2019
First Published
4.33
Average Rating
184
Number of Pages
“On a bend, I will see it, a piece of ground off to the side. I will know the feel of this the leaves stir slowly on the trees, dry air smells like dust, birds dart and the trails are made by beasts living free.” When award-winning author Charles Bowden died in 2014, he left behind a trove of unpublished manuscripts. Dakotah marks the landmark publication of the first of these texts, and the fourth installment in his acclaimed “Unnatural History of America.” Bowden uses America’s Great Plains as a lens—sometimes sullied, sometimes shattered, but always sharp—for observing pivotal moments in the lives of anguished figures, including himself. In scenes that are by turns wrenching and poetic, Bowden describes the Sioux’s forced migrations and rebellions alongside his own ancestors’ migrations from Europe to Midwestern acres beset by unforgiving winters. He meditates on the lives of his resourceful mother and his philosophical father, who rambled between farm communities and city life. Interspersed with these images are clear-eyed, textbook-defying anecdotes about Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, and, with equal verve, twentieth-century entertainers “Pee Wee” Russell, Peggy Lee, and other musicians. The result is a kaleidoscopic journey that penetrates the senses and redefines the notion of heartland. Dakotah is a powerful ode to loss from one of our most fiercely independent writers.
Avg Rating
4.33
Number of Ratings
30
5 STARS
47%
4 STARS
40%
3 STARS
13%
2 STARS
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1 STARS
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Author
Charles Bowden
Author · 21 books
Charles Bowden was an American non-fiction author, journalist and essayist based in Las Cruces, New Mexico. His journalism appeared regularly in Harper’s GQ, and other national publications. He was the author of several books of nonfiction, including Down by the River. In more than a dozen groundbreaking books and many articles, Charles Bowden blazed a trail of fire from the deserts of the Southwest to the centers of power where abstract ideas of human nature hold sway—and to the roiling places that give such ideas the lie. He claimed as his turf "our soul history, the germinal material, vast and brooding, that is always left out of more orthodox (all of them) books about America" (Jim Harrison, on Blood Orchid ).
