HOLDSWORTH BOOK BIG, WONDERFUL: Kevin Holdsworth of Rock Springs adds to the rapidly growing list of intriguing first-person accounts of living in contemporary Wyoming. His book, Big Wonderful: Notes from Wyoming (ISBN 0-87081-846-5, $26.95) was just published by the University Press of Colorado. Here’s a description from the UPC web site: “Growing up in Utah, Holdsworth couldn’t wait to move away. Once ensconced on the East Coast, however, he found himself writing westerns and dreaming of the mountains he’d skied and climbed. Fed up with city life, he moved to a small Wyoming town. In Big Wonderful, he writes of a mountaineering companion’s death, the difficult birth of his son, and his father’s terminal illness -- encounters with mortality that sharpened his ideas about risk, care, and commitment. He puts a new spin on mountaineering literature, telling wild tales from his reunion with the mountains but also relating the surprising willpower it took to turn back from risks he would have taken before he became a father. He found he needed courage to protect and engage deeply with his family, his community, and the wild places he loves.” Here’s what Jeffe Kennedy, another chronicler of WYO in the twenty-first century (Wyoming Trucks, True Love, and the Weather Channel), says about Kevin’s book: “Holdsworth provides a canny vision of Wyoming and the West, from both sides of the Mormon mirror. What begins with simple observations from a Utah transplant to Wyoming becomes an ode to family and place, and perhaps an elegy for it all.”
- posted by Michael Shay @ 9:36 AM