In "Dakota Boy," a skilled writer gives a thoughtful, entertaining account of his childhood in North Dakota's Red River Valley in the 1940's and early '50's, depicting the haphazard, often comical, hit-and-miss process by which the child and adolescent tries to build an identity. Along the way, he traces the gradual expansion of social consciousness, explores his puzzling, unsatisfying relationship with his distant, taciturn father, and shows the indelible, inescapable influence of the Northern Plains environment: the severe climate, the table flat fields of potatoes and wheat under an...