This is a strong, beautiful novel about life of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewas in 1950s South Dakota when Congress considered terminating the reservation and kicking out all the Native Americans. Two main characters are Patrice, and her uncle Thomas who fights against the termination bill.
Louise Erdrich won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2021 with this work.
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History is inevitable; so is love. When you know so much more about a future together, how much should you share? Even though knowing won’t change anything, how much should you tell?
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I read this wonderful little book every couple of years in the run up to Christmas. Scrooge’s reclamation never fails to bring me a bit of cheer and hope that things aren’t really as bad as they seem. In 2016 I had the realization that A Christmas Carol is a classic hero journey (as described by Joseph Campbell). I’ve always been troubled by the passage of time in this story and decided to pay more attention to that this year and now understand the time problem when set in the hero’s journey framework.
The purpose of art is to encapsulate a slice of life in writing, painting, sculpture, or other medium and present it in a way that shows the human condition. Katherine Heiny has written a humorous and poignant novel that captures 17 years of Jane’s life between 2002 and 2019. We can see ourselves in Jane as she works through an ordinary life filled with the mundane, the tragic, and the sublime.
Heather Cox Richardson has the ability of great historians to say “see these events today?” and write a compelling narrative to explain how it started hundreds of years ago and continued to the current day. This book clearly spells out how the suppression and demonization of Blacks by 17th century southern land owners continued to be a successful way of the rich and powerful dominating the 21st century. Read the book, subscribe to her newsletter, or both.
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