If you’re wondering why the presence of Andrew Jackson’s portrait in the Oval Office is offensive, this is your book.
Standing Rock Sioux writer Midge (The Woman Who Married a Bear: Poems, 2016, etc.) delivers powerful, often funny observations on life as a Native American woman in a contentious time.
As poet and novelist Geary Hobson observes in his foreword, Native people are too often thought of, at least by non-Natives, as humorless: “stolid, dour, ready to pounce on you (if you are white) and take away that unnecessary scalp.” Not so Midge, who loves a pun, a play on words, and a goofy recasting of pop-culture tropes: “Gag me with a coup stick” are the first words that appear in the book, followed shortly afterward by an exchange with her mother that includes the title’s play on another title, that of Dee Brown’s classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and works in Chief Joseph with the witticism, “I will fight no more about putting the toothpaste cap on, forever.” The laughter isn’t frivolous, Midge suggests, but rather a way of thumbing a nose at death and the dominant culture. There’s a lot to fight, of course. One of her essays imagines that before trying on African American culture, the one-time headline grabber Rachel Dolezal was a “pretendian,” one of those pretend Indians whose numbers, she reckons, run to about 54% of the population. In another, the author considers other kinds of ethnic border crossings on a trip to Thailand, where she realized that, at least in that context, she was as American as any other American: “big trucks, big talk, big bombs, big money….” She does not, however support Donald Trump, who doesn’t fare well in these pages, and she chides her fellow citizens for being ignorant of “racism, sexism, and living and supporting an authoritarian regime." There are a few misses here and there, but mostly Midge hits, and hits hard.
If you’re wondering why the presence of Andrew Jackson’s portrait in the Oval Office is offensive, this is your book.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4962-1557-4
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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