North Dakota Books

Thrashin' Time is an undeservedly unremarked slice of Americana posing as a children's book. Chronicling the advent of steam thrashers in North Dakota circa 1886 from the perspective of a 12-year-old boy, this story will delight all model railroaders and live steam operators with its scrupulously researched description of steam tractor ops, along with the pen-and-ink illustrations that range from superb to dazzling. It is a deft exercise in regional writing. It is a food book: the descriptions of the collective meals prepared for the wheat harvesters are worthy of Faulkner. In the end, it is a vivid illustration of American life before automobiles, suburbia, and television, when a day in school was a restful privilege compared to the real demands in the life of the young. Do not get this book figuring to read it aloud to young ears. It's pitched at least at the middle school level.

My 8-year-old son is a machine maniac, and he loved his story of a boy in 1912 helping to harvest wheat in North Dakota by learning to run a steam engine. Lots of info and great drawings of the steam tractor and thresher, plus fanscinating details about life on the prairie. Mom enjoyed it too, and often had a tear in her eye.

Badlands National Park is nearly a quarter of a million acres - 25% of federally designated wilderness and 50% of it on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, making 75% of it completely undeveloped. This map will help you safely explore the park - both on and off-road. Remember - no pets in the backcountry. Make sure someone knows where you're going if you plan on spending nights camping out.

This is one of the better maps produced by Trails Illustrated. T. I. has dispensed with the atmospheric colorizing overwash used in some earlier maps in the series, leaving us with a map that is easier to read. Important in an area where you need to be VERY precise about the lay of the land. Elevation change here is not great, but abrupt and hard to predict. Instincts and expectations that have worked elsewhere might not work here. Use a compass. (If you use one of those GPS devices, make sure it doesn't beep. Bugs the buffalo and old-timers like me.)
Both the older "Badlands Nat'l Monument" area in the north and the less-visited southern additions co-managed with the Pine Ridge Indian reservation are included on the two sides of this tear-resistant map (using some sort of plasticized material that has fortunately become common in maps in the last years).
If the Badlands fascinate you, you'll be tempted to charge off cross-country, as there aren't many maintained trails away from the visitor center at Interior. Don't go far without this map or a USGS topo. (Or your beeping gizmo.)
If you don't want to deal with secondary sellers off Amazon, you may want to contact the Badlands Natural History Association in Interior SD. They carry the map and are pleasant to deal with.

This is an excellent resource for anyone studying Native American history, culture, or art. Covering the history of this calendar-like art form, and following with year-by-year images and descriptions from each winter count, the book ends with a modern interpretation of the winter count concept by Emil Her Many Horses.

It is very interesting to compare which events are covered by each winter count keeper. It is also fascinating to see how the Lakota depicted other tribes as well as soldiers. The book and the data in it give us a peek into a window of a culture that had no written language.

This book contains pricless pieces of history. Be aware that the up-close individual pictures are black and white. If you wish to view the winter counts in full color you can just visit the smithsonian website. Even though I have spent countless hours viewing these wintercounts online, there is something about having a copy of your own that you can easily flip through. One of the best parts of this book is that upon reading the descriptions of idividual pictures, you will see that the authors are not so bold as to hold their descriptions as absolute, but rather the best information they could compile from the families and indirect sources of these wintercounts.

This book is set up for use by people hoping to learn how to speak Dakota. This makes it a step above many texts out there written for linguists. Its focus on verbs and verb tenses because this is a very vital part of the Dakota language and diffcult to find the correct form in the older dictionaries. This focus means it is a more advanced book for people with other sources or books covering the basics of the langauge, but it is still very useful for beginners(like me). I have found this book to be very useful in learning the spoken langauge. That is what the purpose of this book is, to aid in learning the spoken langauge. The nicest feature is that not only does it have 550 different verbs and their tenses, it also has them translated from english to dakota and dakota to english. Don't get me wrong it is invaluable for the more linquistily inclined as well. The older dictionaries are hard to navigate and find these verbs and find the conjugated forms as you need them. I hope more come out like it in the future. There are very few like it for the D-speakers at the moment. Books like this are a step towards books helping the spoken language thrive by being understandable by people without linguistic degrees.

Starley Talbott's Along the Grapevine Trail is a delightful and informative book. As a northern California transplant now living in northern Colorado, I had no idea that there were vineyards and wineries in the Northern Great Plains. How is this possible? This is a very harsh climate. I learned that the most popular cold-weather grape, the Frontenac, was introduced in 1996 and it is hardy to -30° Fahrenheit!

No less than twenty-five vineyards and wineries are profiled. Each profile includes unique information about the operation. Talbott has certainly done her homework. In addition to viticultural and vinicultural details, readers are treated to local history, geography, and even geology. There is a lot of history because many of the locations fall along the Pony Express, Oregon, California, and Mormon trails. The author provides lovely color photographs for each location.

Along the Grapevine Trail includes maps, an appendix that lists contact information for 85 vineyards and wineries in the three states, a glossary of terms, a bibliography, and a very helpful index. The book is printed on coated paper and the photographs are in color. It will easily fit in the glove compartment of your car.

All in all, this book provides a fascinating perspective on a new wine region. The Napa Valley has its Silverado Trial, the Spey Valley in Scotland has its Whisky Trail, now the Northern Plains has its Grapevine Trail. I look forward to exploring the Grapevine Trail with this book in hand.

