Review of This Land: A Guide to Central National Forests by Robert H. Mohlenbrock

Robert Mohlenbrock's guide to the national forests of the central U.S. provides the traveling naturalist with a wealth of information on the wide array of national forest lands in the heart of the country. Part of a three-volume series of field guides, this volume covers the states of Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. While most of the forests are along the western and eastern borders of the Great Plains, readers will find a detailed travelog for a National Forest within a day's drive of most areas within the region. While not the focus of this volume, a brief mention of the National Grasslands of the Great Plains would have made it more comprehensive for the traveling naturalist.

Review of 'Pictures Bring Us Messages' / Sinaakssiiksi aohtsimaahpihkookiyaawa: Photographs and Histories from the Kainai Nation by Alison K. Brown and Laura Peers with members of the Kainai Nation

In August 1925, University of Oxford anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood spent two days on the Blood Reserve in southern Alberta, home to the Kainai Nation. Assisted by the Indian Agent, she toured the reserve and took 33 photographs. Blackwood was investigating potential links among "race," culture, and environment, and some of her photographs were anthropometric in nature. Others, showing men working in fields or girls at residential school, portrayed a culture in transition. Upon her return to Britain, Blackwood deposited the Kainai photographs with Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum.

Review of Laws and Societies in the Canadian Prairie West, 1670-1940 Edited by Louis A. Knafla and Jonathan Swainger

For all intents and purposes, the settlement of the Canadian prairie was the founding of a new society using materials brought to the new land along with those close at hand. Of course, preexisting aboriginal society had to be supplanted in the course of this founding. In both the supplanting and the founding, the rule of law as we currently know it was a principal means and end of the settlement process.

Book Review of Archaeology as a Process: Processualism and Its Progeny by Michael J. O'Brien, R. Lee Lyman, and Michael Brian Schiffer

The field of archaeology incorporates a confusing assortment of ideas and approaches to the record. With studies ranging widely in ideology and goals, from strict descriptive materialism to sociological interpretation, language used to communicate key concepts (not to mention which concepts are key) also varies widely, resulting in low levels of mutual interest and intelligibility across the discipline. Archaeologists commonly ignore the majority of available literature as a result, further widening intellectual chasms.

Book Review of Plains Earthlodges: Ethnographic and Archaeological Perspectives Edited by Donna C. Roper and Elizabeth P. Pauls

Nomadic Plains peoples such as the Cheyenne and Sioux have become the stereotypical image of North American Indians in general. In contrast to the hunting and gathering lifestyle of these groups, however, many Plains tribes lived in settled villages and grew extensive garden crops through much of the past millennium. These groups developed a habitation distinctly characteristic of the Plains village way of life-sturdy, earth-covered timber structures known as earth lodges. The remains of thousands of these structures dot the landscape of the Central and Northern Plains. Lodges of various forms persisted from about 1000 CE into the twentieth century. Particularly characteristic of the Pawnee, Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa, earthlodges were also adopted by several other Plains tribes. In this well-illustrated volume eight authors offer nine essays that explore the earth lodge as a subject warranting archaeological and anthropological research in its own right and from numerous perspectives.

Book Review of Discovering North American Rock Art Edited by Lawrence L. Loendorf, Christopher Chippindale, and David S. Whitley

If readers of Great Plains Research are seeking a window on rock art research in North America, this book provides a few clear panes, a few that are hazy, and a few muddy ones. Like many edited volumes, the weaker contributions and lack of a consistent style limit the book's usefulness. Some authors target a general readership; others clearly are addressing colleagues. The book has two stated themes: the history of rock art research in North America and recent approaches to rock art analysis. Articles by Julie Francis and (jointly) David Whitley and Jean Clottes explore why rock art research has long been marginalized in North America. Unfortunately, both of these otherwise observant essays slip into advocacy of shamanism as a unifying or primary explanation for rock art, an interpretive model by no means universally accepted by today's rock art specialists.

