I tried to make use of this book over the summer. It seems like its a collection of peoples descriptions rather than a collection of trails that the author has taken. At first glance it seemed like it would be very useful but when you actually try to make use of the directions you quickly realize that this is not true.

Directions start off fuzzy and then get worse. For instance, a direction might say drive 8 miles west of Custer South Dakota. Fine, at first glance this useful until you start questioning where in Custer this starting point is. This adds a couple of miles of uncertainty to the starting point. Instead she should have written something such as "Start by going west down US-12 until you reach mile marker 82. This will be about 8 miles."

If this doesn't throw you off you'll then be faced with directions such as follow a forest road to the right. Given the couple miles of uncertainty this is also a useless instruction. Even if you could precisely nail down the starting location its still not useful if there are multiple nearby roads. Roads in general have names. "You are looking for Forest Road B112, also known as Bumpkin Peak Road. It will appear on the right."

The directions become extremely vague after this. No distances are given or even a look to the left or right. I travelled up many interesting forest roads but didn't really get much useful instructions from the book. A couple of trails were accurate, most were hopelessly inaccurate. I had a good time, but may as well have taken forest roads at random.

If you're looking for a book that will pinpoint accurately areas of the State of Nebraska that you will find fossil and mineral "goodies" then you've found the wrong book. Many of the areas pinpointed in here have been exploited badly by amature geologists, and have had their resources exhausted. However, the book does give hints on where to look for minerals and fossils, and it is possible once you have experience in searching for these things that you will find them. You'll have to use your experience and wits.

Books like this are a blessing and a curse. A blessing for those starting out in the hobby and looking for places in the field to find the samples they are looking for. A curse because many people (especially those in the commercial area of our hobby) will exploit these findings for their own pocketbooks, and ruin the resources that the author has pointed out for the weekend hobbiest. It is unfortunate, in the case of this book, that that is exactly what has happened in Nebraska.

What does the discipline of Canadian history need? To quote Samuel Gompers it needs more, more of everything. More social history, more comparative history, more economic history, and, in this case, more political history. Wardhaugh's book seeks to show that the decline of the Liberal Party in the West is not so much the fault of Pearson or Trudeau, but that its roots could be seen in the era of William Lyon Mckenzie King (leader 1919-1948, prime minister 1921-1926, 1926-1930, 1935-1948). According to Wardhaugh, King was sympathetic, in a vague romantic way, to the West in the twenties when he needed the support of the Third party progressives to hold power. However he lost sympathy for it when the West's poverty in the depression threatened his support for economic orthodoxy. In defense of this book, one could say that it gives a throurough account of the many splits and factional problems that King had to deal with on both a federal and provincial level. In this respect it fills a niche. We are given plenty of quotations from King's diaries and papers which show his pompousness, narrow-mindedness, smugness and callous indifference to every issue and principle except maintaining power.

Yet ultimately the book is deeply flawed. The book is oddly proportioned as well, devoting 127 pages from 1919 to 1930, 67 pages from 1930 to 1940, and 33 pages for the last eight years of King's ministry. The problem is not that King's policies were good for the West. The question that arises is whether they were any better for the rest of the country. If not, then the flaws of these policies cannot explain why the West was especially alienated from the Liberals. After all the Liberals have been competitive in Ontario despite having only governed the province five years since 1943. The Atlantic provinces are worse off in Confederation than the prairie ones, but that has not weaned them off liberalism. Why would conscription and the problem of postwar reconstruction be any less pressing in the rest of English Canada in 1945 than in the West? Yet according to Wardhaugh any disaffection was markedly less permanent. Wardhaugh points out that organization was weak, yet the Progressives in the twenties showed an almost continuous decline, while the conservatives were almost always in desperate straights before 1958. Other parties in other regions have been bothered by factionalism, yet have made up enough to win elections. Liberal politicians may have been anaemic, but were the other parties any less mediocre? King did not really know about the West, but as the career of Ronald Reagan shows, you do not always need real knowledge. The problem is that Wardhaugh consistently takes up a "high politics" approach which ignores questions at the base. Who voted for the liberals? What were their class, ethnic, religious and occupational background? How did they approach politics, what were the ideological assumptions, what were the material basis of their partisanship?

Another problem is that the Liberals actually put in a creditable performance in 1926, 1935, 1940 and 1949, which does not really match Wardhaugh's constant pessimism. By constantly reminding the reader of the Liberal party's ultimate fate he produces an illusion of inevitability, and he reduces much of the Liberal party's problems to King's obtuseness and the obtuseness of a few leaders. (His notes consist largely of King's diaries and papers, supplemented by the papers of Crerar, Gardiner and Dafoe). His treatment of issues is consistently unimiginative and conventional. The three prairie provinces are reduced simply to agriculture. No mention is made of increasing urbanization or economic diversification, and the problems of the prairie farmer are reduced to one issue, tariffs, with an occasional mention of freight rates. Why were nativist appeals successful against the liberals in 1929 and 1930, and what does this say about western political culture? Often Wardhaugh glibly speaks of public opinion in the West, as if it was an undifferentiated mass. (When you look at the notes it is largely just Dafoe complaining.) That King was an unimiginative leader is not in dispute, but Dafoe and Dunning, Bracken and Brownlee were not much better or more thoughtful. Like it or not, there was a market for incantations of balanced budgets and economic orthodoxy in the West, in patent definance of overwhelming economic catastrophe. In the West you had to suffuse this with a some regional self-pity, some cant against "established parties," and a little "reformist" goobledygook. Perhaps that helps to explain why Diefenbaker, a politician with more rhetoric than competence, would be so successful in the future.

Shostak's illustrations for this book are evocative and demonstrate the variety of activities and landscapes experienced on the prairies. Bouchard's verse, however, is trite and shallow. In fact, much of it is repeated from his earlier book, If You're Not From the Prairie.... If you like Bouchard's writing, then don't buy this book - go for the earlier one. But if you want a book that shows the prairies to be a complex and evolving place instead of a nostalgic backwater, you'd be better off skipping Bouchard entirely and buying a book like Jo Bannatyne-Cuget's A Prairie Alphabet (illustrations by Yvette Moore).

how much this book ?
can i send my money order

I read the whole thing cover to cover and there wasn't one mention of the little house or Laura Ingles. What a waste of time.

This book is written by the odd weather fellow at our local CBS station. He is a very strange guy and the thought of reading something he has written has about as much appeal as riding a Greyhound Bus for 8 hours. So I did not read it and I can't offer any opinion.