Thirty years’ worth of Deloria’s essays on religion and Native American life, thoughtfully edited and presented. Deloria is famous as a pioneering Native American activist, legal scholar, and writer (God Is Red, 1973, and Custer Died for Your Sins, 1969, among others), but not as a theologian. Yet he spent four years in seminary and was rooted in a multigenerational family legacy of missionary work among Indians, so his theological opinions carry some weight, as well as his customary bite. Historian James Treat has gathered some of Deloria’s most memorable essays and chapters published since 1969, arranged topically and arguing for native autonomy and the need for Indians to eschew white-dominated Christianity and return to traditional tribal religions. Deloria’s battles with religious institutions are a recurring motif, as we see him criticizing the Episcopal Church’s missions to Indians (he resigned from the Church’s task force for minorities in 1969). Other essays deal with legal topics like religious freedom and the government’s responsibilities for redress of native grievances. Always, Deloria approaches religion with his attorney mindset: he is pragmatic, solution-oriented, and impatient with illogical arguments. His 1990s essays are generally more even-tempered than his bluntly radical writings from the early 1970s, but some issues still clearly push his buttons. He is particularly choleric about the trendy appropriation of Native American spirituality by whites, an exploitation which Deloria regards as dangerous. (“The non-Indian appropriator conveys the message that Indians are indeed a conquered people and that there is nothing that Indians possess . . . that non-Indians cannot take whenever and wherever they wish,” Deloria warned in 1992.) The essays are finished off by Deloria’s 1998 afterword, in which he describes in fascinating detail how his own intellectual development was influenced by scholars as divergent as Rudolf Bultmann and James Cone, as well as by “the stories of spiritual power and revelation” he learned growing up. A forceful and clear-sighted anthology.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-415-92115-5
Page Count: 311
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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