Dan O'Brien

Describes a rancher's efforts to make a success of his ranch, the Broken Heart, at the foot of South Dakota's Black Hills and restore the grasslands of the region by bringing back the buffalo to the Great Plains.

Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch

Buffalo for the Broken Heart

A Childhood

From Scarsdale

A predator stalks a cold northern Minnesotan town. There is talk of wolves walking on two legs and attacking people in the deep woods. Lauren Westlake, resourceful and determined F.B.I Agent, has found a connection between the strange murders in the north and a case file almost a hundred years old. Traveling to the cold north, she begins an investigation that spirals deep into the darkness of mythology and nightmares. Filled with creatures of the night and an ancient romance, the revelation of who hunts beneath the moon is more grisly than anyone could have imagined.

Bitten

True Story: A Trilogy gathers together three documentary plays by award-winning playwright and poet Dan O’Brien concerning trauma, both political and personal. The Body of an American speaks to a moment in history when a single, stark photograph—of a US Army Ranger dragged from the wreckage of a Blackhawk helicopter through the streets of Mogadishu—altered the course of global events. In a story that ranges from Rwanda to Afghanistan to the Canadian Arctic, O’Brien dramatizes the ethical and psychological haunting of journalist Paul Watson. In The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage the playwright applies journalistic principles to investigating the source of his childhood unhappiness, as he searches for the reason why his parents and siblings cut him off years ago. The more he learns about his family, the more mysterious the circumstances surrounding their estrangement become, until his sense of self is shaken by rumors regarding his true parentage. The trilogy concludes with New Life, a tragicomedy that finds Paul Watson in Syria and the playwright in treatment for cancer, while together they endeavor to sell a TV series about journalists in war zones. New Life explores the paradox of war as entertainment, and dares to dream of healing after catastrophe. These three gritty yet poetic plays stand as a testament to the value of witnessing, honoring, and perhaps transcending the struggles of living.

True Story: A Trilogy

Orion, the last city of men. Deep within the desert, a secret lay waiting. Young women found dead in the street. A corporation that controls the sleep of a populace that never sees the light of day. Alexander Marlowe seeks to unravel the mysteries of Orion as he helps a young girl, Dana, flee the city. The closer they come to the truth, the greater the danger that hunts them. Follow them as they search beyond the boundaries of everything they have ever known for answers.

Cerulean Dreams

This book is the first devoted to Hume’s conception of testimony. Hume is usually taken to be a reductionist with respect to testimony, with trust in others dependent on the evidence possessed by individuals concerning the reliability of texts or speakers. This account is taken from Hume’s essay on miracles in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. O’Brien, though, looks wider than the miracles essay, turning to what Hume says about testimony in the Treatise, the moral Enquiry, the History of England and his Essays. There are social aspects of testimonial exchanges that cannot be explained purely in terms of the assessment of the reliability of testifiers. Hume’s conception of testimony is integrated with his account of how history informs our knowledge of human nature, the relation between sympathy and belief and between pride and the conception we have of our selves, the role played by social factors in the judgment of intellectual virtue, and the importance Hume places on epistemic responsibility and the moral and personal dimensions of testimonial trust. It is not possible to focus on testimony without allowing other aspects of our nature into the frame and therefore turning also to consider sympathy, wisdom, history, morality, virtue, aesthetic judgment, the self and character. O’Brien argues that Hume’s reliance on the social goes deep and that he should therefore be seen as an anti-reductionist with respect to testimony. Hume on Testimony will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on Hume and on early modern and contemporary approaches to the epistemology of testimony.

Hume on Testimony

Alan Bailey

Provides introductions to classic works of philosophy. This book guides the reader to an understanding of the text as a whole, exploring the reception and influence of this philosophical work.

A Reader's Guide

Hume's 'Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding'

David Hume is widely considered to be the greatest British philosopher and his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is the most frequently studied of all his works - a key text in the study of empiricist thought. This is a hugely important and exciting, yet challenging, piece of philosophical writing. In Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: A Reader's Guide, Allen Bailey and Dan O'Brien explain the philosophical background against which the book was written and the key themes inherent in the text. The book then guides the reader to a clear understanding of the text as a whole, before exploring the reception and influence of this classic philosophical work. This is the ideal companion to study of this most influential and challenging of texts.

