Taking Care

“Our character is formed,” William Kittredge writes, “by the stories we learn to live in.”

In Taking Care, Kittredge tells the story of his family’s homestead in the Great Basin, a ranch worked by horses when he was a boy and transformed into an agribusiness by the time he was a grown man. Recounting his life as farmer and writer, he acknowledges the desire for efficiency that led him to spoil the land he loves. He writes about the tough issues of owning property and owning up to who and what we are. And he advocates for a new set of radical stories about the West, stories to foster compassion and caretaking. The future, he argues here, begins with narratives that allow us to give back to the “systems of order that have supported us … before what we adore simply vanishes.”