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pwbalto's review against another edition
5.0
The first time I stepped out of a car in western Iowa and saw the sky of the Great Plains above me, my eyes widened and my breath caught, and not because of the bitter Iowa cold, nor because of the bitter Iowan who was to be my hostess. Standing in a place where you can see a day's worth of weather all at once is, to my mind, the best way to internalize your understanding that Earth is a big spherical THING.
And once you really get that, that one simple fact, the idea that stuff lives on that big spherical thing is nothing short of preposterous. Ok, grass, maybe. But the rest of us, crawling and swimming and tunneling along the surface of a giant ball of rock surrounded by a skinny packet of vapor... naw, man.
This book, in pictures both intimate and sweeping, captures my sense of the astonishing unlikeliness of our planet. Regardless of what the authors say about the Plains being full and rich - full of vascular plants, topography, migratory animals, history - there's a lot of space here. Puts the things that you can see into deep perspective, things that might be overlooked elsewhere. Patterns, colors, small things.
And here is another observation: I would like to see the picture that Mike Forsberg can't take. After sampling this book, with its large, sumptuous, quiet photographs and considerably less quiet text (by heartbroken rancher/researcher Dan O'Brien), I tried to count up the kinds of photos Forsberg takes well. Aerial. Intimate landscape, gigantic landscape, sky. Wildlife: camera trap, motion, shooting from a blind, telephoto. Plants. He has a particular gift for spotting and shooting color fields in landscapes, which he puts to good use among the cloud shadows and mixed grasses of the plains.
Plus, there is really something to be said to get a good, hard deep look at what Laura Ingalls Wilder was describing in all those books.
And once you really get that, that one simple fact, the idea that stuff lives on that big spherical thing is nothing short of preposterous. Ok, grass, maybe. But the rest of us, crawling and swimming and tunneling along the surface of a giant ball of rock surrounded by a skinny packet of vapor... naw, man.
This book, in pictures both intimate and sweeping, captures my sense of the astonishing unlikeliness of our planet. Regardless of what the authors say about the Plains being full and rich - full of vascular plants, topography, migratory animals, history - there's a lot of space here. Puts the things that you can see into deep perspective, things that might be overlooked elsewhere. Patterns, colors, small things.
And here is another observation: I would like to see the picture that Mike Forsberg can't take. After sampling this book, with its large, sumptuous, quiet photographs and considerably less quiet text (by heartbroken rancher/researcher Dan O'Brien), I tried to count up the kinds of photos Forsberg takes well. Aerial. Intimate landscape, gigantic landscape, sky. Wildlife: camera trap, motion, shooting from a blind, telephoto. Plants. He has a particular gift for spotting and shooting color fields in landscapes, which he puts to good use among the cloud shadows and mixed grasses of the plains.
Plus, there is really something to be said to get a good, hard deep look at what Laura Ingalls Wilder was describing in all those books.
megaden's review against another edition
5.0
Very interesting read about the history of the Great Plains and beautiful pictures. Makes me glad I live in NoDak!
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