Having read two books by Doig that I enjoyed, I looked up one of his earliest publications to read. Bucking the Sun is  an ambitious story of a fictitious family working on the real New Deal project to dam the Missouri River at what is now the Fort Peck Dam, when completed, the largest earth dam in the world (over four miles long).

The project and the story span from 1933 to 1939. The fictional Duff family all worked the project and their intertwined lives are the driving force of the story.

Personally, I found a lot of repetition and entirely too much detail. The story, for me, bogged down and I flipped whole chapters to finish.

Mike Lawrence