Candace Savage has made a very long career being a non-fiction writer focusing on the natural world. She is not a professor or researcher of something specific, but has a broad background in her writing. I take that as a positive, because often I find that people highly involved in a subject are worse at explaining it because they are too technical and skip explaining principles that non-experts often need.

If it somehow wasn’t obvious, this book is about the prairie, specifically, the central North American grasslands. She begins many millions of years ago to explain the geology and how the ecosystem evolved to what it was at the beginning of European settlement and continues to its present problems. The book is very broad, because over the many thousands of square miles that constitute the prairie, there are a lot of interesting ecosystems, from playas to sandhills to short and tall grass prairies to name a few. She covered each one about as well as you can expect for a general book on the prairies, so it has made me realize how much more there is to learn, needing to get a book just on each ecosystem in order to feel like I actually understand them. But now I have a solid background.

This book was thorough and broad, and unfortunately, it read a lot like a text book. Many other authors I read have more of an angle. Bernd Heinrich explains many things, but often includes his own investigative science. Menno Schilthuizen and Olivia Judson use intriguing topics for their angles. Jennifer Ackerman works to write herself into each book to give them more of a narrative. This was just plain prairie writing. There was nothing bad about that, but it could be more difficult to concentrate. Actually it was more difficult to concentrate. Again, it wasn’t bad, it was technically very good, I just didn’t expect I would specifically miss authors who use an angle.

The only really odd thing was she refers to the Dirty Thirties a lot, but not the Dust Bowl. Having grown up where the Dust Bowl was, I never once heard of the Dirty Thirties It made me wonder about cultural differences in why someone would have a different name for it. Maybe it’s Canadian, or maybe it’s just from some book she read and she liked it.

So if you want a book background on the prairies of North America, read this book. You will learn a lot, but it will leave you wanting more, which is a good thing, because then you will read more.