Candace Savage’s A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape is a wonderful book, in turns delightful, demanding and discomforting. Unlike her tour de force, Prairie: A Natural History, which painted a broad-brush canvas of grasslands from Texas north to the Alberta Park Belt, this book is a miniature, a focused examination of a small area illuminated by precisely observed detail. It is the outcome of staying put and paying attention to where you are. The writing is effortless and accessible, with frequent riffles of lyricism. Describing the vigour of a grassland ecosystem, Savage writes:
The power of the soil, the wind, and the rain is concentrated in every leathery shrub and every blade of sun-cured grass. Transferred up the food chain, this vitality takes on animal form and becomes manifest in the blue of a butterfly, the bright eye of a snake, the eerie...
Simon M. Evans is an adjunct professor of geography at the University of Calgary. He is author of four books, most recently The Bar U and Canadian Ranching History (University of Calgary Press, 2004), and a score of articles on Western Canada.
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