Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2011
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 31:1 (Winter 2011).
Abstract
What's happening to Linda Hasselstrom's Great Plains is happening everywhere, even in western Maine, where New Yorkers migrate north, buying second houses in communities once home to lobstermen, farmers, and lumberjacks, changing the face of the social, political, and natural landscape. It's enough to make a person, well, want to let off some steam, and perhaps try to come to some conclusions about what is happening to land and community in America in general and in the Great Plains in particular, which is what Hasselstrom does in her newest work of nonfiction. In this collection of linked essays, she returns to the ranch in Hermosa, South Dakota, where she grew up, unsurprised that it has changed from a ranching community to a splintered landscape of subdivisions and ranchettes. One of the questions she chases in this work is whether those new community members, those second-home owners, those investors, ever will form real community. Will they join a church, contribute to the volunteer fire department, help on the fire line? The book is first about this, the creation of community in an era when community seems to be splitting itself like multiply shattered atoms, and second, amidst this wave of disconnection of people from land and each other, about how to find one's home.
Comments
Copyright © 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.