from author's website: " Tuesday, September 12, 2006 IN SHORT; NONFICTION By FRAN HANDMAN Published: March 25, 1990 GREAT PLAINS PATCHWORK: A Memoir by Marilyn Coffey. (Iowa State University, $21.95.) The novelist Marilyn Coffey has put together an entertaining, insightful collection of stories, combining fact and legend, about her beloved central plains between the mid-1880's and the late 1950's. ''Like a speck on the eastern horizon appears a wagon loaded with Coffeys,'' who in 1885 migrated west to the Great Plains from Illinois. # There were 10 of them - great-grandfather James, his wife, Mary, their seven sons and a daughter. The Coffey boys were a raucous bunch who liked a good joke, usually physical, and would try anything once - great-uncle Ben even entered a ''bear-wrassling'' contest and won. Stories of the family are integrated with graphic firsthand descriptions by survivors of the natural disasters that periodically struck the Plains - floods, grasshopper infestations, tornadoes, man-made mischief on a grand scale. Ms. Coffey offers insights on what it is to grow up in Middle America. It ''gives one a different perspective on history than the typical Easterner has, an inside-out view.'' As a child, she ''never doubted for an instant'' that she ''was dead center in the middle of everything . . . a world narrowed by dust storms, bread lines, and Al Capone.'" ( )