This book set a high standard for the soon-to-be Falcoln series. The stunning photographs complement the confident text. Ladd's book has been a constant companion when I search out prairie remnants. A professional, consummate work that should find a place on every botanist's bookshelf.

I felt I should comment on one part of Rissa's review. She mentions that Queen Anne's lace is not in this book, and feels this is a detriment. On the contrary, this is one of the best features of the book: it contains only NATIVE plants, and not many of the invasive, non-native weeds, like Queen Anne's lace, which are very difficult to control in prairies.
If you don't see a common plant in this book, it's likely because it is an imported weed.
There are many, many "wildflower" identification books that include everything-and-the-kitchen-sink, adding to the common confusion about what a 'wildflower' is. (For instance, Dame's Rocket should be on the 'weed' list, but it's in most of the 'wildflower' mixes.)
If you are looking for an all-inclusive book, the Golden Press,"A Guide to Field Identification of Wildflowers of North America", ISBN 0-307-13664-7 is helpful because it includes the weeds, but tells where they came from and how far they have spread across North America. Of course the USDA's PLANTS website (plants.usda.gov) is the best internet source for this technical information.

Just as it is hard to look up the spelling of a word in the dictionary, until you know how it is spelled, it can be hard to identify a plant until you know what it is. This book of photographs of common prairie flowers, grouped by color, is pretty easy to flip through until you find the plant at hand. The caveat is that many 'pink' flowers are in the 'purple' section, but this is true of many flowers (few people really consider 'purple coneflower' to be purple.)
If you want just one field guide to get you started with these gorgeous plants, this is the one I would recommend.

I love romance stories but as a Christian always felt guilty when reading the "dirty" ones. When I purchased this book I did not even realize it was a Christian romance and had never read a Christian romance novel. I just thought it was a western/romance type of book. When I started reading and realized it was a Christian romance, to tell you the truth, I thought it would be boring as I was used to the steamy scenes in mainstream romance. Boy was I wrong! I laughed and cried with Rosie as I finished this book in only one day and immediatley ordered the other books in the series and not one has been a disappointment. I will never go back to mainstream romance books with their filthy scenes. I now can read about people falling in love in a Godly way. God Bless everyone who reads this.

Sometimes with series books, the characters are so perfect and predictable, I really don't care enough about them to read any of their further adventures. Not so with Rosie and the other residents of A Town Called Hope. I gobbled this story up as fast as I could and then waited anxiously for the sequels to arrive at my library. As soon as the Prairie Trilogy was in print--with Prairie Fire and Prairie Storm--I bought it for my friend for Christmas. She fell in love immediately with Catherine Palmer's characters, just like I did. Now she has bought Prairie Christmas and is a huge Catherine Palmer fan.

Catherine Palmer has created a cast of characters that will live on in the reader's mind long after the pleasure of reading Prairie Rose and its successors are over.

Rosenbloom Cotton Mills is ana unusual name for an unusual girl. Brought up in an orphange, Rosie is no stranger to hardship. But when she impulsively leaves the orphange for the Kansas praire, she takes on more hardship than she originally anticipated, including a dour widower, his young son who has never gotten to know his father, and a homestead desperately in need of a woman's touch. Rosie faces each challenge with a smile and with the knowledge that God is her father and his love in her heart. The humor in this book is expertly balanced with the hard praire life that Rosie comes to love. In the midst of her hardships, Rosie comes to understand the true meaning of not only God's love for her, but her love for Seth. Palmer is a great Christian romance writer in the tradition of Oke and Glover, and I recommend her highly.

This book absolutely consumed me from front to back. Unfortunately, it being just the 1st in a series, I am going crazy waiting for the second one to arrive, and knowing I will have to read the whole series, I dread knowing there will be a last one. I can not stop thinking about Abbey and Zeke since I finished this book. I just don't want to believe they don't really exist. What a great book!!

Wow!
I bought Sweet Prairie Passion 6 years ago and it's still one of my all time favorites. The entire Savage Destiny series is a classic. The story of Zeke and Abby will never grow old. If you
haven't read the entire Savage Destiny series, be sure that you do so because you wont want to miss out this great series!

I read this book years ago and fell in love with it. Abby and Zeke are two characters I will never forget. Their trials and love are brought out in this book wonderfully. Abby goes through some very hard times and you can just feel Zeke being pulled towards her even though he doesn't want to. When I finished all seven I felt like I was losing a good friend so I just started over again!! :)You will laugh and then cry and then laugh again. The series has a special place on my bookshelf where it will always stay. Thanks Ms. Bittner for a very special series.

Abraham Lincoln comes to life through the words of his devoted and talented biographer, Carl Sandburg. This edition is an excellent compromise between Sandburg's six-volume edition and the shorter, incomplete texts that abound regarding Lincoln. Take your time with this masterpiece and follow Lincoln from youth through the climax of his political career in Washington.

