Ebook Great Plains, by Ian Frazier

Ebook Great Plains, by Ian Frazier

This book is really proper for guide theme that you are searching for currently. Several sources might supply the choice, yet Great Plains, By Ian Frazier can be the most effective way. It is not only one thing that you can appreciate. Extra things as well as lessons are offered or you to cover exactly what you precisely require. Several readers have to check out the books likewise because of the certain reasons. Some could enjoy to review it so much yet some may require it since the job deadline.

Great Plains, by Ian Frazier

Ebook Great Plains, by Ian Frazier

Taking into consideration regarding the excellences will require particular realities and views from some resources. Now we provide Great Plains, By Ian Frazier as one of the resources to think about. You may not forget that book is the best source to resolve your problem. It can help you from numerous sides. When having such issue, obtaining the ideal publication is much needed. It is to make deal and also matched to the problem and the best ways to solve it.

A publication is much related to reviewing activities. Reserve will certainly be nothing when none reads it. Reading will certainly not be completed when the book is one of the topics. However, in this modern-day period, the presence of publication is expanding sophisticatedly. Numerous sources make the both book in published as well as soft documents. Having the soft file of publication will ease you to make real to review it. It can be conserved in your different tool, computer system, CD, laptop computer, also the device that you constantly bring anywhere. It is why; we reveal you the soft file of Great Plains, By Ian Frazier as one of matter to check out.

When some people assume that this is a hard book to read, we will certainly tell you that it becomes one of the smarter concepts to come with something various. The various points of the Great Plains, By Ian Frazier with other books are lasting en route how the author improvise and select the subject frequently and surprisingly. It will certainly be timeless and unlimited making all people really feel adorned as well as amazed of this book.

The author is really clever to select the words to use in making this publication. The selections of words are essential to create a book. It will certainly appertain to check out by such certain cultures. But among the breakthroughs of this book is that this publication is actually appropriate for each culture. You may not hesitate to know nothing after reading this publication. Great Plains, By Ian Frazier could aid you to find many things after analysis.

Review

“Extraordinary...One thinks of such American originals as John McPhee, Wallace Stegner, Edward Hoagland, Peter Matthiessen, and Evan S. Connell.” ―The Washington Post Book“This is a brillant, funny, and altogether perfect book, soaked in research and then aired out on the open plains to evaporate the excess, leaving this modern masterpiece. It makes me want to get in a truck and drive straight out to North Dakota and look at the prairie.” ―Garrison Keillor“History written with passion and delight... Frazier is a great storyteller.” ―Newsweek

Read more

About the Author

Ian Frazier is the author of Great Plains, The Fish's Eye, On the Rez, Family, and Travels in Siberia, as well as Dating Your Mom, Lamentations of the Father, and The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

Read more

Product details

Paperback: 320 pages

Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (May 4, 2001)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0312278500

ISBN-13: 978-0312278502

Product Dimensions:

5.7 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches

Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.3 out of 5 stars

99 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#129,392 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Ian Frazier describes the Great Plains as a tourist might visiting a foreign country, charmed by its “otherness, romanticizing its strangeness. I’ve spent most of my life on or near the Great Plains. Most of the places he writes about are familiar. I must admit, though, that I have driven past many of the museums he stopped to visit, as I assumed they were at best vain attempts to claim that there was something significant or interesting about a mostly boring and unremarkable landscape. I still find other parts of the country to be far more beautiful and filled with many more things of interest, but the vast open spaces of the prairie still tug at my heart as no other place can. Thus, I found his book to be especially interesting as it has enabled me to see the familiar through the eyes of a stranger. I learned much that was new to me (including what was in the museums I have always driven by), and his writing, is captivating.One quibble: I found it strange that he almost completely overlooks the significance of the railroads to the Great Plains other than a passing remark about coal trains. Long before the development of air travel which made this “flyover country” railroads were an integral part of the development of this area, often determining which settlements succeeded and which failed. Many of the towns of the Great Plains still have a railway station, even if it is no longer in use. And, while only a smattering of passengers still travel my rail across these states, the railways still carry a vast amount of freight. It was strange, in fact, the he made no mention of the Union Pacific Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska, the largest rail yard in the world, through which an average of 139 trains per day pass through.

