I havewritten
about indigenous peoples and about the idealized
trajectory of American history.
But neither of these projects prepared me for the
astonishing, mind-bending lens-reversal of Indigenous
Continent, the story of “what happened here,” from the point of view of the
first tribal-nations occupants through a narrative that gives the lie to Robert
Frost’s “the land was ours before we were the land’s.” Scrupulously researched, not a polemic,
Hamalainen’s text feels like a bracing corrective.
American history and self-understanding have long depended on the notion of a "colonial America", an era that-according to prevailing accounts-laid the foundation for the modern United States. In Indigenous Continent, the acclaimed historian Pekka Hamalainen shatters this Eurocentric narrative by retelling the four centuries between first contacts and the peak of Native power from Indigenous points of view. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth, the American Revolution and other well-worn episodes on the conventional timeline, Hamalainen depicts a sovereign world of distinctive Native nations whose members, far from simple victims of colonial aggression, controlled the continent well into the…
For more than three
decades, since it won the National Book Award for Fiction, this classic has
been sitting unread on my shelf – out a woefully-misconstrued fear that I would
find it abstruse, even “precious.”
How abysmally, embarassingly wrong I have
been – and how thrilled I am to commend this elegaic, landscape-driven prose
poem to everyone who loves an impeccably-constructed masterpiece, its violence
transcendant, its young protagonist, John Grady Cole, stoic and enduring, its
spirit of place on the Southwest frontier tipping into Mexico replete with
beauty and tragedy.
John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
The first volume in McCarthy's legendary Border Trilogy, All The Pretty Horses is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about the passing of childhood, of innocence and a vanished American…
The
Swedish-English author Tom Rob Smith made his smashing debut with the
international best-seller Child 44,
in 2008 which, after I devoured it, I figured he couldn’t supercede.
On the
contrary – The Farm, a multi-layered,
tricky, shape-shifting meditation on truth-telling – is now securely on my
most-loved list. The premise is simple: Our narrator, Daniel, travels from his
home in London to the remote farm in Sweden where he believes his parents are
enjoying a pleasurable retirement, only to be warned by his mother that
“everything that Father has told you is a lie…I need the police.”
The
labyrinthine struggle between illusion and veracity never lets up, and to call
this book a page-turner is inadequate – it’s an open-ended page-blurrer that left me wilfully
disoriented and manipulated.
From the author of Child 44, soon to be a major film starring Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace and Gary Oldman, comes an intricately-knitted thriller in the vein of John Le Carre's APerfect Spy.
Daniel believed that his parents were enjoying a peaceful retirement on a remote farm in Sweden, the country of his mother's birth. But with a single phone call, everything changes.
Your mother... she's not well, his father tells him. She's been imagining things - terrible, terrible things.In fact, she has been committed to a mental hospital.
Before Daniel can board a plane to Sweden, his mother calls:…
Time magazine called her “the Dancer of the Century.” Her technique, used by dance companies throughout the world, became the first long-lasting alternative to the idiom of classical ballet. Her pioneering movements—powerful, dynamic, jagged, edgy, forthright—combined with her distinctive system of training, were the epitome of American modernism, performance as art. Her work continued to astonish and inspire for more than sixty years as she choreographed more than 180 works.
Neil Baldwin, author of admired biographies of Man Ray and Thomas Edison, gives us the artist and performer, the dance monument who led a cult of dance worshippers as well as the woman herself in all of her complexity.
I have read this book to my grandson at least ten times and now he reads it by himself.
He loves it because it is relatable (main character besides the Coyote is a little boy), funny (the convoluted conversations between the two), and most of all, tricky (there’s a pervasive unanswered question that, when finally answered, causes some very strange things to happen).
One day, a purple coyote appeared on the hill. A coyote unlike any other. A purple coyote.
Jim's never seen a purple coyote before, and he's determined to find out how the creature got his unusual color. But the coyote isn't saying. It's a big secret. So is the reason why the coyote howls a strange howl and dances a strange dance. Jim is stumped, and the more he questions the coyote, the more frustrated he becomes. Then one day the secret is revealed . . . .