River Size and Fish Assemblages in Southwestern South Dakota

We studied relations between river size, fish species diversity, and fish species composition along four major rivers in the Great Plains of southwestern South Dakota to assess patterns of species diversity and composition. We expected diversity to increase with river size and fish composition to change via species addition downstream. Previous surveys of 52 sampling stations provided fish assemblage data, and we used the Geographic Information System (GIS) to determine watershed area by station. Watershed area did not predict species richness or species diversity (Fisher's a), so species richness of 12 ± 3.5 SD species and Fisher's a of 2.3 ± 0.87 SD characterized species diversity in the study area. Cluster analysis of faunal similarity (Sorensen's Index) among the 52 sampling stations identified two geographically distinct faunal divisions, so species composition was variable within the study area, but changed via species replacements among faunas rather than species additions downstream. Nonnative species were a minor component of all faunas. Uniform species diversity may be a recent phenomenon caused by impacts of Missouri River dams on native large-river fishes and the unsuitability of rivers in the Great Plains for nonnative species. Variation in faunal composition may also be recent because it was affected by dams.

Book Review of A Dazzle of Dragonflies by Forrest L. Mitchell and James L. Lasswell

Dragonflies are beautiful animals, important predators in and around aquatic environments, and often good indicators of ecosystem health. Stimulated by digital photography, close-focusing binoculars, and many new regional field guides, the study of dragonflies has exploded in the last ten years. Most importantly, the Internet has connected beginners with experts; observers from everywhere now share their experiences. Here is a book that puts it all on paper.

Book Review of Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology by John F. Galliher, Wayne H. Brekhus, and David P. Keys

As an undergraduate sociology major, the only thing I learned about Oklahoman Laud Humphreys's classic, Tearoom Trade (1970) was how it violated standards of informed consent in social science research. As Galliher, Brekhus, and Keys recount in their biography, Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology, sociology graduate student Laud Humphreys needed to supplement his (quite likely, participant) observational research of men who had sex in public bathrooms (i.e., tearooms) in St. Louis in the mid-1960s with a formal questionnaire. Knowing that these men would never agree if they knew they were selected because of their participation in highly stigmatized and criminal behavior, Humphreys recorded their license plates, got their home addresses, and interviewed them as part of a "community health survey." Herein lies the deception and the major source of the controversy. What I didn't fully appreciate when I was a student, however, and what the authors so deftly illuminate is the importance of this work not only for debates around ethical issues of social science research, but more importantly, perhaps, for the study of sexuality, deviance, and urban life.

Book Review of Improved Earth: Prairie Space as Modern Artefact, 1869-1944 by Rod Bantjes

In this short but suggestive study, sociologist Rod Bantjes examines how contending visions of modernity shaped the social and physical landscapes of the Canadian prairies. "[B]oth statesmen and prairie farmers were infused with the modernist spirit of innovation, the will creatively (and destructively) to transform their worlds," Bantjes argues. His provocative view of farmers as agents of modernity reflects recent scholarship that seeks to explore "multiple modernities," or the notion that ideas and practices of modernism must be regarded not as monolithic but rather as contested and multivocal, and must be examined in their historical and geographical contexts.

Review of Prairie Time: A Blackland Portrait by Matt White

Nowadays, the Blackland Prairies of north Texas are the kind of landscape most people think of as great for subdivisions and strip malls: generally flat, easily bulldozed, and not too far from Dallas-Fort Worth. Prairie Time: A Blackland Portrait traces a similar utilitarian vision of the prairie in 19th-century pioneer descriptions as well: good for plowing, grazing, and-once the buffalo and Native Americans are exterminated-not too far from outposts of commerce. The book serves as an environmental jeremiad for a place too easily seen as useful and thus too often ignored for preservation. Matt White gives readers a context in which to begin to value the Blackland Prairie by combining a heartfelt story with a thorough sense of its ecological wonder, our post-settlement history and its environmental impact on the land, and some remarkable stories of current preservationists working to find and save remnant gems of unplowed prairie.

Review of Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating by Jane Goodall with Gary McAvoy and Gail Hudson

One of the world's preeminent experts on primate behavior, author Jane Goodall now invests her boundless energy traveling and speaking about conservation. After years of studying chimpanzees in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania, Goodall found their very existence threatened by poachers, by encroachment of farming into their habitat, and by global forces far from their wild environment. She is now on a mission to inform the public about what is wrong with our society and its impact on the planet. Harvest for Hope catalogs the problems and provides practical solutions.