Review
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.'
