Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 24, 1993 TAG: 9310240196
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: reviewed by Geoff Seamans
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Davies, a Welshman, put 7,500 miles on his camper-truck driv ing around what many would consider a largely uninteresting part of America. This largely uninteresting book is the result.
Which is unfortunate, because Davies' central assumption - that the Great Plains are in fact more intriguing than they're generally given credit for - happens to be true.
But another of Davies' points is sentimental slop. America's geographic heart is no more its spiritual-cultural heart than are, say, the Southern Appalachians, the Pacific Northwest, or the big cities of the Northeast and Great Lakes.
Davies found attributes both good (self-sufficiency and neighborliness) and bad (xenophobia andeconomic decline) in the people and places of the Plains. His insights may be valid, but America is too big and too diverse for any one region to be regarded as prototypical.
The book's most memorable passages are the descriptions of white racism toward Indians in the Sioux country of western South Dakota, of the de facto civil war that raged on the reservation a few years ago, and of a Hollywood movie company come to the area to make a film with that war as its background.
But Davies barely taps the rich literary potential lying in his observation that the life and culture of the Plains are pat terned by the violence of its weather, including the tornadoes with which he seems especially fascinated. That violence is seldom really brought to life, nor put into anything larger than an anecdotal context.
The book is too little about the people and places Davies visits, too much about his own thoughts and reactions. It is also marred by a confusing organization that is neither strictly chronological nor clearly thematic.
\ Geoff Seamans writes editorials for this newspaper.
by CNB