Delusions and Grandeur

Mark Sundeen is the author of four other books about the American West: The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America; Car Camping: The Book of Desert Adventures; The Making of Toro: Bullfights, Broken Hearts, and One Author's Quest for the Acclaim He Deserves; and The Man Who Quit Money, which was a national bestseller and has been translated into six languages. A contributing editor for Outside Magazine, his work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic Adventure, The Believer, and Best American Essays. He is an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Montana.

"Delusions and Grandeur is about what it means to be a man in the west—but if that conjures images of steely-eyed cowboys and oilmen, put those out of your mind. What struck me most is just how gorgeously tenderhearted, vulnerable, and emotionally engaged these essays and their characters are. If a smallish group of men have been the main perpetrators of the destruction of our planet, a larger group, including many of those in this fine book, have been their victims—and survivors." - Vauhini Vara, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Immortal King Rao"This is the West as seen through the eyes of ordinary people with extraordinary connections who have explored politics, literature, environment, and the act of being human. Sundeen has an uncanny knack for finding himself in the thick of things. Once there, he dives deep and reports back with an unerring eye. As a writer, I'm exhausted imagining what he went through to get these stories, but as a reader I'm carried along and come away feeling like I've been everywhere." - Craig Childs, author of Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau