"William Kittredge writes about the West," Raymond Carver once wrote, "with pity and terror and love. His work is singular and unforgettable." And in this extraordinary, much-awaited memoir, he explores one of our primary national mythologies through the history of his own family. The Great Basin is a sagebrush desert extending from Oregon into Nevada and California, ringed by mountains and crossed by oasis valleys--and, until white men arrived in the latter half of the nineteenth century, home to the Klamaths, the Modocs, and the northern Paiutes. By then their destruction was inevitable, as was a future of Manifest Destiny and massive ranches. One of these--the MC, later known as the Warner Valley Stock Company--was William Kittredge's birthright and curse. He was born, in 1932, into a frontier childhood of natural beauty and cowboys all around; and for him, unlike the vast flocks of migrating waterfowl, this was a place to be rooted forever, among people who for three generations had owned it all. But gradually everything changed, as surely as horses gave way to the tractors that drained the swamps and transformed the land, and as the distances between fathers and sons and husbands and wives came to be measured in resentment and silence. This is the story of a great pioneer family's decline and fall, and of a childhood dream that turned into an adulthood of dislocation and loss, the end of a way of life. But it is also Kittredge's account of coming to terms with this complex inheritance and to a new, deeper, understanding of both himself and the West. Based on his experience and our collective past, Hole in the Sky is an epic of American life. Kittredge's ( Owning It All , LJ 8/87) breathless and elliptical memoir, set largely in the cattle country of southern Oregon, illuminates a unique struggle of the American West between fealty toward land and the need for new adventure. When in the 1960s Kittredge reached age 35, he and his siblings sold the vast ranch that had belonged to the family for 80 years. His marriage ending, his life a cloud of booze, Kittredge found salvation in the written word. A good part of that word is devoted here to respectful remembrances of the cowboys and drunks who populated the ranch and to the ancestors who left their marks on Kittredge. The rest is devoted to the sparsely populated Great Basin itself. The Great Basin is rarely the subject of Western writing which makes Kittredge's book more welcome. Enjoyable reading. - Tim Zindel, Sacramento Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. A sobering and obsessive but richly imaged family/self- portrait from Kittredge (We Are Not in This Together, 1984), scion of prominent tamers of the southeastern Oregon wilderness, who treats his legacy as more of a curse than a source of pride. From the iron-willed Kittredge patriarch, whose single-minded philosophy was to pour everything into the ranch he created, to his dissolute grandchildren who wanted nothing more than to sell it off and live on the proceeds, the author looks sharply at family personalities and disappointments and the tensions within and between generations. His father and grandfather developed a mutual hatred over differing opinions regarding the ranch, and the friction colored relations between his parents--as well as his own sense of identity in childhood. Forced early on to learn the ways of a cowhand, Kittredge opted instead for the tamer rigors of haying, thereby coming into his own in ranch routines as a field hand. The confusion of adolescence, buffeted by family dynamics, gave rise to a lack of fulfillment, resulting in a failed marriage and years of existential angst fueled by endless alcoholic binges until, from desperation and desire, writing was tapped as a likely career--a choice facilitated by the decision to sell the ranch in the mid-1960's. Oregon and ranching became Kittredge's past, and Montana and teaching his future, in which the necessary space and distance could be found to put a troubled life into perspective. Acutely perceptive regarding the relationship of a family to the land, but overly confessional and self-flagellating, with exquisite longings and a delicate vision heavily steeped in sentimentality. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.