William Kittredge's relationship to the spare, often unforgiving Western landscape is fraught with contradictions. Having grown up on a cattle ranch in Oregon, he has an intimate connection to the vast landscape that was once vital to his family's trade. He has also witnessed, over many decades, the depletion of the West's natural resources due to overuse. These essays move effortlessly from the personal to the political. With grace and integrity,...

Over the past decade a rich chorus of women's voices has emerged from the West. The Stories That Shape Us is an extraordinary anthology of twenty-six personal essays by contemporary women writers, many being published here for the first time. Ranging widely across the cultures and the regions of the West, these women relate stories of family and community, of race and gender, of commitment and displacement, of grief and repair, of spirituality and...