ATLAS OF THE GREAT PLAINS. By Stephen J. Lavin, Fred M. Shelley, and J. Clark Archer

TLAS OF THE GREAT PLAINS. By STEPHEN J. LAVIN, FRED M. SHELLEY, and J. CLARK ARCHER. xvi and 335 pp.; maps, diagrs., ills., bibliog. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780803215368. Atlases, perhaps the geographer's most fundamental contribution to knowledge, are not as common as one might hope. Collaborative expertise is necessary and production costs are high, especially for full-color efforts on quality stock. Heavy financial subsidies are almost always required. Given these hurdles, we are fortunate to welcome to our collective bookshelf a well-crafted new reference work on the North American midland. The Atlas of the Great Plains was conceived as a companion volume to David Wishart's 2004 Encyclopedia of the Great Plains. The well-regarded Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska sponsored both volumes and raised additional funds within the university, from the Omaha World-Herald newspaper, and from plains enthusiasts William and Sandra Condon of Sterling, Colorado. They also recruited an able trio of authors who had worked together successfully on two previous atlases. Quality marks this book throughout. Employing an 8.5-by-11-inch format, the volume uses heavy, coated stock that holds ink well and a sewn binding that allows pages to lie flat. It weighs an impressive 4 pounds. The page layout, map quality, and color selection are equally impressive. Generous amounts of white space set off the graphics, and the colors are rich, varied, and well chosen. Cartographer Stephen Lavin, who died as this project was in final production, went out in style. The atlas's internal arrangement is standard. Four reference maps come first, then sections on the environment, history, population, rural settlement / agriculture, and urban settlement / economy. Three cultural sections complete the book: politics; recreation and services (media, sports, medical issues, the arts); and social indicators (education, crime, religion, and more). These chapters range in length from twenty-two pages (environment) to fifty pages (population), and each has about an equal ratio of text to graphics. Of the 312 maps, 45 occupy a page alone and most of the others, often historical series, appear in pairs (122) or quartets (88). These size variations generally work well. County-level data show up clearly even on the smaller maps, and only rarely does a large map seem underutilized. Two features make the atlas nearly unique and especially valuable. First, echoing Wishart's encyclopedia, was a decision to include both the Canadian and the United States portions of the plains. The choice was logical, of course, but it more than doubled the authors' workload to find and mesh comparable data. Readers will be fascinated to see which phenomena stop at the border (for example, oats, Taco John's restaurants, and Ukrainians) and which do not (ethanol, the name "Great Plains," and Walmart, for instance). They also will realize how seldom they have seen any sort of U.S. and Canadian distributions on a single map. The atlas's second innovation is contextual as well. Just as the two large areas of plains cannot be fully understood apart from one another, neither can the regional core be isolated from its periphery. Strict definitions of the "Great Plains" may exclude Dallas, Kansas City, and Winnipeg, for example, but such places affect the region greatly. Similarly, the pattern of any plains phenomenon is better understood by seeing that distribution for the adjacent Rocky Mountains, Iowa, and central Saskatchewan, So the authors wisely mapped a larger entity they call the "continental midland"--fifteen states plus three provinces--in their entirety. …