Great Plains Book

This book is like taking the mind on a trip. A circuitous 25,000-mile drive through the heartland of America. The vast semi-arid plains of America.

In the book On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe by Andrzej Stasiuk,Michael Kandel (Translator), the author says: "That's why I rush to make these trips, why I'm so avid for details that will soon vanish and need to be re-created out of words."

This is what Frazier accomplish in this book, making it a perfect choice for someone who might want to do the same. He visits the old and new; the forgotten and the unknown, and he touches base with different people from different walks of life to compile this unforgettable experience.

Ian Frazier takes his reader through the history, geology, sociology, and contemporary reality of this magnificent region of one of the greatest countries in the world. Magnificent, yes, because the environment tells its own stories through dust storms, flooding, human interventions and, probably, God's will.

Other books made me love America even more: Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon; and

A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins (read this one before joining GR - so no review).

Both these books contained a novelistic vibe, which I loved. Frazier's book is a short 200 pages equivalent to them, although a little bit too concentrated on the history of particularly Crazy Horse. Fascinating history for sure, but too many pages dedicated to one subject in an otherwise riveting travelogue, however, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The inclusion of history always adds much more spice to the road-trip genre. Great Plains is not a white-knuckle read overall, but it does have some hair-raising moments, such as when he picked up a hitchhiker who incidentally could lead him to the remote place which Sitting Bull called home. This is not the kind of history that breeds immediate warmth and trust between peoples. In the rearview mirror I looked at my eyes, marked by worry and second-guessing with little lines like the calibrations on a camera lens. Then I looked at Jim Yellow Earring's eyes'calm, bloodshot, brown as a deer's. "Keep going, I'll take you right to him," he said. The road had now become so deeply rutted that the trick was finding the exact moment to steer from one set of ruts into a new set to the right or left. Just as we were about to high-center, Jim Yellow Earring would yell, "My side! Come over to this side!… Okay, okay, now your side!" We often find a small road sign pointing to something insignificant, until we realize how the world is contained within it. Frazier captured the spirits which will forever populate its history.

Great Plains was published in 1987. It withstood the test of time splendidly, since it is one person's subjective observations of a fascinating region through his own political, emotional, and jounalistic glasses. A wonderful adventure for the curious reader.

Travel journals can be addictive reading, since it is often more riveting than reading novels. Who can forget:

The Life of John Ledyard, the American Traveller: Comprising Selections from His Journals and Correspondence by Jared Sparks, John Ledyard. John Ledyard set the pace for later travelogues, including those of Lewis and Clark.

The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1814). (which probably kick-started this road-genre);

Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck;

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain (1883)

The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman

or the many books of Randall Kenan, and Otohiro Watanabe

Thoroughly enjoyable. Ian Frazier is true to this genre.

~ "Live your life by a compass, not a clock." - Stephen Covey ~