“The Plains Cree never washed their clothes, just bought new ones at the trader’s twice a year … The Crow chopped joints off their fingers in mourning so often that they hardly had a whole hand among them. The men generally saved their thumbs and one or two trigger fingers.” ‒ from GREAT PLAINS“The empty air was still vibrating slightly with the suppressed fidgets of children.” ‒ from GREAT PLAINS, Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic in Strasburg, ND after the end of Sunday service“… the oil towns of Plainview and Midland and Odessa rise like offshore drilling rigs. In prosperous years, the push buttons of local pay telephones are smudged with oily fingerprints, and Laundromats have ‘Do Not Wash Rig Clothes Here’ signs.” ‒ from GREAT PLAINS“‘(Custer) killed a man when he fell. He laughed’, Sitting Bull said … I like to believe Custer even had fun dying … Custer finally ran into the largest off-reservation gathering of Indians ever in one place on the continent, and gave them what was possibly the last really good time they ever had.” ‒ from GREAT PLAINS“Driving on the prairie near Great Falls, Montana, or Minot, North Dakota, or Cheyenne, Wyoming, you might not realize right away that you are in a weapons system. A nuclear-missile silo is one of the quintessential Great Plains objects: to the eye, it is almost nothing … but to the imagination, it is the end of the world.” ‒ from GREAT PLAINSIn 1982, author Ian Frazier moved from New York to Kalispell, Montana. There, he started to dream about the Great Plains. And from there, he began his exploration of the landscape he dreamed about. In GREAT PLAINS, he tells us what he discovered.Although there may be an underlying structure to GREAT PLAINS, it wasn’t readily apparent to this reader beyond the chapter numbers. Rather it seems but an almost endless stream-of-thought collection of anecdotal stories of Frazier’s personal experiences driving the Great Plains mixed with historical asides about the region. It is, however, constantly fascinating. It was a disappointment when the narrative concluded at the 69% point when the book transitioned to the Notes Index; unhappily, the narrative itself isn’t endless.Beyond his own experiences with the people he meets and the places he visits, GREAT PLAINS is a varied mix of Great Plains past history and present realities: the identifying characteristics of the Indian tribes and their tepees, the old trapper rendezvous sites of Fort Union and Bent’s Fort, the plains grasses and tumbleweeds, Bonnie and Clyde, Billie the Kid, present-day abandoned homesteads, Custer, the Dustbowl, the influx of black settlers after the Civil War and that of German-speaking Russians in the late 19th century, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, the evolution of wheat types being planted and stored, present-day missile silos, strip mining, the 1862 Homestead Act, Lawrence Welk, the extermination of the buffalo, cattle drives, Dodge City of the “old west”, and the Indian Ghost Dance. The topics touched upon by Frazier are contextually fascinating and, thus, GREAT PLAINS is one of those books which compel the reader to Google search for more information.I enjoyed GREAT PLAINS more than I thought I would. When I fly over them next, I’ll pay more attention looking out the window.

This is a marvelous book, one of my favorites. If it has special meaning for me, it is because I grew up on those plains, where a man on a horse could ride through grasses so tall he could pass unseen. Some 50 years ago when I was a child, those prairies were neat lawns, shaven down to emerald squares topped by demure ranch houses on streets with names like Olathe Drive or Sioux Circle. Ian Frazier, in his epic work, "Great Plains," looks back to America's heart's past and sees again the vast herds of bison, the rutted trails West, the harsh light and harsher weather. His prose sings and dances with stories of people, red, white, black and yellow, who lived and bled on those plains under an endless blue sky, across an enormous landscape of golden plant life teeming with animals. That horizon ended only with the faintest smudge of gray, where the Rocky Mountains began. I knew only glimpses of my home place, living in Manhattan, where the flat, featureless streets bear no resemblance to the supposedly flat, featureless prairies. Then I read, for the first of many times, Frazier's paean to the Great Plains, and I knew I had found my way home.

Mr. Frazier retells the amazing story of the western plains. He brings the history alive by sharing lesser known facts and anecdotes of well known figures and great events. He brings us into the lives of modern people of the Plains by sharing what he learned meeting them, talking with them, and walking with them in their world. It is not always a pretty story, a sequence of happy endings. It is real, because the humans who lived it were real and we see them in action against a never to be repeated landscape of the opening of the west. It remains a magnificent story, and Ian Frazier tells it brilliantly.

Great Plains, by Ian Frazier PDF
Great Plains, by Ian Frazier EPub
Great Plains, by Ian Frazier Doc
Great Plains, by Ian Frazier iBooks
Great Plains, by Ian Frazier rtf
Great Plains, by Ian Frazier Mobipocket
Great Plains, by Ian Frazier Kindle

Great Plains, by Ian Frazier PDF

Great Plains, by Ian Frazier PDF

Great Plains, by Ian Frazier PDF

Great Plains, by Ian Frazier PDF