Bryce Andrews

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Holding Fire

Beautifully observed. . . This jewel of a book belongs on the shelf with our best Western writersNorman MacLean, Pam Houston, and Annie Proulx.John Vaillant, bestselling author ofThe TigerandThe Golden Spruce

From the award-winning author ofDown from the Mountain, a memoir of inheritance, history, and one gun's role in the violence that shaped the American Westand 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 questionsof ranchers, his Native neighbors, his family, and a blacksmith who taught him to shape steelin 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 Fireis a deeply felt memoir of one Western heart's wild growth, and a personal testament to how things that seem permanentinheritance, legacies of violence, forged steelcan change.