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This book is an adventure story that pulls in the reader.Four kids and a TV talk show host are stuck in a runaway hot air balloon and as they travel around the state, readers try to figure out where they are based on the geographical features glimpsed from above and clues from the characters' conversations.Students get one point for every correct answer.Excellent for a classroom game, school-wide competition or individual reading.This is a great geography skill-builder + encourages research, map reading and more.Free teacher's guide gives specific suggestions and instructions on how to get max educational value from this book.Put this title high on your list! ... Read more

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Gives an overview of the state of North Dakota, including its history, geography, people, and living conditions. ... Read more

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Our alphabet journey takes us next to North Dakota, the home to such wide-eyed wonders as bison, mosasaurs and the Red River. Look to the North Dakota skies for a bald eagle or to the horizon for a wild prairie rose, the state flower. Every letter in the alphabet is another chapter in this land rich with history, people, and nature. But no matter where children look in P is for Peace Garden, they're sure to find the singular treasures-from Knepfla soup to the peace gardens-that make North Dakota what it is. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

P is For Peace Garden: Not Just For Children
Having grown up in North Dakota then moved back in mid-life, I wondered what a book in a series of state alphabet books would do with my memories. I was delighted. It invokes everything from the beautiful state flower, the prairie rose, to our bison, badlands, and of course, the International Peace Garden, with its chapel, the only building that straddles an international border. The illustrations are stunning, and the rhymes will be fun for kids, and not too silly for adults. This one's a keeper. Buy two, give one away, and keep one for yourself!

Fine Tribute to the Peace Garden State!
Roxane Salonen brings a depth of love and compassion to the beauty and complexity of North Dakota, the peace garden state. This book is a perfect gift for anyone who has spent time in this lovely state. ... Read more

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Describes the geography, history, government, people, and tourist sights of North Dakota. ... Read more

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"A book of stories, a book of prayer, a book to be read meditatively and well," DAKOTA offers a timeless tribute to a place in the American landscape that is at once desolate and sublime, harsh and forgiving, steeped in history and myth. From the award-winning author of AMAZING GRACE, DAKOTA is Kathleen Norris at her most thoughtful, her most discerning, her best. She gives us, once again, a rare "gift of hope and balance, a place to begin" (Chicago Tribune) and assurance that wherever we go, we chart our own spiritual geography.Amazon.com Review
After 20 years of living in the "Great American Outback," asNewsweek magazine once designated the Dakotas, poet KathleenNorris (The CloisterWalk) came to understand the fascinating ways that peoplebecome metaphors for the land they inhabit. When trying to understandthe polarizing contradictions that exist in the Dakotas between"hospitality and insularity, change and inertia, stability andinstability.... between hope and despair, between open hearts andclosed minds," Norris draws a map. "We are at the point of transitionbetween east and west in the United States," she explains,"geographically and psychically isolated from either coast, and unlikeeither the Midwest or the desert west."

Like Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge), Norrisunderstands how the boundary between inner and outer scenery begins toblur when one is fully present in the landscape of their lives. As aresult, she offers the geography lesson we all longed for inschool. This is a poetic, noble, and often funny (see her discussionon the foreign concept of tofu) tribute to Dakota, including itsNative Americans, Benedictine monks, ministers and churchgoers,wind-weathered farmers, and all its plain folks who live suchcomplicated and simple lives. --Gail Hudson ... Read more

Customer Reviews (58)

A Disappointment for Me
I greatly anticipated this books arrival. I too live on the lonesome, wide open, windyplains and hoped to find a kindred spirit in her description of the place I call home. Instead it seems that she is inclined to paint her fellow neighbors with a wide brush....(in her view it seems that way too many of them have a resentment of ANYONE who has a professional title, from teacher to minister and all in between, to the point that those individuals, according to her, often downplay their level of knowledge or education) and though I am a religious person myself, I grew VERY tired of her continual comparisons of herexperiences at her local monastary with everything in life. If you are a fan of reading about theBenedictine monks and their life, with small samplings of landscape descriptions and generalizations of all the small mindedfolks in her town, you might like this one. But, forme, it is one of the few books that I will give up on this year.

Love it or Leave It
This book is a patchwork of writings, many previously published, inviting us to visit the plains of North America. Many of the pieces effectively transport you there -- to small towns set apart under the big sky, remote enough to challenge our cultural concepts.Others are more personal, taking you on the author's "spiritual journey," and in these you meet Kathleen Norris the seeker.I'm not sure if it all came together as she intended. I learned things I didn't know about the sparsely settled plains states of our country.If you also want to explore some inner territory, you might like this book.

Benedictines and small town living
This book came recommended to me during a spiritual retreat.I found it a thought provoking read in prayerfully reviewing my spiritual direction, as well as informative on small town, prairie living in a place dying, but unwilling to embrace outsiders.It also provided alot of information on the Benedictine monasteries. I took my time reading it and the book will be one I long remember.

America's own "Rub Al Khali"...
In Saudi Arabia there is a vast area, almost a fourth of the country, known as "The Empty Quarter," (Rub Al Khali), with perhaps a thousand permanent residents. It is the lack of good water that makes permanent inhabitation practically impossible. America has a similar region, although the conditions are not as dire. It is the area between the 100th and 105th meridian, roughly spanning a seventy-fifth of the world's circumference. Due to the lack of sufficient rainfall (less than 20 inches per year), John Wesley Powell (as well as others) said that the land should never be tilled. It was; one of the "fallouts" was the Dustbowl days of the `30's. Today, those who have not emigrated face a hard-scrabble existence, with the remaining farmers tapping deeper and deeper into the Ogallala aquifer. The area is called the High Plains, largely pancake flat, has strong winds, and unlike Saudi Arabia, particularly in the Dakotas, it can be bitter cold.