The life story of Harold Schafer identifies the secret to success in America.....Hard Work! Very inspiring, chapter after chapter.

Book review by Edna Boardman, Bismarck, North Dakota

The cover of this book says, "...this rich resource work is a truly Russian-German anthology in the fullest sense." This reviewer was puzzled by this statement because it is not accurate to the contents of the book. The book focuses closely on the travail of only the Volga Germans during the early communist years in Russia, and does not deal at all with the immigrant experiences of either the Volga or Black Sea groups. It wanders off into works about the ancient gods of the Germanic peoples of the far north. There is nothing wrong, of course, with tailoring the scope of a work to something less than a reflection of the whole, but it is hardly an anthology that deals with the German Russians in the full sense as blurb about it indicates. That said, it provides a piercing view of the agony of the Volga community facing dissolution, and that is worth knowing about.

The book is divided into parts: The poetry of Peter Sinner and his wife Kamilla, related poetry by persons, some non-German Russians, who shared his world view and imitated his style, poems and short essays by other Russian Germans, writing by Sinner's son, and work by Samuel Sinner, who grew up on the Mojave Desert in the United States. According to a
biographical sketch by Reinhold Keil, Peter Sinner, a teacher in the German villages of Russia, lived for a time in St. Petersburg, then returned to his Volga homeland. Samuel Sinner's bio sketches say he was arrested several times for his anti-Communist-regime views and disappeared in 1935 in the time of massive purges; some of the Sinners and others whose work appears were university-based intellectuals in Russia. Samuel Sinner is a US scholar interested in his German Russian heritage, in "Jewish mysticism, philosophy, theology, world folklore and mythology, ancient history and languages, ancient Jewish and Christian apocryphal literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and quantum physics." He is also interested in genocide studies.

The poetry of Peter Sinner is the heart of the book. He tells of the love of the steppe, as Americans write sometimes of the prairies. I observed wryly that you could write of that love if you didn't have to get out and do the hard work of farming it, but Peter had some of that work in his life experience. Many of his poems are veiled political commentary. Samuel, to his credit, "spoon feeds" the reader so that the symbolism makes sense. Stalin and his henchpersons certainly wouldn't have liked being depicted as wolves, but Peter flings his characterizations into their faces like a handful of rocks. He foresaw what would happen to his German people because he knew the plan was already in place; the Czar had planned to export them just before the Communist Revolution provided a reprieve. Peter lived through the famine times caused by government requisitioners who came and stole their food, and is blunt about describing his people's experiences. The Volga Germans did not have the German army to push them westward, as did many Black Sea Germans; they could not escape, as a number of Mennonite groups did. It is chilling to understand their raw feelings, their helplessness, as they realized that they were to be destroyed as a people, shipped to the east and far north of Russia without anyone in the world noticing--or caring.

A curious thing about this book is the generous use of classical German/Scandinavian symbolism, primarily in the poetry of persons other than Peter Sinner. The poems occasionally drop references to traditional Christian symbols such as crosses and chalices, and some phrasing borrows from the Bible. Peter would have grown up in a traditional Christian home on the
Volga, where he would have become acquainted with the church, even clandestinely, during his time; in some of Peter's poems, the solace offered by the church comes through clearly. But Samuel is clearly taken with Odin and the other ancient Germanic deities and writings, and these images overpower the Christian symbolic environment of the book.

The latter part of the book contains translations of work by persons who write hard poems and essays about predatory communist attackers, about famine and death and despair. Some of Peter's harshest work appears here. Samuel's own work includes mystical pieces that have nothing to do with the Germans from Russia except that he, their author, is of that background.
Some of the works in this collection are labeled with the author's name and its date of writing; some have neither and the reader feels disoriented. The work, unfortunately, lacked an editor who would have pushed Samuel to greater clarity in its conception and organization.

So, should you read it? The Germans from Russia have few enough poets, and the poetry of Peter Sinner is haunting. Nobody ever told me before that the steppe was beautiful. Nor had I ever felt quite so clearly how helpless the people felt as they guessed their coming destruction and how intense was the anger against their communist oppressors. Feel free to skip the mystical
essays. An anthology for the whole German Russian experience this is not, but in that the best parts illuminate a very dark corner of the Germans from Russian experience, a part of our history that fades in our awareness with each generation, it is worth picking up.

This is a nicely illustrated history story for children. It did not contain the information I was seeking, but I will definitely pass it along to my grandchildren for their pleasure.

This courageous book challenges the assumptions of a white patriarchal eurocentric dominant society. While corporations continue to destroy the enviornment while at the same time enforcing the poverty of People of Color, this book offers instead a brilliant discourse, an investigation of the noble spiritual traditions of the Sioux. This is an important book.

This has to be the best book ever written. It is just soooo full of emotion. Like when Maddy, the little girl with spaz attacks, got out of her wheelchair and walked... I sobbed like a little be-otch. I also love the way the author compares water management to the historic fight for equal rights for inbred hillbilly amputees. And the way he uses Fargo as a metaphore for the universal quest for spiritual truth, blending traditional Christian principles with Eastern religious archetypes is simply Salingeresque in nature. This book is food for the soul! You will never look at Irrigated Agriculture the same way again...