Bad Land – an American romance –

“… takes the reader on an enthralling journey into the least populated and least known region of the United States, and finds there the heart and soul of the country.

Seemingly empty, arid, dotted with low buttes and scored with dry creek-beds, eastern Montana looks like a landscape in an allegory – and so it proves, in this brilliant and revelatory book. For the dusty prairie on the edge of te Badlands turn out to hold the key to the puzzle of modern |America.

Here, in the early years of this century, came emigrants from Britain, Scnadinavia, Russia and Germany in search of a new life in the New World. their ruined houses still stand, among forlorn fencepostst trailing whiskers of rusty barbed wire. They built a brave and hopeful civilization on the prairie, only to see it collapse around their ears within little more than a decade.

Raban’s anatomy of this quintessential American story takes the travel book into a new dimension, as he brings to life on the age both the extraordinary landscape itself and the people whose dreams foudnered here. He recaptures the great adventure of going West, and makes the deserted homesteads fill again with the voices of those emigrants, for whom the bare prairie represented a fantastic chance of personal renewal. …”