Prairy Erth: (A Deep Map) by William Least-Heat Moon (English) Paperback Book

Description: Prairy Erth by William Least-Heat Moon Robert Penn Warren pronounced Heat-Moons Blue Highways a masterpiece. Now Heat-Moon has pulled to the side of the road and set off on foot to take readers on an exploration of time and space, landscape and history in the Flint Hills of central Kansas. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. By the author of Blue Highways, PrairyErth is "a majestic survey of land and time and people in a single county of the Kansas plains" (Hungry Mind Review).William Least Heat-Moon travels by car and on foot into the core of our continent, focusing on the landscape and history of Chase County--a sparsely populated tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills of central Kansas--exploring its land, plants, animals, and people until this small place feels as large as the universe. Called a "modern-day Walden" by the Chicago Sun-Times, PrairyErth is a journey through place, through time, and into the human mind from the acclaimed author of Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories from the Road. "A sense of the American grain that will give [PrairyErth] a permanent place in the literature of our country."--Paul Theroux, New York Times Author Biography Under the name of William Least Heat-Moon, William Trogdon is the author of the best-selling classics BLUE HIGHWAYS, PRAIRYERTH, and RIVER-HORSE: A VOYAGE ACROSS AMERICA. He lives in Columbia, Missouri. Review "A good hearted book about the heart of the country." The New York Times "Our modern-day Walden." The Chicago Sun-Times "Bill McKibben has called this book "the deepest map anyone ever made of an American place" -- a majestic survey of land and time and people in a single county of the Kansas plains. It takes the author--by car, on foot, and in mind--into the core of our continent and backward and forward through a brilliant spectrum of time and place." The Hungry Mind Review -- Review Quote "Our modern-day Walden." Excerpt from Book Along this fossil highway, even though it lies in the bottomlands that have always belonged mostly to the trees, I am walking in the time of the birth of the tallgrass prairie, that epoch when turfy perennials - bluestems and gramas, panicums and ryes - began covering the American interior as the old sea, now turned to a limestone anchor, once did. Down in here, the rock is the worn concrete, yet, as hard as it is, the cement road is nevertheless a fissured seedbed, a string of a glade full of brand-new prairie, an extinct highway giving birth to grassland. Now: Ive walked half this remnant, and Ive found big bluestem and little bluestem, silvery bluestem, cord grass, wild rye, sunflower, bundle flower, catclaw sensitive briar, and also plants of the woodlands, including a clump of garden iris from I dont know where. But this strip is not a relict Pleistocene prairie because there probably never was much grass in this low spot in the bottoms: a vestigial highway, yes, but a new prairie. The native forbs and grasses have come in on the wind and maybe on the floods, and now they have roots under the pavement, and soon the prairie plants will need fire to clear away the shading and moisture-sucking trees, and until then the infant prairie can do little more than begin. Prairie birth: in an earlier time, men believed the grasslands came as a consequence of infertile ground, or an absence of coarse soil material, or from glaciation, from bison trampling, lightning fires, Indian fires, from persistent wind, drought, temperature extremes. But Chase County has good soil of various composition, the ice sheets did not reach here, and the temperature range and rainfall differ only a little from the woodlands of Missouri. The other "reasons" - fire, wind, grazing - contribute less to the birth of prairie than to its maintenance. No: the source of the prairie is its midcontinental position, far from tempering seas, where it lies under an eolian cleavage zone that mixes westerlies, wrung dry by the Rocky Mountains, with humid air from the Gulf: here, inches of evaporation and precipitation are nearly equal, and here, above my head, the rain- shadow of the Rockies meets in commensurate strength the humid Gulf fronts so that this land can grow ten-foot grasses and ninety-foot sycamores, and which one prevails depends mostly on one thing: fire. In the last half-century, the balance has careened toward trees because white men have suppressed the keeper of the grasses. To the prairie, the voice of the Great Mysterious speaks in three tongues: water, wind, flame. This glade beginning in the abandoned highway has heard the first two, and now this slender quarter mile of incipient prairie could use a tossed cigarette from a Santa Fe trackman so that the highway can flourish as never before. Copyright (C)1992 by William Least Heat-Moon. Reprinted by permission by Houghton Mifflin Company. Details ISBN039592569X Short Title PRAIRYERTH Language English ISBN-10 039592569X ISBN-13 9780395925690 Media Book Format Paperback Year 1999 DOI 10.1604/9780395925690 Imprint Houghton Mifflin Place of Publication Boston Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 1999-02-15 NZ Release Date 1999-02-15 US Release Date 1999-02-15 UK Release Date 1999-02-15 Author William Least-Heat Moon Pages 624 Publisher Houghton Mifflin Publication Date 1999-02-15 Subtitle (A Deep Map) DEWEY 978.1 Illustrations illustrations, maps Audience General Imprint US Mariner Books Publisher US HarperCollins We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:7275715;

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