Synopses & Reviews
National BestsellerWith 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 Bulls cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capotes In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West.
Review
"This is a brilliant, 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
Review
"I gorged on Ian Frazier's book. I enjoyed the hell out of it. It's enormously fun and interesting." Edward Hoagland
Review
"Extraordinary...One thinks of such American originals as John McPhee, Wallace Stegner, Edward Hoagland, Peter Matthiessen, and Evan S. Connell." Washington Post Book World
Review
"The miscellany in Great Plains is not uniformly captivating. Here and there, the narrative falls back on the quirky lists, the pointless deadpan and the grandmother's-trunk monologues of which New Yorker reporting, in its most mannered moments, is occasionally guilty, but more often Mr. Frazier displays an ability to revive tired subjects." New York Times
Review
"The expansiveness in these pages is not only a wide swath of space and sky, but of imagination and emotion....At first glance Frazier's narrative seems deceptively freewheeling, nothing more than a rambling journey engaginglytold. But soon patterns begin to emerge....When he meets Crazy Horse's grandson, Le War Lance, for instance, on a street corner in New York City, Frazier gives him directions to Astor Place, named after John Jacob Astor, the owner of the American Fur Company who was indirectly responsible for the needless deaths of War Lance's ancestors. In his endnotes, Frazier points out that part of Astor's fortune 'went toward the eventual creation of the New York Public Library, where I read of his greed.'...'Even after "reclamation,"' he notes, strip-mined land 'gives you no year to think about but the year when the stripping happened.' Frazier's quest in {this book}, and his exhilarating accomplishment, is to free the imagination from this time prison." Sara Mosle, The New Republic
Review
"{Frazier has been} a humor writer for The New Yorker since 1975....Although {his book} is about America, it is most emphatically not one of those ego-driven travel diaries into the soul of a nation....Frazier is a great storyteller, and he tells stories here about the waves of migration over the Plains, about Indian tribes, about war-makers and moneymakers, about local heroes and national villains. Everywhere, he treats the land and its stories as gifts to be shared, a kind of potluck to which we're all invited." Laura Shapiro, Newsweek
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p.[217]-283) and index.