 "Loneliness and Abandonment" | 2007-10-14 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1BWM5DUPQ78L1 |
These are two feelings I got from reading this memoir. Life in NW Wyoming is not easy. Days are spent with horses and one's life is taken by horses. In fact, if you love horses this is a great book.
One thing that kept creeping into this book is the distance the author had toward his parents, especially his father. Little but dialogue is written about the father, but he comes across as callous and more worried of turning the boy into a real man. The boy, in turn, writes about his concerns about the man he will become. At times that dragged on too much.
Still, it's wonderful prose written in a manly tone. For rugged cowboys and ranchers it's a perfect read. |
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 "more than five stars" | 2007-07-27 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1V2OX775GBATA |
I'd worry about peope who don't hurt themselves laughing while reading Wapiti School. My goodness, these stories are terrific, sometimes tough and bitter, sometimes perfect poetry. Just wonderful.
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| "Horses' Hearts" | 2007-05-23 |
| - Reviewed By tschlaak2 |
| Mark Spragg writes beautifully, even poetically, of teenage life in a Wyoming family struggling to make ends meet by catering to "dudes" come West for the seasonal fishing and hunting. His collection of stories is varied, but all are tied to the splendor of unshod love for the land and for the horses he rides through a journey that will steal your heart. |
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| "Good writing but I don't "get" where the author's coming from" | 2007-05-07 |
| - Reviewed By charlie_r |
The author writes excellent prose with innumerable well turned phrases and descriptions. The subject matter is primarily his adolescence on a Wyoming dude ranch and hunting guide service that his family, Pennsylvania expatriates, operated in the 1960s, some vignettes from his adult life and descriptions of friends and conditions in windswept Wyoming. The chapters are actually a series of essays rather than a progressive narrative with the ones about life and work on and around his father's ranch, where he essentially lived as a hired hand in the bunkhouse with hardened wranglers from about the age of fourteen, being the most interesting.
I enjoyed the book principally due to the excellent writing and colorful recounting of the author's experiences as a real "cowboy" in an era when most of us male baby boomers only experienced the same thing through ubiquitous western TV shows and movies of the 50s and 60s. It was a life in another era when so many of us grew up in boring suburbia. I recommend it for these reasons.
But maybe I missed something because I never came across any explanation for the author's seeming sense of hurt, isolation, melancholy and general unhappiness that begins, for unstated reasons, during his college years. |
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| "Something for Everyone" | 2007-02-11 |
| - Reviewed By ollokot |
Where Rivers Change Directions is a collection of 14 essays about events in the life of the author. Mark Spragg grew up on a dude ranch just 8 miles east of Yellowstone National Park's east entrance. This fact alone is what piqued my interest about the book because I love nature, wildlife, and natural areas such as Yellowstone.
I agree with a previous reviewer that a few of the essays are overly "ephemeral" for my tastes. But at least half of the essays proved to be very touching and memorable. I will never forget his descriptions of encountering a cow elk on the trail in the moment of giving birth, of being tracked by a wounded grizzly, of having to destroy a grotesquely wounded horse, of having to deal with obnoxious and arrogant "dudes", and of spending an entire winter snowbound in an isolated cabin.
People who love to read about nature would appreciate and enjoy this book. With 14 chapters which could each stand on its own as a complete and independent essay, this book has something for nearly everyone. It will be included among my favorite nature books along with Desert Solitaire, A River Runs Through It, Grizzly Years, and Indian Creek Chronicles. |
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| "beautiful" | 2007-01-06 |
| - Reviewed By bbhanks |
| A memoir that reads a wonderfully as fiction. Beautiful descriptions of horses and Wyoming and growing up. A real treat. |
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| "The first eleven chapters were superb......." | 2006-09-07 |
| - Reviewed By sunnystuff |
One of the most interesting and captivating non-fiction books I've ever read. Being an Easterner this book made me just fall in love with the mountains of Wyoming and feel as though I've actually been there. In fact felt as though I had actually walked amongst the people who live there. So for the most part loved the book.
Where I feel it fell down was in the last three chapters. Spragg has a unique gift for balancing harsh reality and sensitivity to beauty at the same time. I think he went a bit over the sensitivity line and into the boringly ephemeral in the third from last chapter "Wind".
His last two chapters, where he intermingles his mother's cigarette smoking induced death by lung cancer with that of innocent creatures, whose plight was far from being self-induced, near death experiences made a reader like me end the book with a feeling of annoyance. |
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| "Men & Horses: A fun and engaging romp growing up in Wyoming" | 2003-12-20 |
| - Reviewed By poohwei |
| Where Rivers Change Direction is the engaging story of Mark's journey to manhood on a working Wyoming dude ranch in the 1960's. This is a place outside the world of televisions and flashy cars. Life is his regular classroom, and a boy has to grow up quickly in order to endure and survive in the harsh realities of the wilderness. The responsibility that Mark both endures and earns for himself, gives him his character. It is easy to trust his voice and experiences, including the silent moments as he imagines himself as a horse alongside the other horses, testing his breath in the cold air. Mark's words match his imagination, giving us a taste of what it is like to be a horse in Wyoming. Rivers can change direction when dammed up by man, or they can follow the contour of the earth they cut through every day, changing themselves. The river of the title is about Mark's life, and this memoir leads just through the point where he changes direction. I wouldn't have missed a turn. |
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| "Superb!" | 2003-12-06 |
| - Reviewed By Anonymous |
| I read Spragg's Fruit Of Stone and was disappointed with the silly plot. The writing, however, convinced me to try Where Rivers Change Direction. It is a magnificent book in all respects. Buy this book! |
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| "As Good as They Say" | 2003-09-23 |
| - Reviewed By growlygirl |
| I read Spragg's novel, "Fruit of Stone," first, and was left rather cold. I'm glad I ventured forth with "Where Rivers Change Direction" because it is truly brilliant. This is a writer who can burnish a sentence the way a saddlemaker polishes leather--the love of craft is obvious, and the end result is a quiet elegance that is breathtaking. He loves the passive verbs...so do I. The stately passivity take the wildness of ranch life from the hands of "action packed" Hemingway types and snares it in amber. Posterity over posturing? Sure, I'll take that! He's capable of being thoughtful, brash, graphic, elegiac, and, at times, pretty funny. I adored "Wapiti School," wherein he nails Candy Dohse, his first true love, right on the forehead with a snowball during recess. He even put a pebble in the snowball first. Ah, young love! There's no riders in purple sage, crazy saloon whores, shootouts, chuckwagons, or wacky Western shenanigans, and the "New West, worse than the Old West" place dysphoria/post-mod malaise is absent, as well. What you have instead is Spragg's life--from youth to maturity--carved away from the bone as if by a hunter's skilled hand. Okay, that was a (poor) attempt at a Spraggy sentence. So, don't read me...read him! |
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