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.

Review of The Search for a Common Language: Environmental Writing and Education Edited by Melody Graulich and Paul Crumbley

This edited collection grew out of a symposium held at Utah State University in Logan in 2002. According to the editors, the symposium's purpose was to "publicly explore the particular ways environmental writing educates the public through a fusion of science and literary expression." The Search for a Common Language achieves that purpose by including short prose pieces-ranging from memoirs, essays on specific locations, and scientific papers - as well as poetry on natural themes. The range of topics and genres and the inclusion of poetry provide a variety of ways to talk about the environment and reach out to different audiences to educate them about the natural world.

Review of Native Americans in the School System: Family, Community, and Academic Achievement by Carol J. Ward

The title of this volume promises more than the content delivers. The heart of the book is information from Ward's 1992 University of Chicago doctoral dissertation, which focused on the social and cultural reasons leading to students dropping out of school. Her first two chapters provide a good review of research on dropouts and Indian education; the following six focus on the results of her 1987-1989 study of 698 Northern Cheyenne, Crow, and white high school students attending the Colstrip Public, St. Labre Catholic, and Busby Tribal Schools in Montana. Fifty-two percent of the students in this study were Indian, with a dropout rate of 45% .

NPCA EDUCATION COMMITTEE

The major thrust of the Education Committee results from the rather urgent need to implement interesting programs in which supervisors may train for examination and certification under the qualifications of the pesticide act. While it is not easy at this time to determine what certification is going to be, what supervisors are going to be involved, what kind of examination they are going to have to take, and how the state is going to interpret all of this, we therefore cannot be specific. The wheels are grinding away, and as you know, the timetable is winding down; and we may be faced with a rather short period of time to get these people qualified. Our industry hopes that we will have the training to offer and that all supervisors from around the country have the opportunity to prepare, take the examination, and be certified.

Book Review of Venereal Disease and the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Thomas P. Lowry

Although Lewis and Clark literature has proliferated in the last decade, few works have added scholarly discourse to this field of study. The highly focused Venereal Disease and the Lewis and Clark Expedition, however, will likely stand out on the Lewis and Clark bookshelf as an important contribution.

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 Stone by Stone: Exploring Ancient Sites on the Canadian Plains by Liz Bryan

Liz Bryan begins her book with a description of the Canadian Plains:" . .. a voluptuous landscape of hills and valleys and plains, of lakes and tiny twinkling potholes, of flower-filled coulees and vast sand dunes." Her emphasis throughout on the landscape of southern Saskatchewan and Alberta is necessary since the ancient monuments she describes only truly resonate within this setting. Indeed, almost every page of this attractive book is adorned with at least two color images-of scenery, stone features, artifacts, and aboriginal events. She then proceeds to an eclectic overview of the archaeological record of the Plains of Saskatchewan and Alberta, including the earliest human evidence, such as the Clovis points from the Wally's Beach site, Alberta, where the trackways of mammoths, camels, and muskoxen were miraculously and briefly exposed in the late 1990s. There is one perplexing error, however-the attribution of the extinction of the ice age bestiary, about 12,000 years ago, to the meteorite that felled the dinosaurs!

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.

Book Review of Archaeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural Heritage by Laurajane Smith

The passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1991 significantly changed the way archaeology would be done in the United States. This act was presaged by growing complaints and resentment directed at the scientific community by Native Americans over the treatment of their ancestral remains. Many of the underlying issues came to a head with the discovery and subsequent court battles over the 9,200-year-old individual commonly known as Kennewick Man. This had a galvanizing effect on the discipline, not only perpetuating the sometimes adversarial relationship between archaeologists and Native Americans, but also creating a rift between those archaeologists who understood Native American concerns and those who saw their ancestral skeletal remains representing the legacy of humankind and thus belonging to everyone. Similar scenarios have emerged in Australia.

Book Review of Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America by Paul S. Martin

Applying ecological studies to the adaptations of prehistoric human hunter-gatherer groups has greatly increased our abilities to interpret effects of an ever-changing environment and our access to critical resources on these populations. The Pleistocene/Holocene transition, its climate and human genesis in the new world, draws intensive interest from a number of scientific communities. In Twilight of the Mammoths, Paul Martin adds his views, which are of no surprise, on the megafaunal extirpations during a cultural period referred to in North America as Clovis.

BOOK REVIEW of Oceans of Kansas: A Natural History of the Western Interior Sea by Michael J. Everhart

Just as there are seashells on Mt. Everest, there is an exceptional wealth of fossil remains of marine organisms preserved in the chalk of western Kansas. This Cretaceous-aged rock, and the fossils therein, were deposited at a time when a great sea cut northward across the interior of the continent around 85 million years ago, inspiring the provocative title of Everhart's book. The title is true to its subject: documentation of the Cretaceous fossils of western Kansas, their geographic and stratigraphic occurrences, and the inferences that paleontologists can make about how the organisms represented by these fossils may have once lived and interacted with one another.

Fire History at the Eastern Great Plains Margin, Missouri River Loess Hills

The purpose of this paper is to provide quantitative fire history information for a geographically unique region, the Loess Hills of northwest Missouri. We sampled 33 bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa Michx.), chinkapin oak (Q. muehlenbergii Engelm.), and black oak (Q. velutina Lam.) trees from the Brickyard Hill Conservation Area in northwest Missouri. The period of tree-ring record ranged in calendar years from 1671 to 2004 and fire-scar dates (n = 97) ranged from 1672 to 1980. Fire intervals for individual trees ranged from 1 to 87 years. The mean fire interval was 6.6 years for the pre-Euro-American settlement period (1672-1820), and 5.2 years for the entire record (1672-1980). A period of more frequent fire (mean fire interval = 1.6 for 1825 to 1850) coincided with Euro-American settlement of the area. The average percentage of trees scarred at the site was 16.8%, or about 1 in 7 trees sampled per fire. No significant relationship between fire years and drought conditions was found; however, events prior to 1820 may have been associated with wet to dry mode transitions.

Land Use and Transfer Plans in the U.S. Great Plains

In the next decades, aging farmers in the United States will make decisions that affect almost 1 billion acres of land. The future of this land will become more uncertain as farm transfer becomes more difficult, potentially changing the structure of agriculture through farm consolidation, changes in farm ownership and management, or taking land out of production. The Great Plains Population and Environment Project interviewed farmers and their spouses between 1997 and 1999. Farm Family Survey participants were ambiguous about their plans to leave farming, transfer land to others, and even long-term land use, largely due to concerns about the continued economic viability of farming. Participants living far from metropolitan areas expected to sell or rent to other farmers, while those near residential real-estate markets expected to sell to developers. Delays in planning for retirement and succession were common, further threatening the success of intergenerational transitions.