Philosophy and gardens have been closely connected from the dawn of philosophy, with many drawing on their beauty and peace for philosophical inspiration. Gardens in turn give rise to a broad spectrum of philosophical questions. For the green-fingered thinker, this book reflects on a whole host of fascinating philosophical themes. Gardens and philosophy present a fascinating combination of subjects, historically important, and yet scarcely covered within the realms of philosophy Contributions come from a wide range of authors, ranging from garden writers and gardeners, to those working in architecture, archaeology, archival studies, art history, anthropology, classics and philosophy Essays cover a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from Epicurus and Confucius to the aesthetics and philosophy of Central Park Offers new perspectives on the experience and evaluation of gardens

Cultivating Wisdom

Gardening - Philosophy for Everyone

Mark May

May takes you onto the playing field and inside the huddle. You'll hear behind-the-scenes stories including May's experiences against opposing players such as Lawrence Taylor, Reggie White, and Mike Singletary. You'll also get May's first-person account of the Redskins' extra curricular activities. Tales from the Washington Redskins also includes May's personal reflections on the people behind the Redskins' success; Jack Kent Cooke, Joe Gibbs, Bobby Beathard, Joe Theismann, John Riggins, The Hogs, and the Washington Redskins' loyal and devoted followers - the "Greatest Fans in the National Football League." May also offers his insight to the new Washington regime under club owner Danny Snyder and why the Redskins' hopes for a return to glory may be nothing more than a pipe dream.

Mark May's Tales from the Washington Redskins

Drawing on O'Brien's experience of cancer and of childhood abuse, and on his ongoing collaboration with a war reporter, the four essays in A Story that Happens--first written as craft lectures for the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the US Air Force Academy--offer hard-won insights into what stories are for and the reasons why, afraid and hopeful, we begin to tell them.

On Playwriting, Childhood, and Other Traumas

A Story That Happens

Poet and playwright Dan O'Brien chronicles the year and a half during which both he and his wife were treated for cancer. On the fourteenth anniversary of 9/11--an event that caused their downtown apartment to become "suffused with the World Trade Center's carcinogenic dust"--Dan O'Brien's wife discovers a lump in her breast. Surgery and chemotherapy soon follow, and on the day of his wife's final infusion, O'Brien learns of his own diagnosis. He has colon cancer and will need to undergo his own intensive treatment over the next nine months. Our Cancers is a compelling account of illness and commitment, of parenthood and partnership. This spare and powerful sequence creates an intimate mythology that seeks meaning in illness while also celebrating of the resilience of sufferers, caregivers, and survivors. As O'Brien explains in an introduction, "The consecutiveness of our personal disasters, with a daughter not yet two years old at the start of it, was shattering and nearly silencing. At hospital bedsides, in hospital beds myself, and at home through the cyclical assaults of our therapies, these poems came to me in fragments, as if my unconscious were attempting to reassemble our lives, our identities and memories . . . as if I were in some sense learning how to speak again."

Poems

Our Cancers

A Project of the Center for Great Plains Studies and the School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska Great Plains Bison traces the history and ecology of this American symbol from the origins of the great herds that once dominated the prairie to its near extinction in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent efforts to restore the bison population. A longtime wildlife biologist and one of the most powerful literary voices on the Great Plains, Dan O'Brien has managed his own ethically run buffalo ranch since 1997. Drawing on both extensive research and decades of personal experience, he details not only the natural history of the bison but also its prominent symbolism in Native American culture and its rise as an icon of the Great Plains. Great Plains Bison is a tribute to the bison's essential place at the heart of the North American prairie and its ability to inspire naturalists and wildlife advocates in the fight to preserve American biodiversity.

Great Plains Bison

McDermot, Nebraska, is a pleasant, scenic western cattle town situated in the Pawnee River valley-just the place for people seeking refuge from their hectic city lives. It is also just the place for those who have made their homes on this haunting prairie since the late nineteenth century. Ideal for both, McDermot means everything to those native inhabitants and something very different to those who are looking for a new life.

