Book of the Week: Goodlands

This week’s #AUPBookOfTheWeek is a backlist gem. Published in 2011, Goodlands: A Meditation and History on the Great Plains by Frances W. Kaye is at once an ode to West and a thoughtful critique of how Western civilization defines many environments as deficient. “Every ecological system is necessary and sufficient for the plants and animals that have co-evolved with it and for those that have migrated slowly into it in response to the cycles of climate change that characterize Earth’s history,” Kaye writes in her introduction.

Goodlands is part of AU Press’s West Unbound series which challenges simplistic definitions of the West and its institutions. The series assesses why and how local and regional myths were established and how these myths in turn contributed to cultural and social developments. The mythology of a homogenized West fighting for a place in the sun blunted interest in the lives of ordinary people and the social struggles that pitted some groups in the West against others, usually the elite groups that claimed to speak for the whole region on the national stage.

The series demonstrates that the social structures and cultural attitudes in both Canada and the United States are in constant evolution, with echoes of established mythologies constantly being challenged by new understandings and changing constellations of social forces.

Kaye’s Goodlands “synthesizes knowledge of the Great Plains with an almost stunning interdisciplinarity,” writes Robert Thacker in Western American Literature.

You can download Goodlands for free on our website.