E-Books →Holding Fire A Reckoning with the American West

From the award-winning author of Down from the Mountain, a memoir of inheritance, history, and one gun's role in the violence that shaped the American West-and 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...