Love Song to the Plains

by Mari Sandoz

Book Overview

Love Song to the Plains is a lyric salute to the earth and sky and people who made the history of the Great Plains by the region's incomparable historian, Mari Sandoz. It is a story of men and women of many hues--courageous, violent, indomitable, foolish--their legends, failures, and achievements: of explorers and fur trappers and missionaries; of soldiers and army posts and Indian fighting; of California-bound emigrants who stopped off to...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803251726
• ISBN13: 9780803251724
• Release Date: September 1966
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 305 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A final review of the stories that mattered to her

"Love Song to the Plains" was one the last books Mari Sandoz published in her lifetime. In it, she retells many of the stories she's told before, stories the reader has heard from her and others, the stories that created the Great Plains, "the West", in the mind of the nation. Most of these stories play on myths that have only an irregular basis in historical fact; some stories were outright lies, to advertise a sideshow, to sell stolen realestate, to justify murder, committed or proposed. Even when writing nonfiction, Sandoz finds good use for stories as stories; they are one reality, enlightening precisely by telling everything but the truth. This book is really a history of Nebraska, though ramifiying all over the upper Plains and in to the Rocky Mountains, these ramifications occurring along the pathways of the Indian Wars, ever an important topic for Sandoz, and for Nebraska, a state perhaps more conscious of its history than many. Mari Sandoz probably compares more readily to Wallace Stegner than to her fellow Nebraskan Willa Cather; though she's much more positive about the future than Stegner (I find her remarks on recent Nebraskan history far less insightful than her reading of Plains history up through the New Deal), she shares his skepticism about the culture of "the West" but also his attachment to it. Readers who are bothered by anger may find Sandoz unpleasant at times; of course, to paraphrase a bumper sticker, if you're not angered by history, you didn't pay attention.

Lyical account of the mystique of the Great Plains

This is an extremely beautiful account of the history of Nebraska and the Great Plains. Mari Sandoz is a shamefully obscure writer whose writing is so efficiently pure that it seems timeless. A must for anyone interested in the West, and in the nature of humanity, always looking to expand.