GOOD FRIDAY ON THE REZ

Name: GOOD FRIDAY ON THE REZ
Author: David Hugh Bunnell
ISBN: 978-1-250-11253-8

by David Hugh Bunnell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 25, 2017

A well-intended memoir with forgivable flaws in the service of the greater good of delivering a portrait of reservation life...

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An Indian rights sympathizer returns to the site of an iconic moment in Native American resistance: Wounded Knee.

Bunnell, a white native of Alliance, Nebraska—what he calls “the most boring town in America,” though not without affection—grew up around Sioux people, though often the rootless, wandering, and drunken kind that filled the town’s back alleys, jail, and morgue. The kind he encountered when the American Indian Movement rose up in 1973 at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of the last major massacre in the Indian Wars, were a different sort, muscular, disciplined, and well-armed—“long-haired big-city Indians,” he writes, “some with revolvers tucked in the waistbands of their blue jeans.” The young Bunnell cut his teeth bringing in supplies, questioned by a vigorous security force whether his intention was to poison the activists but then allowed to come and go. Here he recounts those episodes, mixing them with anecdotes about the people he met on the scene and what has become of them, as well as what has become of the entire Lakota Nation at Pine Ridge, a place as remote as any on the continent, just this side of the “North American pole of inaccessibility.” That puts places like Pine Ridge, Kyle, and Wounded Knee out of view of most wasicus, or white people, and even if Bunnell insists that “everyone should come to Wounded Knee at least once,” this little travelogue by way of memoir is about as close as most readers will get. The author’s constant asides on the virtues and demerits of small-town life (“name a fancy New York restaurant that offers you the choice of three outstanding side dishes with every entree”) can be a little much, but his reports from the front line then and now are urgent and important.

A well-intended memoir with forgivable flaws in the service of the greater good of delivering a portrait of reservation life over the course of half a century.

Pub Date: April 25, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-250-11253-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

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)