Post by Diane Merkel on Apr 8, 2008 22:17:31 GMT -6
This 1989 book by Ian Frazier sounds wonderful. If it's like Travels with Charley, in which a specific route is described, I'd love to drive at least part of Frazier's route some day to see how things have changed over the past two decades.
Love the Rand McNally line! Has anyone read it?
Article: online.wsj.com/article/SB120725185742087335.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Twenty years ago on the plains of America, where [Ian] Frazier spent several summers driving around "on roads Rand McNally & Co. considers unworthy of notice," history was alive and well. "For many places on the Great Plains, the past is much more colorful and exciting and populous than the present. Historical markers are everywhere. In many towns I stopped in, the public buildings were a store, a gas station and a museum."
"Great Plains" is part journalism, part meditation, and Mr. Frazier does both very well. He has big ears, an open mind and a puckish sense of humor. He thinks about what he's seen, putting it into the larger context of Americans' long, touchy relationship with their land. If he has an agenda, it's to persuade you to honor a part of the country most often seen from 30,000 feet.
Touring parts of Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas, Mr. Frazier pulls his van over at historical sites, museums, state parks and anywhere else he might find a sliver of past. "Often, as I drove around, I felt as if I were in an enormous time park."
Mr. Frazier loves the plains, its open skies, tumbleweed, wheat fields and mud, but most of all its history. Much of "Great Plains" is about 19th-century American Indians, a culture that often gets pathetically few paragraphs in history books. If there is a hero in "Great Plains," it is Crazy Horse, the Lakota Sioux chief who fought General George Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
"Personally, I love Crazy Horse because even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was," Mr. Frazier wrote. Even after Crazy Horse surrendered to the U.S. Army, when he was "deprived of freedom, power, occupation, culture, trapped in a situation where bravery was invisible, he was still brave."
Love the Rand McNally line! Has anyone read it?
Article: online.wsj.com/article/SB120725185742087335.html?mod=googlenews_wsj