Reviews for Brown Dog of the Yaak: Essays on Art and Activism

The average rating for Brown Dog of the Yaak: Essays on Art and Activism based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-11-04 00:00:00 Sean Halligan Visited the Yaak river earlier this year, then started reading this shortly thereafter, though it had already been sitting on my shelf for several years. What on earth am I doing with my life not reading more Rick Bass? It's been years since I've picked up one of his slim, but eloquent volumes. "We are so used to viewing the land and its resources as raw materials, and ourselves as the tools, the machines, the sculptors, that we have forgotten how it used to be the other way around... We are soft, pink, almost hairless'more malleable than clay, and as adaptable, almost, as bacteria. The landscape carves at us with wild abandon, artistic glee, even if we do not notice."

Review # 2 was written on 2014-02-27 00:00:00 Brian Blackman This is the third Bass I've read. The first nonfiction. I liked it better than the fiction. The book is written in four sections. First is Colter (about his dog). Then comes The Yaak (a valley where he lives in northern Montana). Finally we have Activism and Art. The whole of the book is about trying to save his roadless valley from loggers and to preserve it as it is. The first three sections of the book are good and even entertaining. There is no way you can mistake where he's going. You're reading to see how he gets there. Then it becomes exciting and you know that no matter how passionate his activism is, it's his art that makes this man go. Somehow he brings the topics of the book full circle and all four of them inform us about each other. Even the dog has left it's imprint on the soil of the Yaak. It too is portrayed as an activist dependent on this special place for its own exceptionalism.