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Ghost Dances

Proving Up on the Great Plains
By Josh Garret-Davis (Trade Paperback, 2013)
A gifted young writer takes a singular journey back to his native Midwestern American Plains.

Growing up in South Dakota, Josh Garrett-Davis always knew he would leave. But as a young adult, he kept going back-in dreams and reality and by way of books. With this beautifully written narrative about a seemingly empty but actually rich and complex place, he has reclaimed his childhood, his unusual family-and the Great Plains.

Among the subjects and people who bring his Plains to life are the destruction and resurgence of the American bison; his great-great-grandparents' twenty-year sojourn in Nebraska as homesteaders; Native American "Ghost Dancers," who attempted to ward off destruction by supernatural means before the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee; the political allegory to be found in The Wizard of Oz; and current attempts by ecologists to "rewild" the Plains. GHOST DANCES is a fluid combination of memoir and history and reportage that reminds us that our roots matter-and might even be inspiring and fascinating.
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  • Little, Brown and Company

    • Format: Trade Paperback

    • Price: $15.99 US/$17.50 CAN

    • ISBN-13: 9780316199827

    • On Sale Date: 09/01/2013

    • Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

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    Formats Available: Hardcover Book, Trade Paperback, Electronic Book

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A gifted young writer takes a singular journey back to his native Midwestern American Plains.

Growing up in South Dakota, Josh Garrett-Davis always knew he would leave. But as a young adult, he kept going back-in dreams and reality and by way of books. With this beautifully written narrative about a seemingly empty but actually rich and complex place, he has reclaimed his childhood, his unusual family-and the Great Plains.

Among the subjects and people who bring his Plains to life are the destruction and resurgence of the American bison; his great-great-grandparents' twenty-year sojourn in Nebraska as homesteaders; Native American "Ghost Dancers," who attempted to ward off destruction by supernatural means before the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee; the political allegory to be found in The Wizard of Oz; and current attempts by ecologists to "rewild" the Plains. GHOST DANCES is a fluid combination of memoir and history and reportage that reminds us that our roots matter-and might even be inspiring and fascinating.

Josh Garrett-Davis has an MFA from Columbia and is currently a PhD student in American history at Princeton.


  • GHOST DANCES by Josh Garrett-Davis

  • With Ghost Dances, Josh Garrett-Davis bursts on the literary scene like a fresh, punk-voiced Wallace Stegner, weaving the story of his own coming of age into the tangled history of the Great Plains. A familiar prairie past of sod houses and populists lives here alongside a modern landscape of broken families and alienated teenagers, Christian fundamentalists and Indian activists. Histories of failure and destruction weigh down the present and mute the possibilities for the future.  But the Great Plains emerge here as a place of terrible beauty, explosive possibilities, and that most American of emotions - hope. (Martha A. Sandweiss, author of Passing Strange).

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  • Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
  • Price: $15.99 US/$17.50 CAN
  • Pages: 336
  • Physical Dimensions: 5-1/2" x 8-1/4"
  • ISBN-13: 9780316199827
  • On Sale Date: 09/01/2013
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