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Beyond the Hundredth Meridian

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What to expect

Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner recounts the remarkable career of Major John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of the Southwest Indian tribes. This classic work is a penetrating and insightful study of Powell's career, from the beginning of the Powell Survey, in which Powell and his men famously became the first to descend the Colorado River, to his eventual ouster from the Geological Survey. In masterful prose, Stegner details the expedition, as well as the philosophies and ideas that drove Powell.

A prophet without honor who had a profound understanding of the American West, Powell warned long ago of the dangers economic exploitation would pose to the West—and he spent a good deal of his life battling Washington politics to get his message across. Only now may we recognize just how accurate a prophet he was.

Critics Review

“Stegner’s most exciting work.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“The surrender of self-righteousness would be an enormous boon to the environmental cause. Acknowledging the unedited, complicated, utilitarian John Wesley Powell as an ideological parent would be a big step in that laudable direction, and it is this step that Worster’s thorough and empathetic biography makes possible.”

Los Angeles Times

“No library of western/southwestern materials can be without this book.”

Books of the Southwest

“This book goes far beyond biography, into the nature and soul of the American West. It is Stegner at his best, assaying an entire era of our history, packing his pages with insights as shrewd as his prose.”

Ivan Doig, American novelist

“Narrator Mark Bramhall, like the great river, starts a little slow but becomes more and more animated as the huge rapids and steep canyon walls begin to conquer the men and the boats. Bramhall’s sonorous and sandy voice varies in volume and speed to match the mood of the oarsmen as they face starvation and uncertainty about how much more danger lies ahead.”

AudioFile
Author Wallace Stegner
Narrator Mark Bramhall
Duration 17 hours and 6 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781483071848
Format Audiobook
Publisher Blackstone Publishing
Genre History
Availability AU, GB, IE, US

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