“Beautifully observed. . . This jewel of a book belongs on the shelf with our best Western writers—Norman MacLean, Pam Houston, and Annie Proulx.”—John Vaillant, bestselling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce
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 work. As waves of gun violence swept the country and wildfires burned across his beloved valley, he began asking questions—of ranchers, his Native neighbors, his family, and a blacksmith who taught him to shape steel—in 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 Fire is a deeply felt memoir of one Western heart’s wild growth, and a personal testament to how things that seem permanent—inheritance, legacies of violence, forged steel—can change.
This profound reckoning with the American West begins with one inherited gun—and a choice to forge a different legacy.
- A Reckoning with Gun Culture: When a pacifist's son inherits a Smith & Wesson revolver, he confronts the complicated, often violent, role of firearms in his own life and in the history of the West.
- Personal Transformation: Follow Andrews's journey from Montana cowboy to blacksmith as he decides to physically unmake a weapon of violence and reforge it into a tool of creation and healing.
- Father and Son: A moving portrait of two men—a conscientious objector and his rancher son—navigating their love for each other and their deeply different beliefs about violence and peacemaking.
- Environmental Conservation: An impassioned call to heal a scarred landscape, this memoir is a testament to the idea that we can restore the land and forge a better, more thoughtful relationship with the natural world.