Thousands upon thousands of Civil War books are available, as American readers seem to have a limitless appetite for that era. If you are looking for the best, read Sandburg on Lincoln. A major American poet takes on one of the best-known, best-loved, most tragic of American historical figures.

When I was a freshman in high school, our English teacher offered us a deal: Anyone who read Sandburg's biography (then in six rather daunting volumes) would not have to attend class for a semester. I took him up on that offer, and was blessed to find my way through Sandburg's gift to the American people. Here is the highly detailed, thoroughly researched, and articulately written story of Abe Lincoln's years among us.

If you have time to read only one of the Civil War books from that burgeoning genre, read this one. You will come to know, from the inside out, this prairie boy who became a towering figure in American history.

I believe Sandburg is the only author to win the Pulitzer for both poetry and history. Originally a multi volume history taking decades to complete, this single volume work is an appetizer. I read it in the 1960's and went on with relish to the full multi volume work.

This single volume is insightful, laser like in it's detail yet painting the times of Lincoln in a broad and beautiful brush. Did you know that in 1860 tools could be honed to within one ten thousandth of an inch of accuracy? That magazines and newspapers said the world would change for-ever because of the new "instant" communication nation wide?

This is more than biography. It is a woven fabric depicting the times and life of Abraham Lincoln.

This is a wonderfully warm and inviting depiction of the plains region. For those of us who are from the prairie, the book stirs appreciation and love for the land that has helped shape us. For those who are not from the prairie, the author offers a viewpoint that helps in understanding the beauty of the land and the people of the plains.

I loved this seminal work from some of Canada's finest poets, and for me, the opening stanza sums up just what is right about the work of Bouchard.

"Oh elephant, your nose is long,
Do you not think that it is wrong?"

Stunning.

this book is beautifully done. the words paint pictures and the pictures tell a story. i read it to my 3rd grade class and am planning to buy one for my 83 year old father for christmas!!

It is as peaceful as the prairie it describes but takes you some wonderful places. You will love it, but you might feel like going to Nebraska after you read it... I know I do. A beautiful book.

The author gives a series of brief essays on the history, natural history, and current affairs of this region in north-central Nebraska, which is one of the most isolated areas in the US (in fact, that's why it is considered one of the best places in America for amateur astronomy). I read the book just before visiting the region on my way to work at a Sioux reservation just north of the geographic sandhills -- I must confess I thought this would be a boring and uninteresting territory.

Well, I was wrong about that. The author loves the area, because of its stark beauty and the natural peacefulness of the terrain. I found it to be an almost eerie place, with the same feeling of sacredness that I have encountered in places like Assisi. I remember sitting atop one of the hills on a stormy day and observing the wave-like swaying of the grass and the equally swirling texture of the clouds, and feeling sensually as close to our primordial being as I could. Supposedly, our blood has much of the same chemical character as the oceans from which we came, and the prairie sandhills seem almost as close to some unknown element of our being.

The author has an uncanny feel for the land, and he is able to make you easily understand why he loves it so. The book is far more than a geographic tour, however, and it will leave you with a greater appreciation for life and its observation, no matter where or how you live.

Mr. Jone's admiration, appreciation and concern for this very special ecosystem shines through this lovely book. In it, he intertwines Native American myth, Plains history and well researched scientific data into a cohesive and readable overview of the Sandhills of Nebraska.

Through his eyes, we visit and experience a landscape of beauty, solitute, history and rich wildlife. It is, in turns, thought provoking, humourous, enlightening, yet never preachy. Steve is most respectful of the current private owners of these lands, and integrates their ongoing stewardship into well reasoned suggestions to insure the long-term integrity of this fecund habitat for posterity.

Judith M. Fertig's "Prairie Home Cooking" is a wonderful compendium of heartland recipes that will make you feel like a modern-day Laura Ingalls Wilder in the kitchen. It is the kind of book you want to sit down and devour while sitting on the couch, drinking a cup of tea and nibbling at a homemade oatmeal cookie.

The recipes are wide-ranging, taking their cue from the many immigrants who settled the American west and midwest. There are many German and Scandinavian recipes here, which is in keeping with the immigration percentages, but there are lots of Native American, Russian, Italian, and other "flavors" in the mix as well.

Sara Love's superb illustrations deserve special mention. These block print pictures lend such a homey, heartland atmosphere to the book and complement Fertig's comfortable-as-old-slippers voice beautifully. This book is a treasure!

