Bite-size snacks for the metaphysical appetite.
The iconic Kiowa writer offers an assemblage of parables, poems, vignettes, and a few stark drawings, with the thematic underpinning that all stories are part of a larger universal story.
Momaday (b. 1934), winner of a Pulitzer Prize and numerous lifetime achievement awards, is acclaimed for his work as a fiction writer, poet, and essayist, often blurring the boundaries among categories. In this follow-up to Earth Keeper, the author pretty much obliterates those categories, drawing deeply from dreams, fantasies, personal remembrance, and the wellspring of Native American spirituality to dissolve distinctions between the real and the surreal. “I have heard the thunder of King Lear’s voice on the boards of the Globe Theatre in Elizabethan London,” he writes. “I was spellbound. Emily Dickinson read to me a poem she had written about crickets in which she realized a precision of statement that defies description.” Momaday suggests that if you have dreamed it, you have lived it, and that the you or I of whom you are conscious might itself be a dream. We see these ideas at work in “Dreaming Bear Speaks,” one of the many short narratives in which bears appear—usually not threatening, sometimes dreaming. “Perhaps he dreams of me dreaming of him,” writes the author. “He dreams of being me, of being human.” Night and day, dreams and awakening, fact and fantasy: The boundaries contained therein seem porous throughout these pieces, which combine elements of the fantastical and the matter-of-fact. Despite the title, there aren’t that many drawings, and they appear as representational inkblots, suggesting a tree or a crow or a human visage. The illustrations punctuate the narratives and underscore their thematic unity, but the narratives themselves also have a sketchlike quality—drawings with words. Momaday concludes that these pieces “are random and self-contained, and they are the stuff of story, and story is a nourishment of the soul.” Most spiritually open-minded readers will agree.
Bite-size snacks for the metaphysical appetite.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-321811-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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