"A powerful meditation on a rural life of hunting in a world of guns--some of them used for sinister purposes. A welcome, eminently sensible contribution to the literature of the American West--and responsible gun ownership." -- Kirkus Reviews "In this beautifully observed book, Bryce Andrews takes us on a courageous and necessary journey toward reconciliation that is as visceral as it is transcendent. The West and its varied inhabitants come alive with every shining line and, when I was done, I found myself wishing for the world that Andrews and his family are daily working toward. 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 "An astonishing call to attention. Bryce Andrews' story corrals despair and offers understanding, douses anxiety and offers wonder. This isn't mere memoir, Holding Fire is a song to the West, a talisman of ferocious beauty for a world on edge.
Compelling and compassionate, a must read for all who seek peace in uncertain times." -- Debra Magpie Earling, award-winning author of Perma Red "The two sides of Bryce Andrews--enlightened rancher and sensitive writer--appear to make a smooth fit.Precise and evocative prose." -- Washington Post on Down from the Mountain "Andrews's writing about wilderness is much like that of author Rick Bass, who displays both a healthy reverence for ecology and an easy way of talking about it. This story is not just about Andrews's shift from rancher to conservationist. It's an ode to wildness and wilderness in the form of grizzlies. It's about the tightrope bears walk between living in their mountainous territory, consuming pine nuts, army cutworm moths, and winterkill, versus coming down the mountain to scavenge in human territory. It's about the resulting relationship between humans and grizzlies when they live in close proximity.
" -- Outside on Down from the Mountain "Bryce Andrews' wonderful Down from the Mountain is deeply informed by personal experience and made all the stronger by his compassion and measured thoughts. He outlines clearly the core of a major problem in the rural American West--the disagreement between large predatory animals and invasive modern settlers--without disrespect and without sentimentality. His book is welcome and impressive work." -- Barry Lopez "Would that we had more nature writing like Bryce Andrews's fantastic second book, Down from the Mountain. Part biography of the Mission Valley in Montana, informed by the Blackfeet and Salish histories rooted there, it tells a moving modern tale of how ranchers and big predators overlap uneasily on that land today.Down from the Mountain eschews easy moral scrimmaging.A subtle and beautifully unexpected book.Readers hungry for yet another torch bearer to the ways of thinking of the wild that Barry Lopez and Leslie Marmon Silko made possible should look no further.
" -- Literary Hub "[A] soulful new exegesis on ursid-hominid relations.Down from the Mountain showcases a writer whose talents have fully matured.Down from the Mountain belongs in the pantheon of contemporary conservation writing. It is easy to forget, when arguing over the fate of wildlife, that populations are composed of thinking, feeling individuals; in his sensitive treatment of an ill-fated ursid, Andrews breaches the fences that guard our compassion." -- Ben Goldfarb, High Country News.