TO SEE WITH THE HEART: The Life of Sitting Bull

by Judith St. George ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 1996

Copious research substantiates this biography of Sitting Bull, but St. George (Dear Dr. Bell . . . Your Friend, Helen Keller, 1992, etc.) provides no real sense of the man or why he was considered a great leader. A labored text reads like a cut-and-paste exercise, a grinding out of fact after fact, without insights to behavior or an analysis of Sitting Bull as a real person. Much is made of Sitting Bull the warrior; nearly 100 pages precede the information that he was also a holy man who directed his life and the lives of the people for whom he was responsible through visions. Sitting Bull's joy in fatherhood is presented as dry fact; readers do not see any expression of the depth of his feelings until two-thirds into the book, when he mourns the death of a child. His noted sense of humor is not in evidence until the last pages of the book, when he tells a reporter that white people are ""a great people, as numerous as the flies that follow the buffalo."" Some incidents beg for explanation, e.g., young Sitting Bull urges his warriors into battle with the cry, ""Saddle up; saddle up! We are going to fight the soldiers again."" For those still unenlightened as to the bareback-rider stereotype, this is a startling sentence; without attribution in context or in notes, readers have no way of knowing the source of many quotations.

Pub Date: May 7, 1996

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996

Categories: CHILDREN'S