Reviews of Owning It All

“You may never again see the American West in quite the same way if you take the time to view it through the eyes of William Kittredge…. A stunning book.” —Seattle Times

“Kittredge’s searingly elegiac essays about living in the West carefully dissect the great western myths of property and rugged individualism. Reading this richly detailed book is like listening to Hank Williams. Its twangy, melancholic strains cut to the bone.” —Booklist, Adult Editors’ Choice 1987

“Owning It All is necessary reading. At its core is a writer committed to the discovery of the story that might yet save us from ourselves. His uncommon words have the force of insight laced with moral outrage, tenderness, and that authenticity of sentiment better known as love of this world.” —Oregon Focus

“This is an illustrative and insightful collection of essays on the American West …. Kittredge stands valiantly at the center of a fledgling regional literature emerging from shattered myths and discarded ideals.” —Publishers Weekly

“[Kittredge’s] short stories—vivid, brutal—spring from that experience and the hardscrabble lives of the men and women—ranchers, cowboys, Indians—he knew. Owning it All brings together 14 occasional pieces in which Kittredge attempts, in prose as hard and smooth as the pebbles in a mountain stream, to understand what it means to be a westerner.” —New York Newsday

“Here is an important book! Not the least because of Kittredge’s own wonderful prose style, which places this book in the company of such classics as Norman McLean’s A River Runs Through It, Ivan Doig’s House Made of Sky, John Graves’ Goodbye to a River, D.L. Davis’s rural essays, and Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow…You ought not miss this fine new book.” —Albuquerque Journal Magazine

“Owning it All establishes [Kittredge] as one of this generation’s most provocative and thoughtful observers of the American West as it is today, and how it cam to be that way.” —The Kansas City Star

 “These essays are lucid, discursive peregrinations through history, anecdote, memory and revelation. They are the author coming to grips with the effects of colonial western myth on himself, his loved ones and a land he loves dearly.” —Missoulian

“These autobiographical essays about growing up in the West affirm Kittredge’s place as one of our most astute western writers.” —Ray Gonzalez, The Bloomsbury Review