Book Reviews Archive

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Wind Historian Says: Build New Wind Farms Farther From Neighbors

By
dbennie
– February 9, 2012Posted in: Book Reviews, Environmental Studies, In The News

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Windfall: Wind Energy in America Today, by historian Robert Righter, was recently published by University of Oklahoma Press; it’s a follow-up to his 1996 book, a history of the industry through its first commercial boom. As a hearty advocate of wind energy and continued rapid growth of the industry, Righter may surprise some with his strong call for more sensitivity to quality of life concerns of rural residents. He spends chunks of three chapters addressing the increasing problems caused by wind farm noise in rural communities, chides developers for not building farther from unwilling neighbors, and says that new development should be focused on the remote high plains, rather than more densely populated rural landscapes in the upper midwest and northeast.

Righter seems to be especially sensitive to the fact that today’s turbines are huge mechanical intrusions on pastoral landscapes, a far cry from the windmills of earlier generations.  At the same time, he suggests that a look back at earlier technological innovations (including transmission lines, oil pump jacks, and agricultural watering systems) suggests that most of us tend to become accustomed to new intrusions after a while, noting that outside of wilderness areas, “it is difficult to view a landscape devoid of a human imprint.” He also acknowledges the fact that impacts on a few can’t always outweigh the benefits for the many in generating electricity without burning carbon or generating nuclear waste.

But unlike most wind boosters, he doesn’t content himself with these simple formulations.  He goes on to stress that even as recently as 2000, most experts felt that technical hurdles would keep turbines from getting much bigger than they were then (500 kW-1 MW).  The leaps that have taken place, with 3 MW and larger turbines in new wind farms, startle even him:  ”They do not impact a landscape as much as dominate it….Their size makes it practically impossible to suggest that wind turbines can blend technology with nature.”  He joins one of his fellow participants in a cross-disciplinary symposium on NIMBY issues, stressing:  ”Wind energy developers must realize the ‘important links among landscape, memory, and beauty in achieving a better quality of life.’  This concept is not always appreciated by wind developers, resulting in bitter feeling, often ultimately reaching the courts.”

Read the article at renewableenegyworld.com

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Book Review – Scenery, Curiosities, and Stupendous Rocks

By
dbennie
– February 8, 2012Posted in: Art & Photography, Book Reviews, History of the American West

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Review by By David Hendee, OMAHA WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

An Arkansas farmer who went bust as a gold miner in California hit pay dirt as an artist in the high Plains of Nebraska.

But William Quesenbury’s big strike — sketching the North Platte River wilderness on his way down the Overland Trail to his home back east — remained hidden for nearly 150 years.

Quesenbury, a self-taught artist, couldn’t have imagined that his 1851 sketches of what is now western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming would survive, much less be rediscovered and published in a large-format book for the world to see, said David Royce Murphy of the Nebraska State Historical Society.

After a brief, failed fling as a gold miner, Quesenbury (pronounced Cush-en-berry) bounced from job to job in Arkansas and Texas — newspaperman, Confederate officer, politician, art teacher — and lived a life of desperation. He died in 1888 in Missouri.

“The fact that he would be known today for his Overland sketches would probably surprise him to no end,” Murphy said.

Quesenbury’s greatest work was his role as one of the first and most skilled sketch artists to depict Chimney Rock, Courthouse Rock and other iconic buttes, hills and plains of the Overland Trail, Murphy said.

The sketches have been owned by The World-Herald since 1994, shortly after they were rediscovered. They are on loan to the state historical society.

The Quesenbury story and his 71 pencil sketches are featured in “Scenery, Curiosities, and Stupendous Rocks,” published last month by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Read the entire review at omaha.com

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Book Review: Kit Carson, by David Remley

By
dbennie
– February 8, 2012Posted in: Biography/Memoir, Book Reviews, History of the American West

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Kit Carson: The Life of an American Border Man, by David Remley, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2011, $24.95

“Ask people who Kit Carson was,” David Remley posits in the preface to this new biography. “Most suspect that he was not the great white hero of dime novels, but a real border man of some sort—a trapper, a guide, a hunter, a mountain man, a frontiersman. Some think that he was good and that he was larger than life, others that he was just a killer, even genocidal.” Dime novelists in the 19th century saddled Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson with the nicknames “Nestor of the Plains” and “Terror of the Plains,” among other hyperbolic handles. Modern-day revisionists have termed him “trigger happy” and a “natural born killer.” Remley has thoughtfully sifted through the existing scholarship on Carson to find neither myth nor monster but a man more nuanced than either extreme. “My hope,” says the author, “is to stimulate more careful and balanced thought, speech and writing about Kit.”

