by Enole Bellegarde ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 29, 2018
A cleareyed, inspirational look at one family’s perseverance in the face of internal and external difficulties.
Bellegarde’s Native American family history is told through stories handed down to the author by her grandmother.
In Bellegarde’s debut collection, she intertwines her grandmother Equay’s tales with lessons and historical context: “By audio recording, we recorded the stories of her life, including the stories that her mother and father gave to her.” The book follows a chronological line from the author’s great-great-grandmother to Equay’s death. Equay’s kokum (grandmother) Willow had two daughters, Bella and Nokum. After the girls’ father dies, Willow takes up with One Heart, a man who beats the girls. One Heart and Willow abandon them in the wild, but they are rescued by an old couple from another tribe. The girls eventually return to their mother, and One Heart’s death is predicted by four hoots of an owl. (Bellegarde, a descendent of the Saulteaux, Cree, and Assiniboine tribes, notes that the number four is a powerful cultural symbol, and it occurs throughout the work.) Nokum marries Raindancer, another victim of abuse and a skilled medicine man. Their first child is Chickendancer, and two years later, Equay is born. While traveling to another tribe, an old man puts a deadly hex on Raindancer. At a feast before he dies, Raindancer predicts four more deaths after his own, including those who cursed him; all die. The author relates several tangential accounts before we learn Equay’s story, which includes her forced attendance at a residential school with cruel priests and nuns, two abusive marriages, the deaths of loved ones, and her late-life rediscovery of the traditional dancing of her father. She tends toward repetitive explanation of Native traditions and beliefs, but Bellegarde’s style is easy and straightforward: “The marriage ceremony preparations kept everyone in our family, Sunshine’s family, and the tribe busy and excited, and everything went as planned.” Throughout, the author details Native American culture and recounts the systematic ill-treatment by whites while maintaining a narrative free of animus.
A cleareyed, inspirational look at one family’s perseverance in the face of internal and external difficulties.Pub Date: March 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5462-1815-9
Page Count: 134
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
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
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.