JJKPryde

I think, therefore I am' - René Descartes 1596 - 1650

My Personal Review of PrairyErth by William Least Heat-Moon

by · Published · Updated

PrairyErth by William Least Heat-Moon

I gave this book a rating: 3 of 5 stars  on GoodReads.com. This is the review I posted there.
I noted in a previous comment in GoodReads that William Least Heat Moon has a lot of words and only so much life to use them all. It’s amazing that he has so many facts about birds and animals and plants, agriculture, geology, US and human history, anthropology, etc.
He writes with a sense of compulsion to tell his story. Maybe he is using this book to try to make sense of it all to himself at least. To this reader, I sense a lot of barely suppressed anger.
A few sources of this anger seem to be:

  • The Kaw population of Kansas was sorely abused by greedy white invaders.
  • The knowledge of the land and nature accumulated by 10,000 years of original population was ignored causing great loss of value and species diversity.
  • The religious or philosophical creed of interconnectedness between all things and all times is not understood by white population.
  • The ways of the native population are being lost due to interbreeding with the white population.

Without intending to over simplify the problem, it was interesting to read this during a time when so many OTHER nation-states are struggling with similar disconnects. At the moment, Israel and Palestine are in a similar asymmetrical conflict as are Russia and Ukraine. There are more that are not in the day to day headlines.

I gave this book three stars because it was so much more difficult to wade through than the previous WLHM book I read, “Blue Highways”.  In my opinion, the author has become much more of a curmudgeon, and has less respect for his reader. As I remember it, Blue Highways had less crass humor (The final chapter almost sounds like a scene from college fraternity movie), less explicitly dark episodes(people died in morbid detail), and less long-winded navel gazing philosophies (at least one chapter is written under the influence of mind altering herbal concoctions).   In my opinion, Prairie Erth is an intellectual mountain to be crossed by the more patient and stoic reader.
As usual, your mileage may vary.

-jgp

Tags:

You may also like...