Stolen Horses

In this volume, authors Alan Bailey and Dan O’Brien examine the full import of David Hume’s arguments and the context of the society in which his work came to fruition. They analyze the nuanced natured of Hume's philosophical discourse and provide an informed look into his position on the possible content and rational justification of religious belief. The authors first detail the pressures and forms of repression that confronted any 18th century thinker wishing to challenge publicly the truth of Christian theism. From there, they offer an overview of Hume's writings on religion, paying particular attention to the inter-relationships between the various works. They show that Hume's writings on religion are best seen as an artfully constructed web of irreligious argument that seeks to push forward a radical outlook, one that only emerges when the attention shifts from the individual sections of the web to its overall structure and context. Even though there is no explicit denial in any of Hume's published writings or private correspondence of the existence of God, the implications of his arguments often seem to point strongly towards atheism. David Hume was one of the leading British critics of Christianity and all forms of religion at a time when public utterances or published writings denying the truth of Christianity were liable to legal prosecution. His philosophical and historical writings offer a sustained and remarkably open critique of religion that is unmatched by any previous author writing in English. Yet, despite Hume’s widespread reputation amongst his contemporaries for extreme irreligion, the subtle and measured manner in which he presents his position means that it remains far from clear how radical his views actually were.

Hume's Critique of Religion: 'Sick Men's Dreams'

The South Dakota winter gives a man time to think. One subzero morning, as Dan O’Brien approaches his fiftieth year, the autumnal equinox of his life, he takes stock. Feeling a waning sense of purpose, he decides to devote himself entirely, for the first time in his life, to his greatest loves—falconry, his bird dogs, and the prairie he calls home. That summer he obtains a remarkable falcon chick who immediately distinguishes herself by her ferocity. He names the bird Harley and trains her in the ways of falconry. Harley’s powers of flight are awe-inspiring, her hunting success astounding, and like a lover, she captivates him. O’Brien hunts with her obsessively, reveling in her prowess and beauty. What he learns from her and from what happens one wind-driven day lead him to see fully things he had only just begun to glimpse. In this lyrical evocation of the grasslands, Equinox is a story of a life lived close to the natural cycles of the earth and of a midlife revelation of the importance of staying connected to all things held dear.

Life, Love, and Birds of Prey

Equinox

When Fish and Wildlife Special Agent Margaret Adamson comes to South Dakota to approve the development at Brendan Prairie, she meets Bill Malone, a falconer turned professor, but as they renew their relationship, and he returns to falconry and confronts t

Brendan Prairie

Ten stories deal with a grieving son, a junkyard owner, fishermen, farmers, the rescue of a wounded mountain climber, and country life

Eminent Domain

Spécialiste des espèces en voie de disparition, Dan O'Brien a oeuvré à la réintroduction du faucon pèlerin dans les Rocheuses. Il fait un jour le pari fou de réapprendre la vie sauvage à Dolly, une femelle née en captivité. De la frontière canadienne au golfe du Mexique, leur voyage initiatique dessine une amitié hors du commun entre l'homme et l'animal.

Rites D Automne

For more than forty years the prairies of South Dakota have been Dan O’Brien’s home. Working as a writer and an endangered-species biologist, he became convinced that returning grass-fed, free-roaming buffalo to the grasslands of the northern plains would return natural balance to the region and reestablish the undulating prairie lost through poor land management and overzealous farming. In 1998 he bought his first buffalo and began the task of converting a little cattle ranch into an ethically run buffalo ranch. Wild Idea is a book about how good food choices can influence federal policies and the integrity of our food system, and about the dignity and strength of a legendary American animal. It is also a book about people: the daughter coming to womanhood in a hard landscape, the friend and ranch hand who suffers great tragedy, the venture capitalist who sees hope and opportunity in a struggling buffalo business, and the husband and wife behind the ranch who struggle daily, wondering if what they are doing will ever be enough to make a difference. At its center, Wild Idea is about a family and the people and animals that surround them—all trying to build a healthy life in a big, beautiful, and sometimes dangerous land.

Dan O'Brien

Books

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