A straightforward and richly atmospheric illustrated look at traditional Navajo customs.
A collection of stories and wisdom from traditional Navajo culture.
In this third edition of a work originally published in 1991, Hooker shares the pictures of Navajo photographer Helen Lau Running and adds extensive interviews and commentary of her own to a text in which the Diné people talk about their traditional ways of life (the interviewees would often demonstrate time-honored Navajo techniques for Hooker, which Running would photograph). In these pages, readers are introduced to the quotidian aspects of traditional Navajo life, from handling animals to cooking food to constructing buildings like the communal hogans at the heart of Navajo life. In every chapter, Hooker talks with older Navajo people who’ve grown up in the old cultural ways and encourages them to explain how they go about building a traditional mud oven, preparing food in the old ways, and so on, always stressing the superiority of natural ingredients like yucca or grass brush over industrialized store-bought alternatives. This connection to the natural world runs through every aspect of the book, intensified by the evocative black-and-white photos in every chapter. Hooker is adept at finding interesting people to interview, as when she talks with Hazel Nez, a weaver of Navajo rugs for over 40 years, or with the Deal family about the rhythms of sheepherding (“When we herd, we listen to the animals and do what they want to do”). The book is eye-opening for readers unfamiliar with Diné culture, though the episodic nature of the strung-together interviews can make the reading experience feel disjointed. Hooker partially compensates for this with her strong, readable prose: “On this site consisting of rocks, sand, and clay, with a few sprawling juniper trees,” she writes, “the women take their shovels and jab them into the earth; their blades clang against rock.”
A straightforward and richly atmospheric illustrated look at traditional Navajo customs.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9798991333603
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Soulstice Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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