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I’m Pat Tyrer from Canyon, Texas for the High-Plains-Public-Radio-Readers Book Club. I’m excited to talk about A Gentleman in Moscow, one of my very favorite books.

In this book set in a terrible war time where a boy had to go out every day just to get water so his family could survive, hope is an important theme.

The “Great War.” The “war to end all wars.” Is there such a thing? Without actually asking those questions Erich Remarque gives us an answer and that answer is no.

All Quiet on the Western Front was quite controversial after publication in January of 1928. If book sales, however, had been a sign of success All Quiet… would have been enshrined on the New York Times best seller list. In Germany, sales exceeded one million copies in the first year.

Hi, This is Janice Northerns, coming to you from Wichita, Kansas, for Poets on the Plains. Today, I’ll be sharing a poem by a writer whose work I’ve long admired, Steve Brisendine. Steve lives in Mission, Kansas, but he grew up in Liberal, where I spent a quarter of a century. We both worked for the local newspaper there, though not at the same time..

While the Indigenous populations of the plains are the first peoples to live on and migrate across the landscape, the opening of trade with Santa Fe in 1821 marked the beginning of a series of treks across the Kansas plains by a variety of travelers. Those seeking fortune in the gold fields of California or Colorado, or those wanting a better life on their own piece of ground were also joined by immigrants and Civil War veterans who took up land under the provisions of the Homestead Act, and by the cowboys who drove their herds from Texas to Abilene and Dodge City. Many who crossed or stayed in Kansas brought their heritage with them in songs. Sung around campfires, to restless cattle herds, or in one-room schoolhouses, they offer an insight into Kansas history and of the characters and events that shaped the state.

Hello, I’m former Oklahoma Poet Laureate Benjamin Myers, and I would like to share with you a poem by Jim Burrows. Jim Burrows is a poet and real estate appraiser based in Stillwater, Oklahoma, but born and raised in Cordell. He is the author of the 2015 poetry collection Back Road. His poems have appeared in Rattle, The Southwest Review, The Dark Horse, Oklahoma Today, PN Review, and many other journals.

Hi, I’m Shaun Dunn from Lincoln, Nebraska here for HPPR’s Radio Readers Book Club. John Steinbeck is one of my favorite authors, so I was excited to re-read what is arguably his most celebrated book: The Grapes of Wrath.

The Joads and 2.5 million other Oklahomans and Midwesterners left the dust bowl for California. Grapes of Wrath chapter 19 “And then the dispossessed were drawn west—from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out.”