Flock - Hardcover

Austin, Mary Hunter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0883075091 ISBN 13: 9780883075098

Publisher: Gannon Distributing Co, 1973

Synopsis

The Flock is based on Mary Austin's first-hand experiences. She met many shepherds while visiting the Tejon ranches of Edward Beale and Henry Miller and cultivated relationships with men others often thought of as ignorant, unambitious, and dirty, listening closely to their stories. Her neighbors were scandalized, but Austin respected the shepherds' ways of thinking. In The Flock she captures their way of life, not as part of a romantic bygone era, but as exemplifying potentially radical ways of living in and thinking about the world. She blends natural history, politics, and allegory in a genre-blurring narrative championing local shepherds in their losing battle against the quickly developing tourist business in the Western Sierra.

About this title

About the Author:

Mary Austin (1868-1934) wrote more than 30 books during her career, including Land of Little Rain(1903) and Lost Borders (1909). Born in Carlinsville, Illinois, Mary Austin eventually ventured west with her brother and widowed mother to homestead in California. Throughout her essays, poems, plays, and stories, she focused on environmental issues and the relationship between individual experience and cultural histories.

Review:

“The Flock is not about Austin, and yet we have such a strong sense of personal presence, in her voice and style, that we are made to think about the way a mind comes to understand and be changed by listening to the stories of ‘others’ and retelling them. The reader is jolted from a position of passive reception of information into an awareness of the ambiguous creation of meaning.” -Melody Graulich, editor of Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin

About this edition

• Publisher: Gannon Distributing Co
• Publication date: 1973
• ISBN 10: 0883075091
• ISBN 13: 9780883075098
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 266