Holding Fire
A Reckoning with the American West
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Beautifully observed. . . This jewel of a book belongs on the shelf with our best Western writers—Norman MacLean, Pam Houston, and Annie Proulx.”—John Vaillant, bestselling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce
From the award-winning author of Down from the Mountain, a memoir of inheritance, history, and one gun’s role in the violence that shaped the American West—and an impassioned call to forge a new way forward
Bryce Andrews was raised to do no harm. The son of a pacifist and conscientious objector, he moved from Seattle to Montana to tend livestock and the land as a cowboy. For a decade, he was happy. Yet, when Andrews inherited his grandfather’s Smith & Wesson revolver, he felt the weight of the violence braided into his chosen life. Other white men who’d come before him had turned firearms like this one against wildlife, wilderness, and the Indigenous peoples who had lived in these landscapes for millennia. This was how the West was “won.” Now, the losses were all around him and a weapon was in his hand.
In precise, elegiac prose, Andrews chronicles his journey to forge a new path for himself, and to reshape one handgun into a tool for good work. As waves of gun violence swept the country and wildfires burned across his beloved valley, he began asking questions—of ranchers, his Native neighbors, his family, and a blacksmith who taught him to shape steel—in search of a new way to live with the land and with one another. In laying down his arms, he transformed an inherited weapon, his ranch, and the arc of his life.
Holding Fire is a deeply felt memoir of one Western heart’s wild growth, and a personal testament to how things that seem permanent—inheritance, legacies of violence, forged steel—can change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rancher and conservationist Andrews (Down from the Mountain) portrays the transformative beauty and violence of the American West in this evocative outing. He moved to Montana as a young man just out of school seeking work as a ranch hand, and here details the brutal lifestyle he led in stark snapshots: discovering one morning that someone had killed several deer during the night and left them in a nearby field, fighting his distaste for hunting, and having to put down a sick horse. Andrews, whose father was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, eventually wanted a more serene life and moved with his wife to a farm in western Montana. His inherited Smith & Wesson revolver works as a talisman of sorts as he mulls over what to do with it, ultimately deciding to melt it down and refashion it as a spade to symbolically protest the Indigenous lives lost in the settling of the West. Andrews's personal struggles are mirrored in his examination of the region's beautiful if treacherous landscape: when he learned during a deadly summer drought that his wife was pregnant, he recalls, "Encountering that fear among our hopes was like finding a rattlesnake in the garden." It's a bittersweet meditation on the true meaning of the Wild West.
