A sensitive, well-told story of one life ruined by the racism of involuntary assimilation.
A Native Canadian boy tries to find his way as a man despite his cultural alienation in this novel.
The residential school system aimed to forcibly assimilate Native peoples by taking children from their parents. The kids were given European names, punished for speaking their own languages, and put to work. Abuses and exploitation were rife, and many children died. In this tale, Migizi Baswenaazhi, a young Native boy, is taken from his home and put in a harsh school where he’s assigned the name David Bass. Unlike many children, he survives disease and the bad food; polite and hardworking, he at first does well. But David is an outsider in his own country. He turns to drinking for escape and wrecks whatever he’s built up. Yet he’s hopeful, reflecting that he’s like the tannery furs that become soft and warm again after harsh processing: “The truth of the material survived everything.” World War II gives David the opportunity to find his truth as a warrior. But helping to liberate Bergen-Belsen disturbs him, bringing back memories about being sexually abused by a priest at the school. At home, he’s hailed as a hero, though by 1960 he still can’t protect his family from the schools. According to the book’s introduction by Baron Alexander Deschauer (Slaves of Circumstance, 2017, etc.) and debut author Lucky Deschauer, “Hitler was so inspired by the residential school system…that he used it as a model for the concentration camps.” It’s true that Hitler found inspiration from the design of Native American reservations but not from the schools, so this statement and the title are misleading. That said, the schools were horrific, and this novel is far more thoughtful than its sensationalist introduction or title would suggest. The Deschauers capture David’s point of view with intelligence and sympathy. A farmer’s harsh words strike him “like the branches that slapped my face when I was young and followed my father in the bush,” as if even then the world conspired to slap David with his ethnicity. They portray David’s complications well—his anger, self-hatred, despair, and rationalizations—as when he beats his wife with his belt: “I knew how to do it; the sisters and brothers did it often enough to us. They helped me become the man I was.”
A sensitive, well-told story of one life ruined by the racism of involuntary assimilation.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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