No comments about The Prairie Winnows Out Its Own: The West River Country of South Dakota in the Years of Depression and Dust.

No comments about An Illustrated Edition of the History of the Heinrich Haar Family.

No comments about Historic South Dakota - A Collection of 20 Books Relating to 18th and 19th Century South Dakota History, Genealogies and Its People.

No comments about After the West Was Won: Homesteaders and Town-Builders in Western South Dakota, 1900-1917.

1 comments about Steppes to Neu Odessa: Germans from Russia Who Settled in Odessa Township, Dakota Territory, 1872-1876, 2nd ed..

1. I'm from a russian family from Odessa, Ukraine who wants find out members from my lost family.

1 comments about Tracing Your Dakota Roots: A Guide to Genealogical Research in the Dakotas.

1. I was asked to review this book for a publishing contest. How lucky I was! It is the finest book I've seen this season--full of wonderful information, attractively designed, and very fun to look through. I think you'll enjoy this book, whether or not you do genealogy (I don't!), and no matter where you live. It's an entertaining historical read.

3 comments about Black Hills Ghost Towns.

1. Watson Parker's book is a wonderful reference to use to understand the frenetic development of the Black Hills during its Gold Rush days. It also goes on to show the coming and going of little towns throughout the Black Hills. It is well organized and can easily lend itself to spending a day or more driving through the hills trying to find the remnants of the ghost towns. It is a book that I have gone back to year after year to learn about the Black Hills.



2. This is a great book on the basically unknown ghost towns found in the beautiful Black Hills area. I am originally from the area and still learned quite a bit!



3. All that have traveled the Mid-North West have found magic in the Black Hills, I believe because it truly exists there. I this book is captured the last 100 years of discovery, and what can still be found, for now. Protected as a National Treasure won't stop our Earth from doing her renovations. This is a guidebook, with much accurate work put into it, valuable to our time, but with a generation or two to be lost as memory and legend in the future.

2 comments about The WPA Guide to South Dakota: The Federal Writers' Project Guide to 1930s South Dakota.

1. I bought this as a birthday gift for my stepmom after seeing it in a literary catalog, Amazon had it cheaper of course. She is from South Dakota and I had an idea she might like the book, but she LOVED it. She said she clocked in 20 minutes late from her lunch break on the day I gave it to her, because she couldn't put it down. I later learned that she lived in the country and had lots of homes, wells, etc. that were WPA projects. A home run gift on this one, too bad they are not all this easy.



2. if y are looking for compact guide with lots of details buy this one-its a great buy

3 comments about Pine Ridge Reservation (Images of America: South Dakota).

1. this book is very richly documented. really interresting pictures and the nice thing is all the titles are translated from lakota. nice idea!



2. This book was an outstanding tool in researching the Indians of Crow Creek Reservation. I am doing research on a friend's family and was astounded at what I did NOT know about Indian history.



3. This book is mainly photographs with some very descriptive captions. I think it would be a good reference for anyone studying Native American history or who has ancestors from the Pine Ridge area.

5 comments about Dakota - A Spiritual Geography.

1. 'Dakota' was somewhat rambling but had several good nuggets of thought about how location affects our outlook. Broadens the mind to stretch now and then.



2. In Saudi Arabia there is a vast area, almost a fourth of the country, known as "The Empty Quarter," (Rub Al Khali), with perhaps a thousand permanent residents. It is the lack of good water that makes permanent inhabitation practically impossible. America has a similar region, although the conditions are not as dire. It is the area between the 100th and 105th meridian, roughly spanning a seventy-fifth of the world's circumference. Due to the lack of sufficient rainfall (less than 20 inches per year), John Wesley Powell (as well as others) said that the land should never be tilled. It was; one of the "fallouts" was the Dustbowl days of the `30's. Today, those who have not emigrated face a hard-scrabble existence, with the remaining farmers tapping deeper and deeper into the Ogallala aquifer. The area is called the High Plains, largely pancake flat, has strong winds, and unlike Saudi Arabia, particularly in the Dakotas, it can be bitter cold.
   
