An enlightening, affirmative look at Inuit culture and history by a devoted champion.
A longtime activist for Native rights in Alaska shares his remarkable journey.
Born in 1941 near Kotzebue Sound to a Lithuanian fur trader who vanished and an Iñupiaq mother who could not care for her children, Hensley was rescued from squalor by a relative and taken to live within a large traditional family in northwest Alaska. His memories of childhood are fond, even though life was extremely hard. The family lived a semi-nomadic existence, mostly “at camp” in the country near Ikkattuq, inhabiting a tiny sod house without electricity, bathroom or proximity to doctors. The summer months were spent hunting, fishing and laboring at odd jobs in order to generate the necessary stores to survive the next winter. Accidents and sudden death regularly claimed family members. At the Bureau of Indian Affairs school organized by missionaries, Hensley became aware that “the goal was to isolate [Native] children from their cultures, to cut them off from the ancient way of life and leave them stranded somewhere between the old world and the new.” He made it his life’s work to rectify this alienation. In the early years of statehood, his family was dispossessed from their home; the Iñupiaq did not think in terms of private property and did not hold written contracts for the places they lived. Hensley plunged into political action, speaking out on the dire need for Natives to claim their land before it was seized by the government. Elected to the state legislature when he was only 25, he engaged in years of tireless lobbying that helped push Congress to pass the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which awarded Natives 44 million acres, 16 percent of the state’s territory. Modest, brave and gracious in sharing credit, Hensley has been instrumental in this history.
An enlightening, affirmative look at Inuit culture and history by a devoted champion.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-15484-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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