A thorough academic work on matrilineal descent among Athapaskan groups.
A scholarly book investigates why Athapaskan-speaking people trace their lineage through their mothers.
The Athapaskan languages are spoken among the Indigenous people of Alaska and western Canada (specifically British Columbia and the Yukon). These people have traditionally traced their descent from their mothers as opposed to their fathers, a rare custom for hunter-gatherer societies. Allen (Lessons Learned Along the Way, 2017) suspects that this tradition has its origin in local trading practices, specifically with the Tlingit, a non-Athapaskan coastal people who also trace their descent matrilineally. The coastal Tlingit had extensive trading networks with the Athapaskan people, who tended to live farther inland. The author argues that it was advantageous for the Tlingit to extend their system of matrilineal sibs (or clan groups) to their Athapaskan trading partners, which they did by marrying Tlingit women to Athapaskan men. The custom was often characterized by matrilocality: the practice wherein husbands would leave their own groups to live with the families of their wives. Using 19th- and 20th-century ethnographic works as his source material, Allen lays out the social and economic structures of the Athapaskan people prior to widespread European interaction, illustrating how contact between diverse parties spread unique matrilineal practices across a large portion of northwest North America. This short book was written originally as Allen’s master’s thesis in 1971 and has not been augmented to make it more palatable for a general readership. The author offers little background information to give context for the work’s relevance, and the prose is rather dense and jargon-heavy: “Among the Vunta Kutchin, Balikci noticed that sibs exogamy was not rigidly enforced. He also regarded the tendjeratsia sib as a convenient way of classifying the descendants of sib endogamous marriages.” The specialized language is occasionally broken up by lovely, uncredited, full-color illustrations of Athapaskan traders, elders, dancers, and scenes of domestic life. Though not for a wide audience, Allen’s book is deliberative and well-documented, and he manages to condense a wide body of research into one cohesive argument. Those interested in the culture of Athapaskan people should enjoy this investigation into their matriliny.
A thorough academic work on matrilineal descent among Athapaskan groups.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4602-8235-9
Page Count: 80
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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