Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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
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.
—Los Angeles Times
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.
Los Angeles Times - Michael Dorris
Like Doig's This House of Sky, Heart Earth is a book that repeatedly proves the power of language... Ivan Doig uses words like oil paint to create canvasses of enduring value and originality.
The Seattle Times
Doig at his best: fresh, vivid language energizing his keen insight.
From the Publisher
PRAISE FOR HEART EARTH
"Like Doig's This House of Sky, this book repeatedly proves the power of language. Ivan Doig uses words like oil paint to create canvasses of enduring value and originality."—Los Angeles Times
"A lyrical evocation of the Doigs' gallantly hardscrabble existence and love for the unforgiving Montana mountains."—San Francisco Chronicle
APRIL 2011 - AudioFile
Doig's memoir of the year he turned 6 is based on letters written by his mother during her last months of life to her brother, who was serving in the Pacific during WWII. Narrator Tom Stechschulte underplays Doig's emotional journey as the author pays tribute to Berneta Doig, an independent Montana native who refused to let her life-threatening asthma hold her back, whether she was on horseback herding sheep or at the kitchen table visiting with girlfriends. Unfortunately, owing to Stechschulte's steady intonations, listeners are not always immediately able to differentiate between Doig's narrative text and quotations from Berneta's letters. Further, he misses the mark for Doig's father's Scots accent, making the elder Doig sound distinctly Irish. Nonetheless, listeners will be drawn to Berneta's spunk and vivid observations. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