Why would anyone voluntarily move there? Kathleen Norris did. She left a life in New York City, and embraced the austere bleakness that is northwest South Dakota. Many of her friends were flabbergasted at the move, and this book is largely an answer to why she did it. There are three principal subject matters: the environment, which encompasses the land and the weather; the kind of people who struggle to live there; and, as indicated by the subtitle, "a spiritual geography," dollops of philosophical musings. Norris has brief chapters entitled "Weather Report", with a given date, and generally the reports are not surprises, save, perhaps, the extremes that they can cover. Early in the book she assesses the dynamic tensions and contradictions in the people with a: "...between hospitality and insularity....between open hearts and closed minds." Later she says: "Small-town society often reminds me of the old joke about academic politics--they're so vicious because there so little at stake." And one of the sadder observations that she makes, and counterintuitive in some ways, since you would figure that it is the remote places that reading is more likely alternative: "Many teachers here also seem to give up any thought of lifelong learning... why so many adults in a town like Lemmon stop reading. More than once I've been surprised to discover that people who show no sign that they've ever read a book in their lives, are in fact former teachers, college graduates from the days when an education was said to mean something." She fleshes out these general observations with pithy vignettes involving the very real people of the town.

Concerning how the inhabitants relate to the past, Norris says: "One popular form of writing on the Plains is the local history. These books reveal a great deal about the people who write them but do not often tell the true story of the region... As one old-timer told me, `people have been writing it the way they wished it had been instead of the way it was.'"But it this a "differential diagnosis" of the region's people, or a broader observation on how much of history is written?

As to the philosophical musings, her erudition shines through, and her referential points bounce from Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century to Carl Jung. Fitting for a place with `spiritual geography', she becomes involved with a nearby Benedictine monastery, and mentions the tales of Heloise and Abelard, when the "monk's face brightens, almost innocently, as he says, "It was the Benedictines who castrated him, you know.'" One might assume it was time to move on!Some of her spiritual geography might be too "new age" for some readers, but I was able to suspend some of my natural cynicism, and reflect on the impact of that "infinite horizon."

So few people live in this area, and only a hand-full have Norris's knowledge and perspective, which is the real strength of this book. Particularly for those on the coasts, looking out their windows as they do indeed "fly over," this book would make their journey much more insightful.

Plains Ponderings
'Dakota' was somewhat rambling but had several good nuggets of thought about how location affects our outlook.Broadens the mind to stretch now and then. ... Read more

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An introduction to the geography, history, economy, people, environmental issues, and interesting sites of North Dakota. ... Read more

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Examines the geography, history, natural resources, people, and sports of the Flickertail State. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Needs a better editor
I bought this book for my daughter to bring to Guatemala to give to her host family.I thought it would be good because it was written in English and Spanish.The book is very colorful with nice pictures, but unfortunately who ever edited this book forgot a few facts.The biggest of which is a two page spread on the state fish. It says the state fish is a northern pike and it has a drawing for children to learn to draw the state fish.Too bad the fish they are actually drawing looks like a steel head trout and nothing like a northern pike. There is even a color pic of these so called northerns, but they don't look anything like the dark green and white spotted fish I know a northern should look like.

The other bigerror is the map in which major cities of the state are listed.It puts Stanley and Medora, boths towns of a few hundred people as major cities, while eliminating both Minot and Dickinson, which number in the thousands (yes, these are the big towns in North Dakota)

I emailed the publisher about these issues, they never got back to me.It seems to me, that a book like this, should have the basic facts correct. ... Read more

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Describes the history, geography, government, economics, and people of North Dakota. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Lisbon is a city in Ransom County, North Dakota in the United States. It is the county seat of Ransom County. The population was 2,292 at the 2000 census. Lisbon is located at 46°26′21″N 97°41′1″W / 46.43917°N 97.68361°W / 46.43917; -97.68361 (46.439141, -97.683520). According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 2.2 square miles (5.8 km²), all of it land. Lisbon is at the intersection of State Highways 27 (5th Avenue) and 32 (Main Street). ... Read more

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Webster's bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on "North Dakota," including when used in literature (e.g. all authors that might have North Dakota in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of timeline events associated with North Dakota when it is used in proper noun form. Webster's timelines cover bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage. These furthermore cover all parts of speech (possessive, institutional usage, geographic usage) and contexts, including pop culture, the arts, social sciences (linguistics, history, geography, economics, sociology, political science), business, computer science, literature, law, medicine, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and other physical sciences. This "data dump" results in a comprehensive set of entries for a bibliographic and/or event-based timeline on the proper name North Dakota, since editorial decisions to include or exclude events is purely a linguistic process. The resulting entries are used under license or with permission, used under "fair use" conditions, used in agreement with the original authors, or are in the public domain. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Walsh County is a county located in the U.S. state of North Dakota. As of 2000, the population was 12,389. Its county seat is Grafton. Walsh County was created by the 1881 territorial legislature and organized on August 30, 1881 from the northern parts of Grand Forks County and southern parts of Pembina County. It is named in honor of George H. Walsh (1845 - 1913), a newspaperman and politician in Grand Forks. Grafton became the county seat in 1881. ... Read more