Publisher's Synopsis
The year is 1940 on the rugged plains. While the world burns, a boy embarks upon a voyage of self-discovery, haunted by a bone-chilling guilt that follows like a persistent ghost. Moonblindness and the Paleness of Dust: A Memory of a Last Frontier is a brooding tale of the American West, the story of a boy whose life is shaped by events as troubling, violent, and breathtaking as a Kansas storm. Moonblindness is part history of place, part oral history, and part lyric memoir that recounts a family's generational experiences and a boy's adolescence on the Kansas prairie in what might be seen as the waning years of the American frontier. Moonblindness is about tornados, locust plagues, floods, blizzards, cattle drives, starvation, snake hunts, and the bombing of crows. It is a book about fear, hope, courage, loneliness, and disillusionment. Most of all it is a book about the land, a saga of the West in the American landscape with a lovely and disturbing history that serves as a reminder that the past and place of birth leave an indelible stain on each of us. A fourth generation westerner, and an artist, historian, teacher, athlete, and poet, the author brings together a lifetime of growing up in the West. Raw, provocative, and disturbing, his writing captures the essence of the Plains. His is a voice that reeks with dust, sweat-soaked saddles, and cold rain dripping down one's back, a profound ode to the earth, the persistence of spirit, the energy of pla
