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RUNNING FROM COYOTE

A WHITE FAMILY AMONG THE NAVAJO

A sequel to this author’s extraordinary debut is hopefully in the works. One senses she has much more to say.

First-time author Buhler’s charming childhood memoir about growing up on the Navajo Indian Reservation in the early 1960s.

Although the dusty, red landscape of Navajo country has changed little in the past four decades, its people are measurably different today. Even so, not much has been written about the Navajo shifts from traditional culture to modernism during the ’60s, making Buhler’s take an entry-level immersion into one of the most important decades in Navajo history. That the story is captured in real time through the eyes of a young girl is far less important than what those eyes see: newly paved roads, new clinics being built and a turbulent clash of cultures. Coming from a small Texas town and a family tree of racial discrimination, young Buhler’s parents pack her and her siblings up and move to Shiprock, where her father takes a job as gym teacher. Situated across the street from the Navajo boarding school in a segregated housing complex, after months of adjustment, the white family adopts two Navajo boys and slowly absorbs into the culture. On the occasional family reunion back to Texas, Buhler is asked to remove her concho belt and moccasins (traditional Navajo wear), as not to offend her relatives. The stage is set, and the reader delves into the stark contrast between the old generation of white racial intolerance and the new generation thrown into embracing misunderstood cultures. Later, when Buhler’s family leaves the reservation permanently, the road is studded with tension and even tragedy as the world at large shuns her Navajo brothers. Since this narrative is captured through the point of view of a little girl, the story drifts along with day-to-day details and simple language. Yet on turns the book sparkles with revealing moments of poignant insight, such as when the narrator observes the Navajo children entering the boarding school with long hair, only to leave with shaved heads. Or when a Navajo woman points with her lips at another person and not with her finger because the latter is taboo. The epilogue is the most elaborative chapter as the story ends in the racially motivated murder of her adopted brother and Buhler’s self-reconciliation through the Navajo worldview.

A sequel to this author’s extraordinary debut is hopefully in the works. One senses she has much more to say.

Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-595-40543-5

Page Count: 170

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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