Great Plains

The Great Plains is a memoir of Ian Frazier's late-1980s journey across the vast ten-state region that comprises the American Great Plains. Frazier's account covers the territory from so many angles -- not just its history but its culture, geology and climate. And he has a Bill Bryson-like way of using individual people and places (e.g., Sitting Bull's cabin, the Clutter house of In Cold Blood fame, a rock shop built from dinosaur bones, and a Montana missile silo, among many others) to tell a larger story of the area. It takes a writer of great skill to capture such a broad and diffuse subject, and Frazier has mostly managed to do it.