Welsch’s gratitude toward the Omahas and Pawnees is real, his outrage at their painful history is justified, and his story...
A Nebraska-born folklorist shares how his life and perspectives have changed as a result of his 60-year-long relationship with Native American communities.
Welsch (My Nebraska: The Good, the Bad, and the Husker, 2011, etc.) resides with his wife in Dannebrog, Neb., (pop. 347) on land he has returned to the Pawnees—and on which he continues to live “by their grace.” Through personal interest, the author developed lifelong friendships with members of the Omaha and Pawnee nations, having been officially accepted as a member of both tribes. Welsch offers a disclaimer early on that his book is a memoir of his own experience of being accepted into another culture—a “casual, straggling conversation,” not a scholarly study, nor an attempt to speak on American Indians’ behalf. This approach makes the book authentic and engaging, if repetitious, and frees the author to toss in as much snark as he pleases. Welsch doesn’t suffer fools (most of mainstream white America, especially Nebraska football fans) gladly and doles out smug exaggerations where a touch of perceptive wit would be more effective and less alienating. Nonetheless, he writes ably and knowledgeably about a variety of topics, offering readers plenty to learn and enjoy. Welsch praises much of Indian culture, including civil debates, eloquent speechmaking, rich oral history, gift-giving practices, patriotism, community and lack of conflict among faiths. He also leverages his unique position as a full member of both cultures to humorously highlight the differences between Native and white cultures, such as “Indian Time,” and to deconstruct stereotypes in white and Native relations.
Welsch’s gratitude toward the Omahas and Pawnees is real, his outrage at their painful history is justified, and his story is proof that Native American culture is still alive and complex.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8032-2532-9
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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