Prairie Home Cooking is the kind of cookbook you curl up and read with before ever entering the kitchen. Wonderfully written, it interweaves heartland history with beloved recipes. Growing up in the country, this cookbook took me back to simpler times and the comforts of food made with love. As I plan my move back to the prairie and grow my own food, this book will serve as my never-ending reference and companion. The Blue-Ribbon Brownies recipe (page 373) will make you the most popular baker around! My ancestors, being German, probably made many of the recipes in this cookbook. I am honored to replicate them. Prairie Home Cooking is my very favorie cookbook. A huge variety of recipes- something for everyone!

I gave this cookbook as a Christmas present to a very good German friend of mine who loves to cook and we had fun noticing the similarities between the recipes in the book and the traditional recipes of Germany.

From her descriptions of the wind, to the grasses, to the hardships, Ann Daum captured South Dakota's reality on paper. Every chapter lends truths to the prairie and our lives here. Thanks, Ann.

My life has many parallels to Ann Daum's; my life could have been hers. I grew up on a farm/ranch in central North Dakota, went out of state for college, came home to try to make a living, enjoy traveling and the wonders of the rest of the world, but am always drawn back to the northern Great Plains. Nowhere is the phrase "Hope springs eternal" better personified than in the lives of farmers and ranchers on the northern Great Plains. Daum captures this. Despite devastating losses of livestock, hail storms, floods and grasshopper plagues, farmers and ranchers believe next spring will be better, there might be a bumper crop and the next winter can't be so harsh. This hope strains marriages, finances and families. Daum also wonderfully and painfully captures the contradictions between the love of pets and baby calves and the war against predators and ultimate demise of all farm animals. I, fortunately, did not have some of the negative experiences that Daum did, but I saw them in others, heard of them and empathize. Walt Whitman wrote, "The Plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest and make North America's characteristic landscape." Daum supports this statement. Anybody who enjoyed this book might want to read "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography," by Kathleen Norris. Also, for a different, more fact based, perspective of the Great Plains, "Where The Buffalo Roam: The Storm Over the Revolutionary Plan to Restore America's Great Plains," by Anne Matthews.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune Regional Round-up, June 24, 2001: "Daum's writing is lyrical, haunted by mortality, and so detailed you can almost feel the dust and heat. With great feeling, she captures a place where 'loneliness is just another disease.'"

Forward Magazine, July Issue: "This land, the prairie is not just in her eyes-it's in her soul in this slender but weighty first book."

After my daughter gave me this book, I plowed through the first few pages and decided this was going to be a hard book to plow through. However, it quickly evolved into a facinating picture of the country, the people. Especially interesting was the Indian story, both past and present she was so skillful in portraying. Her presentation of environmental concerns and solutions should be read by everyone. Long and short of my experience with this book, was I loved it.

Carlene Cross is an extremely gracefull writer. The way she juxtaposed her "coming of age" with a short course in Reservation history was most interesting. As a long time resident of the Flathead Indian Reservation and a local history buff, The Unique West brought many new facts to my attention and the excellent bibliography made it quite convenient to investigate them further.

The Historical Society of the Flathead Indian Reservation and the Montana Heritage Project are seriously considering using Carlene's book as the primary resource for for developing a local history course for use in Reservation high schools.

We want to encourage our kids', both Indian and white, interest in their heritage and this is the most engaging expostion of local history we have found.

If you want an interesting introduction to the history of the Flathead Reservation, including what it was like to grow up here in the last 30 years, there is no better book than this.

This unpretentious work comes loaded with surprises as the author evokes the fascinating Camas Prairie of her childhood. This poetic book is as Montana as bear grass and marmots. What is it about the Big Sky country that produces so many fine authors -- Richard Ford, Ivan Doig, Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, and now, Carlene Cross? I also appreciated the pictures and line sketches. For anyone with a feel for the great open spaces of the west, this book has it all.

It is a refreshing change not to be able to predict every plot turn in a book for a change! Although Prairie Bride features the usual "misunderstandings" to create conflict, the characters don't act/react in the formula ways. The book has a nice, steady pace, is easy to read, and keeps you turning the pages. I look forward to Ms. MacLean's future works as she clearly has a talent to draw you in. Great way to escape for an afternoon - read this book!

Prairie Bride tells the story of trust in a vivid setting of untamed prairie. Julianne MacLean uses her vast knowledge of the region so poetically, I felt the prairie breezes on my face as I read it. Having lived out west, I can tell you for sure she was unsurpassed in her descriptions. The romance, too, was tender and passionate. What person hasn't felt the tug of war mistrust and fear can create in a relationship? Julianne takes that familar fear and weaves it into a romance with strong external danger, all in a fast-paced, hard-to-put-down story. A must read for all romance fans!

Prairie Bride is an excellent combination of romance, history and mystery. It's a page turner from the beginning. Julianne has a real talent at hooking the reader and making us want to keep reading. Her story is extremely visual and her imagery wonderful. I felt like I was actually there while I was reading the book. Her hero was to die for!

Great Job Julianne!!