"The Great Plains, America's Lingering Wild" by Michael Forsberg, Dan O'Brien, David Wishart, and Ted Kooser, University of Chicago Press, $45, 260 pages

This book is a magnificent collaboration of pictures and words, authors and photographer.

It meshes a geographer's vision of the Great Plains through the long view of geology and then human habitation. A noted novelist gives his personal recollections and imaginations from a lifetime on the Great Plains. A poet provides a metaphorical beginning. And the photographer … well, he just lifts our souls with beauty.

This large, sturdy book is much more than a coffee- table volume. It shows the Great Plains, a good one-fifth of America, as it was, as it is and as it could be (with future choices).

The book is the result of four years of travel up and down the Plains, from Mexico to Canada and all that vast area in between, by Lincoln photographer Michael Forsberg. His travel companion for much of that time was Dan O'Brien, a South Dakota bison rancher and author of many books.

David Wishart, University of Nebraska-Lincoln geographer and author who edited the "Great Plains Encyclopedia," gives us opening essays on each of three major Plains regions - north, south and tallgrass prairie - with maps. The introduction is by Nebraska's Ted Kooser, 13th U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner in poetry.

This is a book with an attitude. As O'Brien writes in the first of his essays, "There is the eternal dialogue of the Great Plains. How are we humans to relate to the transient wonders we have seen? Has the hubris of humans condemned not only us but the land itself? Is man's interest in something so fragile as the Plains a loving caress or a kiss of death? Can our intellect and our capacity for hope be an agent in the restoration and nourishment of this continent's enchanted heartland?"

The Great Plains is one of the Earth's most endangered environments, having lost all but a tiny remnant of its tallgrass prairies and much of the rest endangered by mining and drilling, overgrazing and toxic pollution. Wildlife is disappearing from lost habitat, and the number of endangered and extinct species grows annually.

Forsberg's photos show these intrusions by human development, along with his breathtaking double-page landscape spreads and close encounters with cougars, rare black-footed ferrets, waterfowl and much, much more. Wishart cites disturbing trends and past injustices from his studies. And O'Brien gives us a human look at the tortured history of Great Plains boom-and-bust development that is now resulting in a spread of ghost towns.

This is also a very personal book, with nothing standoffish. Forsberg's field notes bring us right down into the mud and ice of taking pictures, including underwater in a fairly shallow Plains creek. We get into O'Brien's mind and thinking, and we enjoy his casual conversations with Plains residents. It is a neighborly view of a huge landscape.

This book cries out to be read and enjoyed. Don't just thumb through to look at the pictures. Set the book down on a table and read the stories and the histories. It will amaze and engage you. You will view the Great Plains in new and enchanting ways.

Francis Moul, Lincoln, is the author of the book "The National Grasslands."