I have always enjoyed Jonathan Raban’s books—‘Coasting,’ ‘Old Glory,’ and others—but somehow I missed this one. It’s just as well because now I live in the West and ‘Bad Land’ is so much more meaningful to me. Raban explores the dreams and experiences of a few homesteading families who got off a train and landed on the plains of Montana in about 1906 or 1907, ready to apply their sweat equity into their dry farming plans. They lucked out for the first few years: they got more than the 15 inches of annual rain required to make a go of it on a Montana farm. But by WWI their luck had run out; the rain had stopped and their bank notes were coming due, only to be followed by the Great Depression. Raban has a knack for asking delicate questions and getting straight answers from strangers, and then applying his historical knowledge and geographical understanding to create a well-rounded explanation for what happened to these families’ western dreams. His book is sympathetic but not pitying. He shares the unblinking truth that these men and women were hoodwinked—unintentionally perhaps, but certainly carelessly—by railroad men and government and the promoters who worked for them. Campbell’s method of dryland farming comes in for special criticism, as the Bible that led these would-be farmers astray. No wonder westerners embrace conspiracy theories, Raban argues. “If one were looking for evidence to support the idea that the federal government was into scams of this magnitude, one only had to remember the dryland homestead scheme,” he writes of the 1990s rumor that the Moon landing was faked. “In 1909, the government *did* drop people on to an expanse of land which looked suspiciously like the surface of the moon” (276). A great companion to Lucas Bessire’s book about Kansas.