Seldom seen : a journey into the Great Plains /

It was just about 15 years ago when Dobson, stuck in a stultifying job, bored and restless, decided to shake things up a little. He set out from his home in Kansas City, Missouri, and, armed with nothing but a backpack and a sense of adventure, headed off to Helena, Montana, a distance of about 1,200 miles as the crow flies. Dobson, not being a crow, took about two and a half months to make the journey, finding along the way a deeper understanding of himself and of the variety of people, places, and ways of life you can find in one small part of a vast country. It's the kind of book Bill Bryson might write in some ways he's already written it, in Lost Continent (1989), about his travels through small-town America full of lively people, intriguing places, and humor. But where Bryson's book was a lighthearted travelogue, Dobson's is more introspective, more a voyage of self-discovery. You'll easily see where the book is going, philosophically speaking, but it's a journey worth taking, anyway.--Pitt, David Copyright 2009 Booklist

Dobson, a freelance writer, former journalist, and doctoral student, decided to walk from Kansas City, MO, to Helena, MT, in May 1995, partly to re-create childhood vacations taken in the family car with a troubled father and partly to reflect upon his own life. Here, he relates his close-range examination of the Great Plains and his journey of self-reflection. He is remarkably ill prepared and suffers from severe blisters after walking 15 miles the first day. Not a purist, he accepts rides from the folks he meets along the way. It is the characters who inhabit the small towns of the plains-from the Bible quoters who hustle him out of St. Mary's to the disturbed man who fishes from a canoe with his cat-that give the reader a real feel for the rural existence. VERDICT There may be local interest from readers in Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming, but Dobson does not offer enough insight or substance to capture the imagination of others. William Least Heat-Moon-lite.-Susan Belsky, Oshkosh P.L., WI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A first-time author goes on walkabout in the Great Plains. Like countless people, freelance writer Dobson was feeling trapped. In 1995 he was working a dead-end job, and he felt aimless and helpless. The only thing that comforted him was that massive swath of land that stretched for hundreds of miles just west of his hometown of Kansas City, Mo. The Great Plains had been soothing to him as a child, even if he'd only taken in those endless golden oceans from his father's car window. Dobson wondered if he could enhance that feeling if he enveloped himself in the prairie, so he decided to walk from his front step to Helena, Mont., hoping that the Plains could somehow cure him. It did more than that. This isn't a book about the author's personal musings on the road, but rather a chronicle of the folks that, despite a lack of virtually everything except endless space, have decided to live on the prairie. More surprisingly, these peoplethe former carnival worker in Wyoming, the evangelicals in Kansas, the would-be rock star in Nebraskawere eager to let Dobson into their lives. The prairie, lovingly described by the author, becomes the fabric that holds these people together. Their stories, some as violent and powerful as a Midwestern thunderstorm, others as calm as a breeze, create a captivating narrative, and Dobson finds the common humanity that keeps people struggling against their circumstances and striving to succeed, in whatever form that may take. Restrained storytelling and a string of charming, relatable characters make the prairie seem like much more than a flyover region. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.