David Laskin Jr., Award-Winning Producer and Arranger of the Acclaimed Album 'Child's Play'

Anastasius Sloane: Over the course of thousands of years, the Tribes of Native Americans ("Indians") became intimately acquainted with the rhythms and cycles of the Vast Plains upon which they dwelt, and, aside from their Bison hunting grounds, they knew the tracts of land, of spaces that were dangerous to establish day-to-day, all-year-round villages. They knew where the could set up their tipis, in places where fuels for wildfires were sparser; where watertables were closer to the surface, in case of droughts; where they were spared the heavier gusts of windage, for both Summers and Winters; and, where the buildups of the terrible mesocyclone Supercells were less likely to drop their lethal fingers and Derecho Bands, from the skies.

Not quite so, for the over-civilized peoples that immigrated from Europe, including those who had already become Americans. Indeed, it was their unwise manipulations of the land, that triggered the Great Dustbowl throughout and a little beyond the Great Depression. It's nothing short of a big fluke, that respectable-sized metropolises such as Lincoln, Omaha, Sioux City, Rapid City, Bismarck, Fargo, and others, were able to get a foothold, and help support their...

United States on Nov 24, 2021

Dakota Evans-Rompen: A really good read. A big part of what ppl remember from history. I was astonished at how fast this storm took over.

Canada on May 18, 2021

Mrs. S. L. Dunwoody: Lovely book

United Kingdom on Oct 28, 2017

c.h: Fascinating. Good balance of facts and fictionalised interpretations of what happened.

United Kingdom on Jul 20, 2015

Isabelle Smith: A fascinating book. It not only tells the story of this dreadful blizzard but how the people arrived on the plains of America. The writing is in an easy style, very readable.

United Kingdom on Jan 20, 2015

T. M. Johnson: My first reaction to Chapter One of David Laskin's "The Children's Blizzard" was impatience. "Let's get on with the blizzard," I thought;"Let's get to the singular event of the story." Not until a few chapters later did I realize the motive behind Laskin's emphasis on the trials of the European emigrants, the hardships and heartaches they experienced leaving their own countries only to be met by a harsher life in a new land. Laskin's intent, of course, was to highlight the role the prairie children played in the tragedy caused by the Great Blizzard of 1888. By focusing on the difficulties these immigrant homesteaders faced in child bearing and the raising of children in remote prairie settlements in the 19th Century, the author sets the stage for the catastrophe that befell so many young school children. In the Old Country many of these immgrant families had lost children in childbirth and to childhood disease only to lose their surviving offspring in transit or in the New Country. (One mother, Anna Kaufmann, had only one of her first four sons survive into his teenage years and then lost that son to the Great Blizzard.) In short, Chapter One of the book stresses the fact that...

United States on May 20, 2010