<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: A Brilliant Tour de Force
Review: Clive Chisholm's "Following the Wrong God Home -- Footloose in an American Dream" is travel writing at its absolute best. A chronicle of the author's walk from Nebraska to Utah in 1985, it is also a fascinating, sometimes irreverant, history of one group's westward migration in the 19th century -- the Mormons. Chisholm, a Roman Catholic, tells this uniquely American story with compassion, attention to detail and the kind of devastating humor that deflates myths without working to destroy those who created them. And for anyone who doesn't give a damn about why or how Mormons ended up in the Salt Lake valley, there's the rest of Chisholm's story: The daily slog on the trail, the oddballs he meets and his extended meditation on the importance of "American Dreaming" in our national psychology. If you liked William Least Heat Moon's "Blue Highways," then you'll love this book.
Rating:
Summary: Following the wrong god home
Review: Clive Scott Chisholm recounts his walking retracement of the Morman trail across Nebraska and Wyoming to Brigham Young's"Zion",Utah.This book is about people,places,perceptions,and the nebulous envisagement of the American Dream.
To Chisholm,born into a Morman Family and faith,the walk it vividly personal.He weaves parenthetical"Acccording to Hoyle" chronicles of Morman history in each chapter.
The author crosses the bounds of genre with timely placed sidebars.He touches geography,natural history,hydraulics,soil management,native indian movements,railway and highway beginnings,politics and a host of others.
He describes eating,sleeping and entertainment establishments past and present;"watering-holes",museums and libraries with a generous portion of humor.There are no sacred cows,be it presidents or prophets.
This book just gets better as it goes.Clive Scott Chisholm doesn't disappoint his readers by slipping off the rails in the final chapter.He runs strong to the end.
The last entry adds a homey"Where are they now"(fifteen years later) about many of the people and personalities we meet in the book.
End
Rating:
Summary: Following the wrong god home
Review: Clive Scott Chisholm recounts his walking retracement of the Morman trail across Nebraska and Wyoming to Brigham Young's"Zion",Utah.This book is about people,places,perceptions,and the nebulous envisagement of the American Dream.
To Chisholm,born into a Morman Family and faith,the walk it vividly personal.He weaves parenthetical"Acccording to Hoyle" chronicles of Morman history in each chapter.
The author crosses the bounds of genre with timely placed sidebars.He touches geography,natural history,hydraulics,soil management,native indian movements,railway and highway beginnings,politics and a host of others.
He describes eating,sleeping and entertainment establishments past and present;"watering-holes",museums and libraries with a generous portion of humor.There are no sacred cows,be it presidents or prophets.
This book just gets better as it goes.Clive Scott Chisholm doesn't disappoint his readers by slipping off the rails in the final chapter.He runs strong to the end.
The last entry adds a homey"Where are they now"(fifteen years later) about many of the people and personalities we meet in the book.
End
Rating:
Summary: One Man's Saga
Review: I was enthralled by Clive Scott Chisholm's brilliant meld of personal experience, social criticism, and history. On his 1100 mile trek from Omaha to Salt Lake City, he encounters a rich variety of experiences involving the weather,the landscape, historical markers, towns, and human personalities which he describes in vivid detail. Independence Rock in Wyoming, for instance, evokes a discussion of the natural forces which created it and its role as "a geological semaphore of good-bye" for travelers venturing into the unknown West.
Threaded through this account are Chisholm's thoughts about his life, his friends, western history, and particularly about "the American Dream" and the Mormons. He is often brutally frank in his judgments, especially of the Mormon leader, Brigham Young, for whom he can say nothing good. All-in-all, this is a brilliantly written, deeply personal account of one man's adventure in space and time.
Rating:
Summary: Well of Hope
Review: Is the American Dream an empty hole(or whole)? Clive Chisholm takes a hard look at that in his trek across the American West, following the trail the Mormons blazed in 1847. Those Mormons were seeking their dream, their promised land. Chisholm, looking deeply at their experience through their journals, overlaps them with his modern day rediscovery of what is left of their trail. In the process, he digs deeply at the Mormon faith, at himself and at all of us, trying to find what gives us the courage and the passion to get up each morning and try it all again. The stories of the young brides who, far from home, died the horrible death of cholera, and his battles with dysentery and toothache; how they drug all their worldly belongings in handcarts, and he a dilapidated hand-golfcart, soon discarded in a highway culvert. Their is no shortage of dispair and heartache for either story, yet there is hope. Chisholm fills the pages with his gift of humor, and the quirky characters that he collects like mile markers on his road. He masterfully weaves both stories together. In the end, he questions what it all meant. Americans, he determines, believe everything works out simply because they are Americans. It's not the same experience for the rest of the world but we, as americans, are comprised of the peoples of all the world. We inherit a legacy of ancestral dreams. The dream is a lie, but it's the dreaming that counts. That's what fills our "common well of human hope." Buy it.
