing both criticism and appreciation, for those who have read Wallace Stegner and will enjoy a conversation with another, most astute, reader. It is another dip into the complexity of Wallace Stegner's fiction, essays and biographies and into the meaning in them that can be described as their author once described mountain streams: always running, always there. by Thomas Beresford, M.D., University of Colorado Health Sciences Center

This is a refreshing way to spend your time listening to some of the best interviews from the show. I like the show but sometimes don't have time to catch it on NPR. This audio set gives me lots of the memorable interviews I've heard or partially heard over the years. It's a great collection of some of the folks who are major influences in their work. The inquisitive and probing questions of Terry Gross really open up conversations with the likes of Tracy Ullman and Dennis Franz, they sound like us. These are wonderful snippets of real life.

I read Angle of Repose for my reading group, having never read Stegner before (but always wanting to). Frankly, I was disappointed. This novel was filled with peaks and valleys, moments of beautifully written descriptions, countered with long stretches of banal prose without drama. That's real life, some would argue; but is that the stuff of great drama, or the Great American Novel? I think not. The ending of Susan & Oliver's tale was obviously rushed, and told with an emotional detachment that was all the more frustrating. The biggest problem I had with this book was the framework in which it is told: the literary convention of a story within a story didn't work here. I cared less and less about Lyman as the novel progressed, and wished Stegner had stuck with Susan's tale alone. It became a chore to finish, only to find Lyman's "dream" at the end, a tired twist if ever there was one. Perhaps Stegner's other works are worthy of the thoughtful reader's time, but I wonder if I'll ever give them a chance now.

Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose is simply a wonderful novel--a serious piece of fiction about a marriage and marriage itself. Lyman Ward, a fifty-something professor whose own marriage has disintegrated has returned to his childhood home to write of the marriage of his grandparents, perhaps to determine why their marriage lasted through tremendous adversity when his own could not. His grandparents, Susan and Oliver Ward met in New York the 1870s, where she was a promising illustrator and he an engineer. They marry and travel West, living in various places, California, Idaho. Susan feels that she never quite fits into this "uncivilized" place, expressing her unsettleness beautifully in her letters to her good friend Augusta, who lives the life in New York that perhaps Susan felt she was destined to live. Lyman is fascinated with his grandmother, telling her story as he discovers how it unfolds through reading these Augusta letters, adding what he remembers from his own childhood. Lyman suffers from a degenerative bone disease and must rely on young Shelly Rasmussen to help him construct this book on his grandmother. Shelly has just escaped a failed "marriage" of her own. Lyman tells the story of his grandmother while also telling us both his and Shelly's stories seamlessly. Stegner's writing is beautiful and evocative. Angle of Repose is a big, beautiful, unique novel. Stegner's method of weaving the stories together works marvelously and so many of his sentences are simply perfect. Susan Ward's life(and Lyman's and Shelly's) is the believable story of a flawed human being--it's not picture perfect--there are no rosy endings for us here. However, the novel is very satisfying. Highly recommended.

This was one of the most thought provoking novels that we have ever read. Stegner captured the thoughts and emotions of his characters with an economy of words that is the mark of an author who understands at a profound level the human condition. Stegner's device of using Lyman Ward to tell the story of his paternal grandparents, Susan and Oliver Ward while sifting through mounds of pictures and letters, enables him to sort through his own troubled loss of limb and wife. We feel Oliver's intense desire to succeed at what he loves best, always falling just short and not understanding why; Susan's desire to please her husband and be content with her choices in life warring against her artistic spirit and the pull to "be somebody". Frank's frustration and unrequited love for his best friend's wife is heartwrenching to watch. The passage of years and evolution of personhood is as real and complicated as life truly is. This juxtaposition of complex relationships both past and present further enriches this generational tapestry woven by Stegner. Angle of Repose, is now one of our favorite books having provoked much thought and discussion. We recommend it without reservation to anyone who loves life and people and the journey that we are all on together.