Dakotah Book Reviews

Dakotah by Charles Bowden Book Summary

The author of Blood Orchid explores the history of the Sioux alongside that of his own family in this posthumous work.

When award-winning author Charles Bowden died in 2014, he left behind a trove of unpublished manuscripts. Dakotah marks the landmark publication of the first of these texts, and the fourth installment in his acclaimed “Unnatural History of America.” Bowden uses America’s Great Plains as a lens—sometimes sullied, sometimes shattered, but always sharp—for observing pivotal moments in the lives of anguished figures, including himself.

In scenes that are by turns wrenching and poetic, Bowden describes the Sioux’s forced migrations and rebellions alongside his own ancestors’ migrations from Europe to Midwestern acres beset by unforgiving winters. He meditates on the lives of his resourceful mother and his philosophical father, who rambled between farm communities and city life. Interspersed with these images are clear-eyed, textbook-defying anecdotes about Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, and, with equal verve, twentieth-century entertainers “Pee Wee” Russell, Peggy Lee, and other musicians. The result is a kaleidoscopic journey that penetrates the senses and redefines the notion of heartland. Dakotah is a powerful ode to loss from one of our most fiercely independent writers.

“[Dakotah] is about hope, disappointment, impermanence and erasure . . . This is a meditation Bowden fans will not want to miss.” —Arizona Daily Star

 “This posthumous work continues Bowden’s uniquely ecocritical writing—starting from human common ground and ending with the ground itself—and allows us to hear his voice long past his own time in earth. It is a worthy offering.” —Western American Literature

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