While it deftly captures the intricacies of firefighting, this book would benefit from more color and character development.
A Native American explores the history of the firefighting crews he served on for three decades.
As the Western United States suffers through another devastating fire season, the ranks of those fighting the blazes likely include hundreds of Native Americans. This is not a novel phenomenon. As debut author Whiteplume shows in his revealing history of the Sho-Rap Fire Crew Organization from Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation, “federal wildland fire agencies have depended on Native American firefighting crews since the 1940s,” providing “an economic boon for many Indian reservations.” Whiteplume, a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe of Wind River, worked with the Sho-Rap crews for many years and he meticulously documents the evolution of Native American firefighting—from the Office of Indian Affairs’ establishment of a “general fire protection program” in 1910 to the organization of the first Sho-Rap crews in 1967. From rattlesnakes on the trails to “crabby” Sho-Rap bosses, the crews faced all the hazards of their trade and, remarkably enough, always returned from assignments without large-scale casualties or fatalities. “The everyday struggle for a people to survive made us stronger and less prone to carelessness when it came time to battle either enemies or nature,” the author asserts. Vivid details from the firefighting front and historical photos enliven the book. In Idaho’s rugged Salmon Country, Whiteplume “lost count of the number of headless rattlers we came across on our hike” to the front, all of them dispatched for the purpose of “removing a fireline hazard.” But the book largely fails to catch fire, in part because Whiteplume focuses on bureaucratic minutiae rather than the more intriguing elements of his story. Problems such as racism—the author recalls seeing a “No dogs, no Indians” sign in the front window of a diner—and alcoholism are mentioned only in passing and readers will learn little about the Sho-Rap firefighters themselves. The author, though, does succeed in giving historical weight to the craft of the Wind River crews, one that, unfortunately, may be fading into oblivion. Unless Native American firefighters are offered another opportunity to be “a positive force in America’s forests,” Whiteplume warns, “then the Sho-Raps along with some other native crews will be just another historical footnote.”
While it deftly captures the intricacies of firefighting, this book would benefit from more color and character development.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-88912-1
Page Count: 186
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2017
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
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