Sheep Rock

by George R. Stewart

{ 15.34 x 23.59 cms} Leather Binding on Spine and Corners with Golden Leaf Printing on round Spine (extra customization on request like complete leather, Golden Screen printing in Front, Color Leather, Colored book etc.) Reprinted in 2019 with the help of original edition published long back [1951]. This book is printed in black & white, sewing binding for longer life, printed on high quality Paper, re-sized as per Current standards, professionally processed without changing its contents. As these are old books, we processed each page manually and make them readable but in some cases some pages which are blur or missing or black spots. If it is multi volume set, then it is only single volume, if you wish to order a specific or all the volumes you may contact us. We expect that you will understand our compulsion in these books. We found this book important for the readers who want to know more about our old treasure so we brought it back to the shelves. Hope you will like it and give your comments and suggestions. - english, Pages 300. EXTRA 10 DAYS APART FROM THE NORMAL SHIPPING PERIOD WILL BE REQUIRED FOR LEATHER BOUND BOOKS. COMPLETE LEATHER WILL COST YOU EXTRA US$ 25 APART FROM THE LEATHER BOUND BOOKS. {FOLIO EDITION IS ALSO AVAILABLE.} Complete Sheep Rock a novel 1951 George R. Stewart

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

George Rippey Stewart was an American toponymist, a novelist, and a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his only science fiction novel Earth Abides (1949), a post-apocalyptic novel, for which he won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951. It was dramatized on radio's Escape and inspired Stephen King's The Stand .

His 1941 novel Storm , featuring as its protagonist a Pacific storm called Maria, prompted the National Weather Service to use personal names to designate storms and inspired Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe to write the song "They Call the Wind Maria" for their 1951 musical "Paint Your Wagon." Storm was dramatized as "A Storm Called Maria" on a 1959 episode of ABC's Disneyland. Two other novels, Ordeal by Hunger (1936) and Fire (1948) also evoked environmental catastrophes.

Stewart was a founding member of the American Name Society in 1956-57, and he once served as an expert witness in a murder trial as a specialist in family names. His best-known academic work is Names on the Land A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945; reprinted, New York Review Books, 2008). He wrote three other books on place-names, A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names (1970), Names on the Globe (1975), and American Given Names (1979). His scholarly works on the poetic meter of ballads (published under the name George R. Stewart, Jr.), beginning with his 1922 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, remain important in their field.

His 1959 book Pickett's Charge is a detailed history of the final attack at Gettysburg.

Reviews

[Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gosh this is a hard book to review and rate. There is constant jabber about ‘genre-bending’ works of fiction, I rarely find them genre-bending. Sheep Rock is an exception, although whether it is a successful case is another matter. The book is equal parts fiction, natural history, and philosophy, which coming from someone as erudite as Stewart should be a good thing. Later on in his life, Stewart looked back without fondness on Sheep Rock believing it to be a failed novel (See Donald Scott’s The Life and Truth of George R. Stewart ), and I can understand why he felt that way. A better way to see this book is as a philosophy book with parables and supporting tales. In this sense it is truly genre-bending.


If someone was to pick up Sheep Rock hoping for a novel in the form of Storm , Earth Abides , or Fire the reader would be disappointed. This is a book about a specific place spanning time for generations, not about a specific plot. While these stories do drive home specific points of philosophy, they also reinforce the durability of place against human time. Themes, thoughts, and objects are constantly repeated and reinforced, which give the book a very strong aura of time and place as being both resistant to change and as repetitive. In a sense, its easy to say that the landscape has an effect on human activities, but Stewart makes sure that you can have absolutely no lingering doubts whatsoever about the immutability of this truth. In this sense, all the fictional stories of the book are subject to the philosophy, being relegated to the role of illustration.

Sheep Rock is not a fun read per se. It is dense, dry, repetitive, and at times alternately bland or exasperating. Our main character, Geoffrey, a poet with a fellowship who lives out his term at the eponymous locale, is self-absorbed, unnecessarily convoluted, and above all things, a bad poet. I was not a fan of him as a character, however, as an way to push forward Stewart’s philosophy, he worked. I found the other plots and stories much more interesting, if at times distracting.

If you class Sheep Rock as a book that illustrates philosophy, it works. As a novel it does not. Does the philosophy conveyed make Sheep Rock worth reading? Yes, although, I won’t go back to it hoping to be gripped to pages. Go in expecting to see how time and place affect Stewart’s mind and thoughts and you’ll be fine.

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

i appreciated the imagery and awe of the natural world but i don't typically read nonfiction and this was a slow journal entry of a man who visits a desert and then leaves so 3 stars

[Mark Buchignani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stewart steps out in offering Sheep Rock, a narrative not of people but of a place, a method which echoes aspects of Earth Abides in its details regarding the land as it responds to the cataclysm and aftermath in that story. Here events are less spectacular, tracking a longer, more languid passage of decades, of eons, viewed from the earth’s perspective. We see lakes and mountains and tress and meadows come and go, human beings present or not. Time is; it passes; there is change – inhabitants, if there, functionally irrelevant.

The book itself comes off as a lengthy one-act play, years galloping past, slowing or stopping at points, yet anxious to move on. The effect is oddly defocused, because the land, the location, has the starring role, and people are merely actors, stepping onto the stage when cued.

By the end, Sheep Rock, the locale, has washed over the reader, via not physical, but temporal movement. The effect leaves one wondering about details not examined, and speculating which aspects are fiction and which fact, especially as the story comes to a close and the author reveals some aspects of the writing.

Overall, praise for the concept, but not entirely successful as a novel.

[Barbara Lock · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too slow for me