Born in Kentucky on Christmas Eve 1809 and raised in Missouri, Carson ran away from a saddlery apprenticeship at age 16 and never let the dust settle long on his feet after that. For the next four decades he roamed the United States from coast to coast as a fur trapper, guide, dispatch rider and Army scout. He was married twice to Indian women and, finally, to lifelong love Josefa Jaramillo, the daughter of a prominent Mexican family in Taos. Kit shared campfires with explorers Ewing Young and John Frémont, served in the Indian wars and Civil War under noted officers Stephen Kearny and Edward Canby and rubbed elbows, albeit anxiously, with presidents and statesmen. Such professional associations brought the plainspoken Carson uneasy fame.

Read the entire review at Historynet.com

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Bryn Mawr Classical Review…Eros at the Banquet

By
dbennie
– February 8, 2012Posted in: Book Reviews, Classical Studies

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Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2012.01.41
Louise H. Pratt, Eros at the Banquet: Reviewing Greek with Plato’s Symposium. Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture, 40.   Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 2011.  Pp. xxiii, 407.  ISBN 9780806141428.  $29.95 (pb).

Reviewed by Derek Smith Keyser, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (dereksh@email.unc.edu)

As one of the most well-known and beloved dialogues of Plato, the Symposium is an enticing selection for teachers of intermediate language courses. Unfortunately, it is generally not considered to be an ideal text for third- semester students: its length (roughly twice that of the Apology), its complexity in both language and thought, and its wealth of cultural details requiring explanation seem to make it more fitting for upper-level classes than for students first dipping their toes into the sea of Greek literature. There are several excellent commentaries on the dialogue, including the Bryn Mawr edition by Rose and the Cambridge edition by Dover,1 but these either refrain from commenting on the intellectual and cultural material within the dialogue (Bryn Mawr) or lack the meticulous grammatical and syntactical explanations that intermediate students often need (Cambridge). Louise Pratt’s Eros at the Banquet successfully addresses both these concerns in a lucidly written, thoroughly researched, and engaging edition of the dialogue. Teachers should be aware, however, that the first five readings of the book contain a moderately altered Greek text that has been simplified for intermediate readers; I discuss the nature of these alterations below.

Like other commentaries in the Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture, Pratt’s edition provides students and teachers with almost everything they will need to study the Symposium, including text, running commentary below each passage, and glossary in the back. The opening sections contain: an outline of the book’s format and helpful suggestions on using it in the classroom; a key for grammatical abbreviations found in the commentary; and a brief but detailed introduction divided into several topics relevant to the dialogue, including religion, history, sexuality, and literary themes. Students will appreciate the clear and succinct writing in these sections, and teachers will find many helpful references to primary and secondary sources at the end of each discussion. Pratt’s three-page bibliography is not meant to be exhaustive, but she consistently cites reliable sources that are appropriate for intermediate-level classes. For example, rather than overwhelm readers with a comprehensive list of scholarship on Diotima’s speech, Pratt directs them to the sound, though cautious, analysis found in Allen’s The Dialogues of Plato.2

Read the entire review

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Great Sioux War Orders of Battle Book Review

By
dbennie
– May 13, 2011Posted in: Author Interviews, Book Reviews, History of the American West

While reading Paul Hedren’s, “Great Sioux War Orders of Battle”, we have to ask why no one has produced such a reference before. We find bits and pieces of Mr. Hedren’s material in a small number of other works, but never have we seen this data comprised into one volume. Besides data, the author provides a reasonable and innovative analysis for why the frontier army was ably led and equipped to win the Sioux/Cheyenne War of 1876.

No matter one’s opinion on the subject of the U.S. Army during the Centennial Campaign, Mr. Hedren’s arguments are well made and supported from primary research. His check list of primary material includes but is not limited to 185 monthly Regimental Returns, official reports, and diaries. The war was made up of a complex maze of many columns of infantry and cavalry moving across a wide landscape over a period of almost two years. Making sense of it all is a huge challenge, but Mr. Hedren accomplishes it through a novel approach.

The book is divided into three parts. Part one “explores the doctrine, training, culture, and materiel” of the army that entered the campaign. Part two is exemplary in that the author has divided the entire campaign into 28 separate deployments starting with the relief of Fort Pease in February 1876, and ending with the establishment of Fort Custer in July 1877. Part three encompasses a well thought-out analysis for why a well trained army could lose on some of the campaigns’ battlefields. It also affirms why the war was not won because of luck; the army went into the field confident and rightfully so.

Read the entire review and the interview with the author.