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Great Plains | 
 enlarge | Author: Ian Frazier
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 89524
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0312278500
Dewey Decimal Number: 917.80433
EAN: 9780312278502
ASIN: 0312278500
Publication Date: May 4, 2001
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Great Plains is great reading. November 12, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
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.
I learned a lot June 4, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
While reading this book, I found myself compelled to read parts aloud to my husband: about where tumbleweed came from, facts about different Indian tribes, Bonnie and Clyde, Crazy Horse, and "In Cold Blood". I found the book totally fascinating, and I learned many things I never thought of even wondering about before. This is the first book I have ever read by Ian Frazier, and I will now look for his other books, he's a very interesting author.
 Don't waste your money. February 16, 2005
2 out of 13 found this review helpful
Mr. Frazier gives a pretty good litany of historical facts, but his haphazard presentation leaves one to wonder whether he was totally coherent during his two years on the plains. His style is reminiscent of someone who never quite grasped the finer points of high school English composition, and the entire description of his travels seems to reflect someone who is permanently mired in a 1960's-era drug trip. I grew up in northwestern Nebraska and am intimately familiar with the region and its history, so I expected a more thorough, considered discussion in this book. Boy, was I disappointed!
Plain Joy July 14, 2004
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
Let me add just these two things to the remarks of the many other reviewers: Ian Frazier's rhapsodic discussion of the joy the Great Plains engender (like the mysticism of deserts and the melancholy of moors) is good reading. Sitting Bull, though not an eyewitness, reported that Custer fell laughing in his last battle. Frazier expertly uses this intriguing anecdote to discuss the joy he connects with the Plains.
And that last page of the book! This is some of the best and most evocative prose I've read anywhere. It's worth the price of the book to read that one page. It's nearly hypnotic and I hope soon to memorize the entire ending.
 The America that never was and will be again. April 2, 2004
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
Frazier's book portrays the middle of America truly and entertainingly. He basically condenses his wanderings through the plains region of America into several vignettes, historical personages and occurences that convey a sense of this place. Most of what passes for "American" these days comes from the much more populous bi-coastal regions. But there is still a core of small towns, farms and small businesses that exists in our collective memories and Frazier found the real-life remnants of this culture.This book is well-written and entertaining. The small events that Frazier uses to illustrate the great plains region of the US are excellent vignettes that portray a deeper meaning than just the event itself. For example, the author is attending a community get-together in Nicodemus, Kansas where diverse groups of people are enjoying each others company and experiences a joyful epiphany. "This democracy, this land of freedom and equality and the pursuit of happiness -- it could have worked! There is something to it, after all!" I hope everyone has one of those moments occasionally and it is a joy to read Frazier's retelling of his. Frazier does a great job of examining controversial events without throwing in snide sarcasms that seem to pass for commentary these days. Case-in-point is his stories about Crazy Horse and other plains Indians and Custer and the whites who interacted with them. He assigns equal doses of blame and credit to both sides. I loved his pages on Crazy Horse and also the pages about an exuberant Custer who loved the plains region just as deeply as the Indians. The quote Frazier uses "For bringing us the horse we could almost forgive you for bringing us whiskey" sums up the fine edge that Frazier balances on so well. Frazier is at his best condensing various historical sources to develop an entertaining story. Frazier does display despair about the negatives of the Great Plains - the alcoholism of the Indians, the environmental issues of mining and the depletion of the aquifer, and the spectre of nuclear war that hangs over the northern great plains and its missile silos - but I still finished the book feeling both entertained and educated. The nearest book I know of to this was Dayton Duncan's "Out West" and this one is better. In short, this is a solid piece of regional travel writing that is a joy to read.
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