What do you think?
Rate this book
Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit
A compilation of essays and photographs.
From the book's cover: "Through short writings and photographs, Cindy Crosby and Thomas Dean enter a conversation to inspire in readers new understandings of the Midwestern tallgrass prairie through word and image."
From the book's cover: "Through short writings and photographs, Cindy Crosby and Thomas Dean enter a conversation to inspire in readers new understandings of the Midwestern tallgrass prairie through word and image."
144 pages, Hardcover
Published April 1, 2019
1 person is currently reading
35 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 3, 2021
About the time I was falling in love with the tallgrass prairies of the Midwest in the 1990s, Richard Manning’s "Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie" (Penguin, 1995) helped me understand the significance of the grasslands that cover about 40 percent of the U.S. This makes them the largest biome in the country, Manning wrote, but they are “also our most degraded and most misunderstood.”
Short and tallgrass prairies once hosted hundreds of species of plants that, in turn, hosted a diversity of insects, birds, rodents, their predators, and large mammals like bison that grazed the land. But with plows and chemicals, grain farmers “drops the count to one species,” wrote Manning. “On grazed land, soil erosion is virtually nonexistent. On wheat land it is constant.”
If Manning helps us understand the history, politics, and value of the grasslands, Cindy Crosby and Thomas Dean’s book, "Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit" (Ice Cube Press, 2019) calls upon us to settle into a deep meditation about the essence of the tallgrass prairie of the Midwest.
True to their subtitle, these authors imbue the book with the spirit of the prairie. “The path to prairie is awe,” writes Dean in the introduction. “Without accepting awe, madness may ensure. Legend has it that some European pioneers went insane in the vastness of the sea of grass. Did they fail to revere a horizontal immensity?”
The authors go on to portray the awe of that horizontal immensity, in words and beautiful photos on every page of this attractive, hard-back book. It is divided into five sections—The Spirit of Opening, The Spirit of Awareness, The Spirit of Celebration, The Spirit of Reflection, and The Spirit of Hope. Each section is further divided into “conversations,” with subtitles like “path,” “stillness, and “depth,” within which the authors call and respond to each other even while they educate and inspire.
In Conversation Ten, “Stillness,” Dean evokes the peace he experiences in the prairie. “The moment I step onto the path into the grassland, my breathing slows and my mind clears as my eyes take in the sprawling expanse of natural bounty, whether in full bloom or at rest….Time and earth play a broader, slower song on the prairie, and when I join its rhythm, my mind, even my soul, is still in its measured grace.”
For her part of this conversation, Crosby bemoans the coldest April on record around her home near Chicago, with everything is in slow motion. “May arrives, and there’s not much in bloom except the fading pasque flowers, always on early arrival, and a few of the more common violets.” (Any prairie lover knows this feeling of waiting—or worse, realizing that we have missed the blooming of our favorite flower because we didn’t get to our favorite prairie on time.) By July, however, there will be a “frenzied rush-hour collision of pollinators, blooms, competing grasses, and birds. Bright colors, all jostling for my attention. So many species! So much glitz and light and sound. My pace will increase as well—so much to see!” Knowing what is just ahead, she savors the stillness.
Read this book quickly, and then put it on your list to reread. The book holds twenty-six two-part conversations for a total of 52 meditations. At one meditation per week, that’s a year’s worth of wisdom—about the prairie and about life itself—to contemplate slowly, year after year.
Short and tallgrass prairies once hosted hundreds of species of plants that, in turn, hosted a diversity of insects, birds, rodents, their predators, and large mammals like bison that grazed the land. But with plows and chemicals, grain farmers “drops the count to one species,” wrote Manning. “On grazed land, soil erosion is virtually nonexistent. On wheat land it is constant.”
If Manning helps us understand the history, politics, and value of the grasslands, Cindy Crosby and Thomas Dean’s book, "Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit" (Ice Cube Press, 2019) calls upon us to settle into a deep meditation about the essence of the tallgrass prairie of the Midwest.
True to their subtitle, these authors imbue the book with the spirit of the prairie. “The path to prairie is awe,” writes Dean in the introduction. “Without accepting awe, madness may ensure. Legend has it that some European pioneers went insane in the vastness of the sea of grass. Did they fail to revere a horizontal immensity?”
The authors go on to portray the awe of that horizontal immensity, in words and beautiful photos on every page of this attractive, hard-back book. It is divided into five sections—The Spirit of Opening, The Spirit of Awareness, The Spirit of Celebration, The Spirit of Reflection, and The Spirit of Hope. Each section is further divided into “conversations,” with subtitles like “path,” “stillness, and “depth,” within which the authors call and respond to each other even while they educate and inspire.
In Conversation Ten, “Stillness,” Dean evokes the peace he experiences in the prairie. “The moment I step onto the path into the grassland, my breathing slows and my mind clears as my eyes take in the sprawling expanse of natural bounty, whether in full bloom or at rest….Time and earth play a broader, slower song on the prairie, and when I join its rhythm, my mind, even my soul, is still in its measured grace.”
For her part of this conversation, Crosby bemoans the coldest April on record around her home near Chicago, with everything is in slow motion. “May arrives, and there’s not much in bloom except the fading pasque flowers, always on early arrival, and a few of the more common violets.” (Any prairie lover knows this feeling of waiting—or worse, realizing that we have missed the blooming of our favorite flower because we didn’t get to our favorite prairie on time.) By July, however, there will be a “frenzied rush-hour collision of pollinators, blooms, competing grasses, and birds. Bright colors, all jostling for my attention. So many species! So much glitz and light and sound. My pace will increase as well—so much to see!” Knowing what is just ahead, she savors the stillness.
Read this book quickly, and then put it on your list to reread. The book holds twenty-six two-part conversations for a total of 52 meditations. At one meditation per week, that’s a year’s worth of wisdom—about the prairie and about life itself—to contemplate slowly, year after year.
November 9, 2020
Beautiful
August 23, 2025
I LOVE THE PRAIRIE
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews