A straightforward and richly atmospheric illustrated look at traditional Navajo customs.
A collection of stories and wisdom from traditional Navajo culture.
In this third edition of a work originally published in 1991, Hooker shares the pictures of Navajo photographer Helen Lau Running and adds extensive interviews and commentary of her own to a text in which the Diné people talk about their traditional ways of life (the interviewees would often demonstrate time-honored Navajo techniques for Hooker, which Running would photograph). In these pages, readers are introduced to the quotidian aspects of traditional Navajo life, from handling animals to cooking food to constructing buildings like the communal hogans at the heart of Navajo life. In every chapter, Hooker talks with older Navajo people who’ve grown up in the old cultural ways and encourages them to explain how they go about building a traditional mud oven, preparing food in the old ways, and so on, always stressing the superiority of natural ingredients like yucca or grass brush over industrialized store-bought alternatives. This connection to the natural world runs through every aspect of the book, intensified by the evocative black-and-white photos in every chapter. Hooker is adept at finding interesting people to interview, as when she talks with Hazel Nez, a weaver of Navajo rugs for over 40 years, or with the Deal family about the rhythms of sheepherding (“When we herd, we listen to the animals and do what they want to do”). The book is eye-opening for readers unfamiliar with Diné culture, though the episodic nature of the strung-together interviews can make the reading experience feel disjointed. Hooker partially compensates for this with her strong, readable prose: “On this site consisting of rocks, sand, and clay, with a few sprawling juniper trees,” she writes, “the women take their shovels and jab them into the earth; their blades clang against rock.”
A straightforward and richly atmospheric illustrated look at traditional Navajo customs.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9798991333603
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Soulstice Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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