From Publishers Weekly
This moving complement to Doig's acclaimed memoir, This House of Sky, chronicles the author's childhood in Montana and Arizona in the 1940s. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
Fifteen years after This House of Sky, Doig (Ride with Me, Mariah Montana, 1990, etc.) returns to his earliest days in another profoundly original and lustrous re-creation. Inspired by wartime letters (just recently presented to the author) from his mother to a favorite brother stationed in the Pacific, Doig traces his family's struggles from Montana ranches so isolated that ``weather was the only neighbor'' to the shared hopes of an Arizona defense workers' housing project and back to Montana, with its steady string of natural indignities. Doig's parents eke out a living, always on the verge of better times despite the shadow of his mother's asthma and the prevalence of daily hardships: coyotes near the sheep ranch; infested one-room houses; road mud ``thick enough to float a train.'' His mother's death comes without warning, on the author's sixth birthday, just as the sheep are ready for shearing and a certain healthy profit. ``Nobody got over her,'' Doig writes, ``those around me in my growing-up stayed hit.'' Doig captures the serial disasters, as well as several cherished family scenes--including a lunch of Spam sandwiches and lime Kool-Aid--with the clarifying beauty and sure shaping hand of his first book. Even when mining some of the same material that appeared there, he claims new territory for the significant figures in his life. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

ANNOTATION

An exploration of the poineer impulse that drew settlers to the Pacific Northwest.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

With its powerful echoes of a family and its fate, Heart Earth is the fitting companion to Ivan Doig's classic memoir, This House of Sky. Against the backdrop of World War Two and the American land before and since, this remarkably told saga of the Doigs and their journey from a defense housing project in boomtime Arizona to the high country of their Montana origins builds with the drama only real life can hold. Here we see an adventurous mother miraculously back again in the evocative lines of her wartime letters after "all else of her. . . has been only farthest childscapes, half-rememberings thinned by so many years since"; a resonant father who gives off the "tense hum of a wire in the wind" as he strives, in memorably go-getting fashion, to make his family secure against chronic odds; and a child, "touchy and thorough, doctrinaire and dreamy," who early learns to infiltrate the drama-filled world of grown-ups by "standing back and prowling with the ears." "In that last winter of the war, she knew to use pointblank ink," begins this unusual blend of heartfelt memoir and narrative skills. As ever in the writing of Ivan Doig, the most innocent sentence has the trap of poetry. Heart Earth is the most imaginative - and moving - book yet from the writer, The Washington Post has said, "whose work makes readers recall why they love to read, reminds writers why they ever wanted to write in the first place."

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

In poetic and precise prose, Doig has crafted a worthy complement to his acclaimed memoir, This House of Sky. While that book concerned family tensions after his mother Berneta's death in 1945, here, prompted by a cache of his mother's letters to her sailor brother from that year, Doig recreates a life ``the five-year-old dirtmover that was me'' could hardly have known. He describes life in an Arizona housing project for defense workers, where his family moved to spare his mother's asthma. He tracks down his Uncle Wally's old beau, about whom his mother wrote. He recalls the battle between his grandmother and father over his mother's medical condition, ``the geography of risk'' and the family move back to Montana ranching. Doig's writing is immensely quotable--listening to his elders was ``prowling with your ears.'' What makes this book so touching is that, through letters, Doig realizes how much he, the writer, owes to ``this earlier family member who wordworked.'' (Sept.)

Michael Dorris - Los Angeles Times

Like Doig's This House of Sky, this book repeatedly proves the power of language. Ivan Doig uses words like oil paint to create canvases of enduring value and originality.

Kirkus Reviews

Fifteen years after This House of Sky, Doig (Ride with Me, Mariah Montana, 1990, etc.) returns to his earliest days in another profoundly original and lustrous re-creation. Inspired by wartime letters (just recently presented to the author) from his mother to a favorite brother stationed in the Pacific, Doig traces his family's struggles from Montana ranches so isolated that "weather was the only neighbor" to the shared hopes of an Arizona defense workers' housing project and back to Montana, with its steady string of natural indignities. Doig's parents eke out a living, always on the verge of better times despite the shadow of his mother's asthma and the prevalence of daily hardships: coyotes near the sheep ranch; infested one-room houses; road mud "thick enough to float a train." His mother's death comes without warning, on the author's sixth birthday, just as the sheep are ready for shearing and a certain healthy profit. "Nobody got over her," Doig writes, "those around me in my growing-up stayed hit." Doig captures the serial disasters, as well as several cherished family scenes—including a lunch of Spam sandwiches and lime Kool-Aid—with the clarifying beauty and sure shaping hand of his first book. Even when mining some of the same material that appeared there, he claims new territory for the significant figures in his life.