Book description
Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were for centuries at the centre of the North American universe. We know of them mostly because Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them,…
Why read it?
1 author picked Encounters at the Heart of the World as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This evocative book addresses the conundrum of writing about an Indigenous place barely mentioned in narratives foundational to U.S. history. For Fenn, this was the ancestral homeland of the Mandan of the Northern Plains, once a flourishing hub of Native life.
This is history-writing at its finest, expertly braided from threads of archaeological, climatic, geological, epidemiological, and ethnographic evidence and enriched by Fenn’s eye-opening journey to North Dakota. Neither denying the impacts of European-American settler expansion nor portraying the Mandan merely as passive victims, the book led me on a journey of discovery that revealed complex interrelationships of colonialism, geography,…
From Patricia's list on Indigenous survivance, place, and memory.
If you love Encounters at the Heart of the World...
Aggressor
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
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