Customer Reviews

Love Song to the Plains

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This is an extremely beautiful account of the history of Nebraska and the Great Plains. Mari Sandoz is a shamefully obscure writer whose writing is so efficiently pure that it seems timeless. A must for anyone interested in the West, and in the nature of humanity, always looking to expand.

Marie Sandoz has written some of the best accounts of the lives of the plains Indians of the old west. She lived on the family farm in Nebraska, and her father, Old Jules, (the title of one of her books) would talk for hours with Indians and white traders who were young when the Indian tribes were free and buffalo herds still darkened the plains. Her book, "The Battle of the Little Bighorn" seems to be the template for many of the movie depictions of the battle. Her books, "Cheyenne Autumn," "Crazy Horse, stange man of the Oglalas," "These were the Sioux," and others, are told from the Indians' point of view, are tautly written, engaging, and moving.

In "Love Song to the Plains," Ms. Sandoz seems to have lost her focus. While the book contains many fascinating tidbits and characters, they are piled on, one after another, as if the author were trying to put a lifetime of anecdotes into one book. What is missing is the necessary writer's discipline of selection and emphasis. Whereas the characters in most of Marie Sandoz's books come alive, the stories and characters in "Love Song" are oddly flat, no one much distinguishable from any other.

Despite my criticism, I recommend the book to any fan of Marie Sandoz and readers fascinated by pictures of a region inexorably transitioning from wilderness to civilization. The book undoubtedly contains stories hard to find elsewhere. And since I detest spoilers, I'll not reveal any detail - the last four paragraphs of the book are downright odd.

"Love Song to the Plains" was one the last books Mari Sandoz published in her lifetime. In it, she retells many of the stories she's told before, stories the reader has heard from her and others, the stories that created the Great Plains, "the West", in the mind of the nation. Most of these stories play on myths that have only an irregular basis in historical fact; some stories were outright lies, to advertise a sideshow, to sell stolen realestate, to justify murder, committed or proposed. Even when writing nonfiction, Sandoz finds good use for stories as stories; they are one reality, enlightening precisely by telling everything but the truth.
This book is really a history of Nebraska, though ramifiying all over the upper Plains and in to the Rocky Mountains, these ramifications occurring along the pathways of the Indian Wars, ever an important topic for Sandoz, and for Nebraska, a state perhaps more conscious of its history than many.
Mari Sandoz probably compares more readily to Wallace Stegner than to her fellow Nebraskan Willa Cather; though she's much more positive about the future than Stegner (I find her remarks on recent Nebraskan history far less insightful than her reading of Plains history up through the New Deal), she shares his skepticism about the culture of "the West" but also his attachment to it.
Readers who are bothered by anger may find Sandoz unpleasant at times; of course, to paraphrase a bumper sticker, if you're not angered by history, you didn't pay attention.