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MONTANA SURROUND
Land, Water, Nature, & Place
By Phil Condon
Published by Johnson Books
Boulder, 2004
Read the reviews
As patiently as he searched for water on a patch of land in Missouri, Phil Condon water-witches his way through westerly geographies of land and of being in his collection of fourteen personal essays, Montana Surround. The natural world is where he lives, walks, and works, as well as the springboard for his deep and generous reflections on the importance of place. From Nebraska and British Columbia in his youth, to Missouri, to diverse landscapes and moments in Montana over the last seventeen years, Condon creates an intriguing map of past, present, and future.
Praise for Montana Surround:
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"This book carried me into a landscape of both sadness and hope. In Montana Surround, Phil Condon writes elegantly about the truth of living in the American West at this point in time. His essays are lovely still-points of understanding. There is an enlightened melancholy to his prose, reminding me of a full moon breaking through on a very cloudy night."
— from Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Open Space of Democracy and Red
"Montana Surround is one fine writer's testament to growth and placement, struggle and adaptation, settling in and stretching out. Phil Condon, in this rich in-dwelling of a book, attends to his surroundings with a knowing intimacy that only the best chroniclers of person and place ever achieve."
— from Robert Michael Pyle, author of Wintergreen and The Thunder Tree
"The tributaries of Phil Condon's life and art find their confluience in this remarkable collection of essays. A compelling and eloquent memoir emerges, in which Condon's alertness to the shape of his experience is heightened by an eye for the particularity of terrain and by gifts of sympathy and compassion of those he encounters along the way."
— from John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home and Frog Run
"Montana Surround is an important and intimate testimony to one man's quest for belonging. . . . Like the water he drills for and the rivers he walks beside, Condon's narratives offer both sustenance and solace. In stories personal yet universal--stories of love, loss, confusion, hope, and grief--Condon guides us through the natural world while wisely instructing us as to its fragility and care."
— from Kim Barnes, author of In the Wilderness
"Meditation, thoughout this storytelling book, is occasioned by personal anecdote. But Phil Condon also finds his meanings in historical stories . . . books like this one urge Americans to take care of each moment and each place, no matter where or how fleeting."
— from the Foreword by William Kittredge, author of Owning It All and A Hole in the Sky
"Phil Condon is a quietly lyrical writer, whose truths well up from these pages as if from a still pool, surprising you with their depths."
— from Robert Finch, author of Death of a Hornet and Editor of Norton Book of Nature Writing
Montana Surround: Land, Water, Nature, and Place
Johnson Books, Boulder, 2004
Paper: ISBN 1555663540 Price 15.00
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