   Why would anyone voluntarily move there? Kathleen Norris did. She left a life in New York City, and embraced the austere bleakness that is northwest South Dakota. Many of her friends were flabbergasted at the move, and this book is largely an answer to why she did it. There are three principal subject matters: the environment, which encompasses the land and the weather; the kind of people who struggle to live there; and, as indicated by the subtitle, "a spiritual geography," dollops of philosophical musings. Norris has brief chapters entitled "Weather Report", with a given date, and generally the reports are not surprises, save, perhaps, the extremes that they can cover. Early in the book she assesses the dynamic tensions and contradictions in the people with a: "...between hospitality and insularity....between open hearts and closed minds." Later she says: "Small-town society often reminds me of the old joke about academic politics--they're so vicious because there so little at stake." And one of the sadder observations that she makes, and counterintuitive in some ways, since you would figure that it is the remote places that reading is more likely alternative: "Many teachers here also seem to give up any thought of lifelong learning... why so many adults in a town like Lemmon stop reading. More than once I've been surprised to discover that people who show no sign that they've ever read a book in their lives, are in fact former teachers, college graduates from the days when an education was said to mean something." She fleshes out these general observations with pithy vignettes involving the very real people of the town.
   
   Concerning how the inhabitants relate to the past, Norris says: "One popular form of writing on the Plains is the local history. These books reveal a great deal about the people who write them but do not often tell the true story of the region... As one old-timer told me, `people have been writing it the way they wished it had been instead of the way it was.'" But it this a "differential diagnosis" of the region's people, or a broader observation on how much of history is written?
   
   As to the philosophical musings, her erudition shines through, and her referential points bounce from Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century to Carl Jung. Fitting for a place with `spiritual geography', she becomes involved with a nearby Benedictine monastery, and mentions the tales of Heloise and Abelard, when the "monk's face brightens, almost innocently, as he says, "It was the Benedictines who castrated him, you know.'" One might assume it was time to move on! Some of her spiritual geography might be too "new age" for some readers, but I was able to suspend some of my natural cynicism, and reflect on the impact of that "infinite horizon."
   
   So few people live in this area, and only a hand-full have Norris's knowledge and perspective, which is the real strength of this book. Particularly for those on the coasts, looking out their windows as they do indeed "fly over," this book would make their journey much more insightful.



3. This book came recommended to me during a spiritual retreat. I found it a thought provoking read in prayerfully reviewing my spiritual direction, as well as informative on small town, prairie living in a place dying, but unwilling to embrace outsiders. It also provided alot of information on the Benedictine monasteries. I took my time reading it and the book will be one I long remember.



4. This book is a patchwork of writings, many previously published, inviting us to visit the plains of North America. Many of the pieces effectively transport you there -- to small towns set apart under the big sky, remote enough to challenge our cultural concepts. Others are more personal, taking you on the author's "spiritual journey," and in these you meet Kathleen Norris the seeker. I'm not sure if it all came together as she intended. I learned things I didn't know about the sparsely settled plains states of our country. If you also want to explore some inner territory, you might like this book.



5. I greatly anticipated this books arrival. I too live on the lonesome, wide open, windy plains and hoped to find a kindred spirit in her description of the place I call home. Instead it seems that she is inclined to paint her fellow neighbors with a wide brush....(in her view it seems that way too many of them have a resentment of ANYONE who has a professional title, from teacher to minister and all in between, to the point that those individuals, according to her, often downplay their level of knowledge or education) and though I am a religious person myself, I grew VERY tired of her continual comparisons of her experiences at her local monastary with everything in life. If you are a fan of reading about the Benedictine monks and their life, with small samplings of landscape descriptions and generalizations of all the small minded folks in her town, you might like this one. But, for me, it is one of the few books that I will give up on this year.