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BookBrowse Reviews The Children's Blizzard: Captures the brutal, heartbreaking folly of this chapter in America's history. History

The Children's Blizzard
by David Laskin
Paperback, Oct 2005,
336 pages.
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Comment: 'You'd think that 307 pages about the weather would be literary NyQuil. But this account of the 1888 blizzard that killed more than 100 children in the Great Plains reads like a thriller in which a deranged predator preys upon an unsuspecting frontier population.'  -- Entertainment Weekly.

I started reading The Children's Blizzard out of a sense of duty to the publisher, so I could hold my head up and honestly say that I'd given it my best shot, but just like the reviewer for Entertainment Weekly, I ended up hooked by the gripping story, and read it cover to cover in one evening, despite the fact that much of this time was spent in an increasingly cold bathtub of water.  The Children's Blizzard is about so much more than the blizzard- it's about the prairies themselves...
Beyond the Book
According to David Laskin's final chapter, 'nearly 70% of the counties in the Great Plains states have fewer people today than they did in 1950.  These days nearly one million acres of the plains are so sparsely populated that they meet the condition of frontier as defined by the Census Bureau in the nineteenth century.... and Indian and buffalo populations have now reached levels that the region has not seen since the 1870s.  The white farmers and townspeople who remain would shun you for daring to say it, but in large stretches of the prairie it's beginning to look like European agricultural settlement is a completed chapter of history.'
This review is from the September 14, 2005 issue of BookBrowse Recommends. Click here to go to this issue.
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