A poignant though too brief memoir by a prominent Native American author of young-adult fiction. Sneve (The Sioux, 1993, etc.) offers vignettes from the lives of her female ancestors. Flora Driving Hawk, whom the author knew as ``Unci,'' was small in size but nevertheless a strong-willed and determined woman. An Indian and a devout Christian, she was equally comfortable telling her children and grandchildren stories from her tribe's oral tradition and humming her favorite hymns. She was the granddaughter of High Bear, a chief who fought Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn. ``Kunsi,'' Sneve's great-grandmother, was a Ponca who married into the Sioux nation and became conversant with the traditions of each tribe. Her husband, a Santee Sioux, was exiled from his native Minnesota to South Dakota in the aftermath of the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862. Sneve relates this story, and many others from the history of the Ponca and the Sioux, in a stream-of-consciousness manner that reflects the style of Native American storytelling. Many myths from the oral tradition are included, among them the tale of White Buffalo Calf Woman, who gave the Sioux their sacred pipe. The author also gives details of the tribes' folkways: food, the role of women, the winter count by which they kept track of the years. Interwoven with the portraits of these remarkable women and their people is the biography of Sneve herself, who used information gathered from them as source material for many of her books. She completes the family circle by closing with the stories of her mother, who grew up on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, and of her own life. A genealogical table clarifies the relationships, and historical family photographs add to the book's intimacy. A heartfelt account of Indian history and tradition by a masterful storyteller.
Pub Date: May 31, 1995
ISBN: 0-8032-4226-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
