A rough but affecting account of an Apache’s love for his son.
A debut true crime book tells the story of a sudden murder that changes the lives of a Native American father and son.
“Native American Apache legends pass down from father-to-son across centuries,” Hutcheson begins ominously. “Of all those teachings, traditions, and legends, the ‘Legend of the Woman’ is the one they fear the most. Her presence means someone is about to die.” According to the author, there was a beautiful Apache woman sitting in the back seat of the truck as Frank “Wakado” Banashley and his son, Quinten, drove around the vicinity of Hawley Lake in Whiteriver, Arizona, on Dec. 8, 1999. Wakado—who had recently started drinking again after 16 years and whose marriage to Quinny’s mother was quickly falling apart—didn’t want his son to steal snacks from the local convenience store when they find it empty with its door ajar, but he didn’t stop the 17-year-old from doing so. A little while later, they were pulled over by Apache Reservation Police Department Officer Tenny Gatewood, a friend of Wakado’s from boyhood. Despite their friendship, over the course of the interaction both Wakado and Tenny were shot—the latter fatally. For this, Wakado was sentenced to 42 years for second-degree murder. It was inside the prison that he met Hutcheson, a fellow inmate, and decided to tell him what happened that fateful day as well as in the years before and after. It is the stirring story of a man who would do anything for his family, especially his son. The author’s prose tells the tale from Wakado’s perspective, summoning the man’s emotional trauma with stark images: “Deep in Wakado’s soul, those wounds remained suppressed for two decades, and the time had come for them to be free. The small emotional moment with” a faithful friend “caused a seismic event in Wakado that allowed his secret to ooze to the surface like hot magma.” Hutcheson does his best to give the story an intriguing shape, jumping back and forth through time and ending chapters with cliffhangers. Even so, the book reads like it was written by a friend of Wakado’s in terms of its sympathies.
A rough but affecting account of an Apache’s love for his son.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72716-051-2
Page Count: 167
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
bookshelf
