My Dakota

In 2005, Rebecca Norris Webb set out to photograph her home state of South Dakota, a sparsely populated frontier state on the Great Plains with more buffalo, pronghorn, mule deer and prairie dogs than people. South Dakota is a land of powwows and rodeos, corn palaces and buffalo roundups; a harsh and beautiful landscape dominated by space, silence, brutal wind and extreme weather. The next year, however, everything changed for Norris Webb, when her brother died unexpectedly of heart failure. "For months," she writes in the introduction to this volume, "one of the few things that eased my unsettled heart was the landscape of South Dakota. For each of us, does loss have its own geography?" My Dakota is a small intimate book about the west and its weathers, and an elegy for a lost brother.

"I've known about Ike Blasingame all my life, knew many of his fellow punchers, white and Indian. Ike was certainly a salty representative of the Texas bronc twister when he came North with that most romantic of cow outfits, the British-owned Matador. . . . [He] takes the reader across the treacherous Missouri River as the spring-softened ice goes out under the horses' feet, into the still wild cow towns, through the round-ups, the prairie fires. . . . There is the authentic smell and feel of the Northern cow country of fifty years ago in the story Ike Blasingame tells."-Mari Sandoz"Here is one of the most gripping Western tales since Andy Adams' The Log of a Cowboy was published in 1903. The telling is considerably like Adams'-warm, human, flavorful. The author, a one-time Matador ranch cowboy, . . . lived his story, and he tells it straight in the language of the cow country without contrivance."-New York Times"Many of the cowboys who have written about their experiences never really looked at any wider segment of the cattle business than was visible between their horses' ears, but Ike Blasingame did. He paints a big picture without omitting details."-New York Herald-Tribune

The main character, a great Akita doggie "Dakota" was a reality. Sharing an apartment in 1996 with my sister, which was around a lovely lake, the character developed. The story starts out with Dakota, a little doggie, coming to live with Audra, his master, to fill the void of loneliness for her. Dakota spends most all of his days alone with Audra away at work. She had told him how she had prayed for her loneliness to be fille and she came home with him, just 5 weeks old! Dakota decides to pray and ask God for a talking friend to feel his lonely days. The story evolves with how those prayers were answered meeting his new turtle friends, Tia and Tuck, from the lake near by. Life becomes great!!!!

A tale of a lifelong passion for a WWII aircraft that changed the author’s life: “It is almost like an adventure novel except it is true” (Air Classics). This book tells the story of a Dutch boy who grew up during the 1950s in postwar Borneo, where he had frequent encounters with an airplane, the Douglas DC-3, a.k.a. the C-47 Skytrain or Dakota, of World War II fame. For a young boy living in a remote jungle community, the aircraft reached the proportions of a romantic icon as the essential lifeline to a bigger world for him, the beginning of a special bond. In 1957, his family left the island and all its residual wreckage of World War II, and he attended college in The Hague. After graduation, he started a career as a corporate executive—and met the aircraft again during business trips to the Americas. His childhood passion for the Dakota flared up anew, and the fascination pulled like a magnet. As if predestined, or maybe just looking for an excuse to come closer, he began a business to salvage and convert Dakota parts, which meant first of all finding them. As the demand for these war relic parts and cockpits soared, he began to travel the world to track down surplus, crashed, or derelict Dakotas. He ventured deeper and deeper into remote mountains, jungles, savannas, and the seas where the planes are found, usually as ghostly wrecks but sometimes still in full commercial operation. In hunting the mythical Dakota, he often encountered intimidating or dicey situations in countries plagued by wars or revolts, others by arms and narcotics trafficking, warlords, and conmen. The stories of these expeditions take the reader to some of the remotest spots in the world, but once there, one is often greeted by the comfort of what was once the West’s apex in transportation—however now haunted by the courageous airmen of the past.

This unique book combines state-specific facts and 30 fun-to-do hands-on projects. The Symbols Projects Book includes creating a model of the state bird, counting popcorn to visualize state population, creating state borders using craft materials, making a scrapbook of unique state facts and more! Kids will have a blast and build essential knowledge skills including research, reading, writing, science and math. Great for students in K-8 grades and for displaying in the classroom, library or home.

"... Classic about life on the Great Plains and its influence on the human spirit"--From publisher description.