Fair Land, Fair Land, Paperback/A. B. Guthrie

With his revered classics The Big Sky and The Way West, A. B. Guthrie , Jr., claimed his preeminent post as the father of the western epic. Fair Land, Fair Land , first published in 1982, marks the sequel to his two masterworks and rounds out a chronological gap, the mid-nineteenth century, in Guthrie's Big Sky series. Reappearing here is Dick Summers, of the earlier sagas, now a wizened conservationist who seeks retribution from his former compatriot Boone Caudill and renewed companionship with the self-reliant Teal Eye. Imbued with a rich sense for the impermanence of the idyllic plains, this tour de force offers a stirring commentary on a country's physical and spiritual erosion, as relevant today as it was a decade ago.