Rating:
Summary: Well of Hope
Review: Is the American Dream an empty hole(or whole)? Clive Chisholm takes a hard look at that in his trek across the American West, following the trail the Mormons blazed in 1847. Those Mormons were seeking their dream, their promised land. Chisholm, looking deeply at their experience through their journals, overlaps them with his modern day rediscovery of what is left of their trail. In the process, he digs deeply at the Mormon faith, at himself and at all of us, trying to find what gives us the courage and the passion to get up each morning and try it all again. The stories of the young brides who, far from home, died the horrible death of cholera, and his battles with dysentery and toothache; how they drug all their worldly belongings in handcarts, and he a dilapidated hand-golfcart, soon discarded in a highway culvert. Their is no shortage of dispair and heartache for either story, yet there is hope. Chisholm fills the pages with his gift of humor, and the quirky characters that he collects like mile markers on his road. He masterfully weaves both stories together. In the end, he questions what it all meant. Americans, he determines, believe everything works out simply because they are Americans. It's not the same experience for the rest of the world but we, as americans, are comprised of the peoples of all the world. We inherit a legacy of ancestral dreams. The dream is a lie, but it's the dreaming that counts. That's what fills our "common well of human hope." Buy it.
Rating:
Summary: The American Dream Is Still Alive
Review: Scott Chisholm has provided us with a wonderful read as he describes his sojurn through present-day (1985) American wilderness in his search for the truth of the early Mormon experience in the West. He left me anxiously awaiting his next tongue-in-cheek comments about both the early settlers and the then current occupants of the lands from Nebraska to Utah. His colorful word caricatures of those he met along the way fueled my already lively imagination as I walked the ruts in the road along with him. Thank you, Scott, for putting it all down on paper so I could spend a few hours wrapped in the adventure. The American Dream is still alive; it's all in how you define it.
Rating:
Summary: a study in landscape
Review: scott MacDonald wrote a book called "The Garden in the Machine" and this book reminds me of "Following the Wrong god home" because they both discuss the meaning of landscape. But if you read both books together you can see how Chisolm's book on the mormons is much more personal mostly because he actually is doing the traveling himself and having the experiences he is talking about. I think that a lot of people who don't know anything about Mormon history could love this book because he is using the mormon history as a way of writing about the western dream. The writing of this book is superb and it is one of those rare books that I never wanted to finish.
Rating:
Summary: a study in landscape
Review: scott MacDonald wrote a book called "The Garden in the Machine" and this book reminds me of "Following the Wrong god home" because they both discuss the meaning of landscape. But if you read both books together you can see how Chisolm's book on the mormons is much more personal mostly because he actually is doing the traveling himself and having the experiences he is talking about. I think that a lot of people who don't know anything about Mormon history could love this book because he is using the mormon history as a way of writing about the western dream. The writing of this book is superb and it is one of those rare books that I never wanted to finish.
Rating:
Summary: American Dreaming Revisited
Review: You can't judge a book by its cover or, in the case "Following the Wrong God Home", by the advertising blurb on the dust jacket. An acquaintance who works at a local bookstore fairly frothed at the mouth while singing the praises of this book, and she had only finished half of it (the first half). As her tastes agree with my own generally and as Mormon history happens to be my bag, I bought it and started to read. After the first chapter, I put it down and scratched my head. Somehow the reading wasn't going as planned. I've read hundreds of volumes on as many aspects of Mormonism as I can think of, but something wasn't clicking with me. I didn't want to admit to my bookstore acquaintance that I didn't "get it". So in an act of preemptive bravado, I plunged back into its pages, determined not to be outunderstood by the bookstore lady. As chapters rolled by, I grew more accustomed to Scott Chisholm's meter. Although I'm sure his method may be shoehorned into "the seven holy principles of good prose" and thereby explained, this book does not have the feel of such an effort. Rather, the structure and tenor of the tale mirror the rhythms of the difficulty of those first Mormon pioneers. Instead of simply describing the experience, he paints it as a work or art. Like the Russian masters, the most poignant observations of life are made by those who have experienced the worst of it. Suffering has no value without the introspection that follows and Scott Chisholm guides us through that experience. Spoiler: the Mormons do make it to Utah.
<< 1 >>
|
