Why I Came West Paperback - 2009

"Rick Bass is one of the country s greatest and most reluctant activists." Los Angeles Times

In this searching memoir, Rick Bass describes how he first fell in love with the West as a landscape, an idea, and a way of life. Bass grew up in the suburban sprawl of Houston, attended college in Utah, and spent eight years working as a geologist in Mississippi before packing up and heading west in pursuit of something visceral and true. He found it in the remote Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana, where despite extensive logging not a single species has gone extinct since the last Ice Age.

Bass has lived in the Yaak ever since, a place of mountains, outlaws, and continual rebirth that transformed him into the writer, hunter, and activist that he is today. The West Bass found is also home to deep-rooted philosophical conflicts that set neighbor against neighbor--disputes that Bass has joined reluctantly, but necessarily, to defend and preserve the wilderness that he loves.

"This illuminating story of place and howit can transform a person is from one of the West s most prolific and talented writers"--Seattle Post Intelligencer

"A must-read for any environmental activist" The Oregonian

A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

Rick Bass is the author of many acclaimed books of nonfiction and fiction, including The Lives of Rocks, The Diezmo, and Winter.