SOURCE: “The Wilderness Within,” in Time, Vol. 150, No. 24, December 8, 1997, p. 97.

In the favorable review of The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness below, Skow praises Bass's use of imagination and his ability as a fiction writer.

Rick Bass drew good reviews in 1992 with The Ninemile Wolves, a moody nonfiction report of a Canadian wolf pack that crossed the U.S. border a few years ago and colonized one of the Western states. But Bass’s fiction (The Book of Yaak, In the Loyal Mountains) seems to get categorized as good-with-an-asterisk. He’s regional. (So was Wallace Stegner, of course, until he became a national monument.) Bass may reach monument or even wilderness-area status in time, but for the moment he gathers honorable obscurity, and blackflies, on the shelf reserved for nature writers.

The view here is, forget that asterisk. With the publication of The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness...