Heart Earth: A Memoir - Softcover

Doig, Ivan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501156055 ISBN 13: 9781501156052

Publisher: Scribner, 2016

Synopsis

With its powerful echoes of a family and its fate, Heart Earth is the fitting companion to Ivan Doig's classic memoir, This House of Sky. Against the backdrop of World War Two and the American land before and since, this remarkably told saga of the Doigs and their journey from a defense housing project in boomtime Arizona to the high country of their Montana origins builds with the drama only real life can hold. Here we see an adventurous mother miraculously back again in the evocative lines of her wartime letters after "all else of her. . . has been only farthest childscapes, half-rememberings thinned by so many years since"; a resonant father who gives off the "tense hum of a wire in the wind" as he strives, in memorably go-getting fashion, to make his family secure against chronic odds; and a child, "touchy and thorough, doctrinaire and dreamy, " who early learns to infiltrate the drama-filled world of grown-ups by "standing back and prowling with the ears." "In that last winter of the war, she knew to use pointblank ink, " begins this unusual blend of heartfelt memoir and narrative skills. As ever in the writing of Ivan Doig, the most innocent sentence has the trap of poetry. Heart Earth is the most imaginative - and moving - book yet from the writer, The Washington Post has said, "whose work makes readers recall why they love to read, reminds writers why they ever wanted to write in the first place."

About this title

Review:

"Like Doig's This House of Sky, Heart Earth is a book that repeatedly proves the power of language... Ivan Doig uses words like oil paint to create canvasses of enduring value and originality."--Michael Dorris "Los Angeles Times "

"Doig at his best: fresh, vivid language energizing his keen insight."--The Seattle Times

"Profoundly original and lustrous."--Kirkus Reviews

From the Back Cover:

"Like Doig's "This House of Sky," this book repeatedly proves the power of language. Ivan Doig uses words like oil paint to create canvasses of enduring value and originality."--"Los Angeles Times"
Ivan Doig grew up with only a vague memory of his mother, Berneta, who died on his sixth birthday. Then he discovered a cache of her letters--and through them, a spunky, passionate, can-do woman as at home in the saddle as behind a sewing machine, and as in love with language as Doig would prove to be. In this moving prequel to his acclaimed memoir "This House of Sky," Doig brings to life his childhood before his mother's death and the family's journey from the Montana mountains to the Arizona desert and back again. He eloquently captures the texture of the American West during and after World War II, the fortune of a family, and one woman's indomitable spirit.
"Fresh, vivid language [energizes] Doig's keen insight into a woman whose warmth he felt only briefly."--"The Seattle Times"
"An affecting book, heartbreaking in its recital of the stark severance of a young family's life, but ennobling in the implacable spirit that infuses its pages . . . [It] should endure as [a] magnificent testimonial to the men and women who people it, and as [a] classic of the bittersweet history of the American West."--"The Washington Times"
Ivan Doig is the author of ten previous books, including the memoir "This House of Sky," a National Book Award Finalist. A former ranch hand, newspaperman, and magazine editor, Doig holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington. He lives in Seattle.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1501156055
• ISBN 13: 9781501156052
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176