Great Plains
by Ian Frazier
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ian FrazierEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-05-04
ISBN: 0312278500
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of Great Plains
Book Review: Great Plains is great reading.
Summary: 5 Stars
Wallace Stegner has written beautifully of the northern Great Plains (specifically Saskatchewan and Montana), and some small sense of similarity will occur naturally when reading this book. But Stegner had a deeper personal connection to the landscape and the writing here is better compared to Edward Hoagland's. Like Hoagland, Frazier visits and observes landscapes and cultural communities that are not his home, but that fascinate him. He enters a landscape and then 'paints' portraits of its physical features, its recent history, its lore, its natives, its foreigners, its itinerant dreamers, its meteorology, its bigness, its diversity and its sameness.
Garrison Keillor said that the book "makes me want to get in a truck and drive straight out to North Dakota and look at the prairie," and it had the same effect on me. Frazier's style is more laid-back than Stegner's or Hoagland's, and the writing might seem effortless (in a good way) except for the obvious fact that the work required a fair amount of research. Frazier sketches the personalities of the plains with just the right level of detail. Diverse personalities: Crazy Horse, Theodore Roosevelt, Lawrence Welk, random farmers, rangers, American Indians, local history buffs, nuclear missile silo personnel. Cultural characteristics of native tribes are sympathetically but colorfully explained: "The Comanche, who probably killed more settlers than did any other American Indians, made a distinction among whites between Texans and all others. Then, as now, it was possible to tell the difference. . . The Comanche hated Texans the most of all."
From a rise in a dirt road near Beach, North Dakota: ". . . all you'd need to paint [the] landscape would be gold for wheat and blue for sky."
At a civic event in Nicodemus, Kansas: "At one o'clock the parade began. It was like a parade in someone's living room. Its front was followed closely by its back."
In a restaurant in Lincoln, New Mexico: "The menu featured home-baked bread and sole; New Mexico is like the Vermont of the West."
Like a stretch of prairie road, the book invites the reader onward. It might easily be read in two or three sittings, but that's not what I did. I habitually keep a book in my car, to keep me company at lunch, and this is how I read Great Plains. A few paragraphs or pages at a time, with a burrito or a Jamba Juice, it was quite tasty.
Summary of Great Plains
National Bestseller
With his unique blend of intrepidity, tongue-in-cheek humor, and wide-eyed wonder, Ian Frazier takes us on a journey of more than 25,000 miles up and down and across the vast and myth-inspiring Great Plains. A travelogue, a work of scholarship, and a western adventure, Great Plains takes us from the site of Sitting Bull?s cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capote?s In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West.
With his unique blend of intrepidity, tongue-in-cheek humor, and wide-eyed wonder, Ian Frazier takes us on a journey of more than 25,000 miles up and down and across the vast and myth-inspiring Great Plains. A travelogue, a work of scholarship, and a western adventure, Great Plains takes us from the site of Sitting Bull?s cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capote?s In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West.
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