December Book of the Month
Zen of the Plains: Experiencing Wild Western Places
By Tyra A. Olstad, Center for Great Plains Studies Affiliate Fellow (University of North Texas Press, 2014)
From the publisher:
"Although spare, sweeping landscapes may appear "empty," plains and prairies afford a rich, unique aesthetic experience—one of quiet sunrises and dramatic storms, hidden treasures and abundant wildlife, infinite horizons and omnipresent wind, all worthy of contemplation and celebration. In this series of narratives, photographs, and hand-drawn maps, Tyra Olstad blends scholarly research with first-hand observation to explore topics such as wildness and wilderness, travel and tourism, preservation and conservation, expectations and acceptance, and even dreams and reality in the context of parks, prairies, and wild, open places.
In so doing, she invites readers to reconsider the meaning of "emptiness" and ask larger, deeper questions such as: how do people experience the world? How do we shape places and how do places shape us? Above all, what does it mean to experience that exhilarating effect known as Zen of the plains?"
Past Great Plains Books of the Month:
American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, Dan Flores
A Chorus of Cranes: The Cranes of North America and the World, Paul Johnsgard
Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930, Karen Hansen
Wild Again: The Struggle to Save the Black-Footed Ferret, David Jachowski
A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America's First Indian Doctor, Joe Starita
Natives of a Dry Place: Stories of Dakota Before the Oil Boom, Richard Edwards
Towards a Prairie Atonement, Trevor Herriot
Walking the Llano, Shelley Armitage
Barnstorming the Prairie, Jason Weems
Homesteading the Plains, Richard Edwards, Rebecca Wingo, Jacob Friefeld
Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology 1867-2017, Edited by Daniel Simon
This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm, Ted Genoways
Grasses of the Great Plains, By James Stubbendieck, Stephan L. Hatch, Cheryl D. Dunn
The Personal History of Rachel DuPree, Ann Weisgarber
The Trans-Mississippi and International Expositions of 1898–1899: Art, Anthropology, and Popular Culture at the Fin de Siècle by Wendy Katz
Jewels of the Plains: Wildflowers of the Great Plains Grasslands and Hills by Claude Barr and James Locklear
Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America's Grasslands Since 1945 by David Vail
Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakota, 1886-1916 by Harvey Markowitz
The Sea of Grass: A Family Tale from the American Heartland by Walter Echo-Hawk
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser.
Great Plains Literature by Linda Ray Pratt
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh
American Trinity: Jefferson, Custer, and the Spirit of the West by Larry Len Peterson
Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands by Brenden Rensink
Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras by Kristen Epps
Visions of the Tallgrass: Prairie Photographs by Harvey Payne
Flood on the Tracks: Living, Dying, and the Nature of Disaster in the Elkhorn River Basin by Todd Kerstetter
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
kisiskâciwan: Indigenous Voices from Where the River Flows Swiftly by Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber
Pacing Dakota by Thomas Dean Isern
Theodore Roosevelt & Bison Restoration on the Great Plains by Keith Aune and Glenn Plumb
American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World by David Baron
Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation by Martha Louise Hipp
Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn by Catherine Friend
The Chisholm Trail: Joseph McCoy's Great Gamble by James Sherow
First Americans: US Patriotism in Indian Country After World War I by Thomas Grillot
A Thirsty Land by Seamus McGraw
Keetsahnak/Our Missing And Murdered Indigenous Sisters by Kim Anderson, Maria Campbell, and Christi Belcourt, eds.
Forty Acres and a Fool: How to Live in the Country and Still Keep Your Sanity by Roger Welsch
Perfectly Golden: Adaptable Recipes for Sweet and Simple Treats by Angela Garbacz
Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen by Bob Greene
Wilber "Bullet" Rogan and the Kansas City Monarchs by Phil S. Dixon
Standing Up to Colonial Power: The Lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Cloud by Renya K. Ramirez
Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes
Great Plains Politics by Peter Longo
Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's by Tiffany Midge
Nebraska: Poems by Kwame Dawes
World War II Nebraska by Melissa Amateis
Man Killed by Pheasant and Other Kinships: A Memoir by John Price
WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier
The Road to Chinese Exclusion: The Denver Riot, 1880 Election, and Rise of the West by Liping Zhu
Tulsa, 1921: Reporting a Massacre by Randy Krehbiel with Black Wall Street 100: An American City Grapples with its Historical Racial Trauma by Hannibal Johnson and The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 by Mary E. Jones Parrish
Those of the Gray Wind: The Sandhill Cranes, Earth, Water, and Sky: A Naturalist's Stories and Sketches, and Dragons and Unicorns: A Natural History by Paul Johnsgard
Ours by Every Law of Right and Justice: Women and the Vote in the Prairie Provinces by Sarah Carter
Voting in Indian Country: The View from the Trenches by Jean Reith Schroedel
Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest by Edward E. Curtis IV
The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson
The Mayans Among Us: Migrant Women and Meatpacking on the Great Plains by Ann L. Sittig and Martha Florinda González