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
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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