A triumph of a remarkable spirit.
Love, pain, and anger radiate from every word of this strikingly beautiful and tragic memoir of an American Indian.
Born on a Navajo reservation in 1950, Nasdijj was raised by alcoholic parents and has lived with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) all his life. For the author, who has worked as a journalist and a teacher, reading is “extremely hard work. Things appear upside down. Writing is worse.” His language flows with incredible elegance and simplicity, and his passions are harnessed by a pure clarity of speech and thought. He has a love-hate relationship with his past and continuously mourns and embraces his own history, remarking that “My repetitions are my failures and my songs.” In stories that often drift into poetry, Nasdijj speaks with tenderness and rage of the genocide he has witnessed; he observes the poverty, the lack of education, the abuse, and the disease that his people continue to suffer. History haunts him, awake and asleep. He writes of his adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, who died of FAS at six and whose ghost still visits his dreams. Writing in pencil on legal pads, he works at picnic tables in a state park, molding homelessness into words. His narrative is not guided by chronology of events. Instead, stories that could each stand on their own are woven together with patterns of image and metaphor: he drifts back and forth in time, mixing memories of his son’s short life with moments from his own adolescence, and sharing the times and travels that have shaped him. One of his more touching recollections is his account of the rebellious and illiterate young boy whom he took under his wing in an attempt to keep him out of trouble with the law. In Nasdijj’s telling, the smallest gesture of responsibility on the boy’s part (ordering his own lunch in a restaurant) resounds with the victorious force of battle won against the odds.
A triumph of a remarkable spirit.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2000
ISBN: 0-618-04892-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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