HPPR Radio Readers Book Club

I’m Lynn Boitano with memories of celebrating Route 66’s 100th year in Amarillo, Texas. 100 years ago this week, America adopted its US numbered highway system, and Route 66 officially joined the map. To mark that shared birthday, HPPR's Radio Readers Book Club is returning to the Mother Road after our celebrations in May and June.

I’m Lynn Boitano. Climb aboard. We're returning to America's Mother Road. Today marks 100 years since America adopted its US numbered highway system. That's the network that includes familiar roads across HPPR country, US Highway 50, 54, and 83, along with legendary Route 66.

For the past several weeks, the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club has been exploring something that shapes our lives every day, whether we notice it or not: wind and weather. Here on the High Plains, we know something about both.

Hello Radio Readers! This is Marit coming to you from western Lane County with a Radio Readers BookByte about The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin. This tragic story reminds me of a particularly bad winter storm we had when I was in high school in the early 2000s.

In 1902, my great-great-grandfather H.B. Kliewer gained his U.S. citizenship. He had been living in Hillsboro, Kansas, ostensibly orphaned when his father died shortly after the family emigrated from Russia in the late 1880s. Until a few days ago, I had only a vague outline of this story. I knew my family had emigrated from Russia as part of the larger Mennonite migration discussed in David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard, but I was unfamiliar with the texture of this family’s settler story.

I am Martin Fulmer from Goodwell, OK, here for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2026 Fall Read. Growing up in the Carolinas, I never thought of blizzards as part of my weather vocabulary. Hurricanes, yes. But blizzards belonged somewhere else. Melanie Benjamin’s The Children’s Blizzard reminded me that weather has a way of making such distinctions meaningless.

For High Plains Public Radio Readers Book Club, I'm Shane Timson in Colby, Kansas. Today we're talking about the book The Children's Blizzard, by David Laskin. This is about the 1888 blizzard. It affected three states, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota.

In The Children’s Blizzard, David Laskin seeks to unpack the complex history of Anabaptist emigration to the Great Plains and the eventual tragedy of the 1888 blizzard, which took the lives of hundreds of people, many of them children. There are many points where Laskin might impart some sense of cosmic morality to these events, such as when he repeatedly notes that the land that lured these settlers from their Mennonite communities in Europe had been violently seized from the Indigenous peoples who had inhabited it for millennia by the U.S. military and railroad companies.

I'm Glenda Shepard of Yucca Corners farm in rural Stanton County KS. On a 100 plus degree day in August, I have for you my Radio Readers BookByte of The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin.

Hi, this Alan Erwin from Amarillo. I just finished reading The Children's Blizzard, by David Laskin. As I write this, Amarillo's extended weather forecast calls for multiple days over 100 degrees.