This “Tour Guide Confidential” just doesn’t have quite the same zest as other memoirs of this nature.
A memoir about working as a cultural tour guide in rural Alaska.
This remembrance of working briefly as a guide in remote Alaska may prove a bit too academic for biography fans and a bit too straightforward to intrigue the literary crowd. Now an anthropologist (more properly, a “project ethnographer”) at Simon Fraser University, Bunten wrote this diary of sorts while she was studying for her doctorate at UCLA. There, she discovered the ferocious system that guides students to certain inevitable ends. “This brand of liberal, elite discrimination disguised as privilege followed me to graduate school,” she writes, “where my advisers in the anthropology department insisted that because I’m Alaska Native, I would have to conduct original research in Alaska….Working for a tribe I’m not related to, in a place I’ve never lived, would have to be proxy for ‘real’ anthropology, the kind where the intrepid explorer travels to an exotic destination to live among strangers in a strange land.” Bunten landed a job with Tribal Tours, a small company in Sitka, Alaska, that focuses on the multifaceted Tlingit people. From here, she walks readers through the strange process of being a tour guide, which includes catering to mobs of ill-informed cruise-ship passengers, cracking bad jokes to skirt issues like cultural genocide, and developing an alternative persona to deal with questions like, “Do you live in a house?” There is also a lot of history, cultural anthropology and a little self-searching about her place among a people who only loosely share her heritage, as well as working in a business that is torn between the economic realities of tourism and the desire to offer visitors a genuine experience that reflects the nature of the Tlingit people. Bunten provides some value for invested readers, but generalists may find this equivalent to reading an intern’s autobiography.
This “Tour Guide Confidential” just doesn’t have quite the same zest as other memoirs of this nature.Pub Date: March 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3462-8
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
