I can still remember that day. If you asked me, I thought the world was coming to a blazing end. Well, at least my world. It was a very humid and hot summer afternoon. Unusually warm for New England, it was the type of weather found in the deep south of our country. It was quite a coincidence actual...

Jonathan Raban, in his award winning novel, Bad Land, attempts to describe the migration of homesteaders to eastern Montana in the first decade of this century, and examines the last great wave of American western settlement. More tellingly, Bad Land is somewhat of a memoir; a well edited collecti...