Last night, after all the work was done and the Thriller went downstairs to read, I hit the sofa and channel-surfed. I came upon the last segment of Ken Burns’s Twain biopic on PBS. I was really surprised.

We generally tend to think of Twain as a sage; an American literary papa whose humor and talent for spinning yarns enchanted the world — and I do mean the world, as he toured extensively around the globe, giving talks and reading from his novels. But what I didn’t know was the freak show of guilt and personal tragedy that made up most of his adult life.

An inventor, he spent lots of time with the likes of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. He invested heavily in a contraption called the compositor, designed to make newsprinting more efficient. He actually staked a great deal of his wife’s personal fortune on its development, but it failed miserably, and his family lost nearly everything. It was for this reason that Twain embarked on his world speaking tour. He needed to recoup $200,000 in debts and save his beloved wife and daughters from the embarrassment personal bankruptcy would cause.

It was decided that his daughter and wife would go with him, but other daughter Susie would stay home. Susie fell ill while the others were in England, so Twain’s wife and daughter sailed home to take care of her. They were no strangers to losing a child, as they had lost a son years before. It was during that journey home that Susie died. Livvy (Twain’s wife) found out about it when she reached the States, and Twain himself was unable to attend the funeral services. Thus began the downward spiral into depression and loss.

Not long after, his wife died, which pretty much sealed the deal for him. Robbed of his soul mate and two of his children, he sank into despair and was, understandably, never the same. Never really happy again. How tragic.

I learned that his ambitious novel, A (Connecticut) Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, is an encapsulated representation of his own life. It starts out lighthearted and optimistic, and ends darkly. I must buy that today for my Nook.

It’s a fear that lives in the back of many minds, I’m sure: outliving all your loved ones. My grandmother Johnson lived to see her husband, sister, mother, father, and worst of all, all three of her sons, die. All the more reason to enjoy your family every day. Tell them you love them. Don’t lose touch.

Next week I am going to visit my cousin Glenn, who lives near Dallas. I haven’t seen him in probably 35 years. Perhaps we can talk about Mark Twain.

Happy Wegsday — now go hug your mama.

The first item to remember is that this thing reads like a real book. That is to say there is no “backlighting” on the screen. What you see in the pale afternoon light is what you get. It’s like reading an actual book in the evening — you’re going to need to shine some light on it.

I think the hardest thing for me to get used to was that it is not a computer or smartphone. It doesn’t act like one with regard to feel, light, response or speed. So a minor realignment of expectations is necessary at the get-go, especially if you have a fast touch-screen phone or tablet computer that you’re accustomed to using. I’m assuming it’s pretty much that way for all e-readers.

This is a relatively accurate representation (on my monitor, at least) of the brightness of the nook screen. This photo was taken in the early evening, with one lamp turned on in the living room:

clicky

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Here’s a view of when I sat right next to the lamp:

Better.

~

Truthfully — I could stand for the screen to be a leeeeetle bit brighter. But that’s likely just my horrible eyesight. Not a deal breaker. And the text renders beautifully outside in the sunlight — no screen glare or whiteout issues.

The page turn transitions are nice, but again, it’s not like swiping to the next menu on your Droid or iPhone. I’m not a page ripper in real-book life; I take my time, so this was no biggy. I shot a quick & dirty Flip video, illustrating both ways to advance the pages:

~

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The Wi-Fi connection is cool — it picked up the wireless signal in my house right away. I also got the 3G for on the road, which will be nice. Here’s a shot of searching the B & N store, again with no direct light shining on the screen:

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Again, you’re going to need a lamp or a book light to read in the darkness. B & N sells a clip-on model called the Lyra for $15, but my cheapy little GE book light did the job, too. I turned off all the lights, pulled down the shades and took this photo:

~

You can change fonts and sizes, of course. (I don’t particularly love serifs, so I chose the smoothy font.) The pictures above show the “large” version of the font.

I haven’t had it long enough to measure battery life with the Wi-Fi and 3G on, so maybe Helen or BoomR could comment on that. I look forward to taking this little gem on the road.

Yay, it’s Finkday for all you people with real jobs.

I’m leafing through a delightful — albeit rather snarky — book, written 15 years ago for the purpose of setting straight those of us who occasionally subscribe to (and unwittingly disseminate) erroneous information. Call it “Conventional Wisdom Takes a Hit.”

In his book, Everything You Know is Wrong (a slightly impertinent title, with the cover photo to match), Paul Kirchner delivers the real goods on dozens of longstanding “truths” in the areas of science, history, entertainment and culture. Behold a partial list:

• An airplane’s black box is black. No, it’s orange. Why make such an important piece of evidence so hard to find after a crash?
• CIA agents are globe-trotting adventurers. Actually, less than 5% are involved in covert operations. The majority spend their lives analyzing brain-numbing trivia.
• The US Constitution refers to a wall of “separation between church and state.” Nope. In fact, that phrase is nowhere to be found in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. It was actually mentioned by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to a committee of church men, during his tenure as President of the US.
• Charles Darwin claimed that man evolved from apes. Not quite. Darwin claimed that man and apes evolved from a common ancestor, and the split in species occurred about 5 million years ago.
  
• Henry Ford invented the modern automobile. Actually, that credit goes to Germany’s Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz. Ford didn’t invent the assembly line, either; Ransom Olds did it in 1902. Rather, Ford’s feat was making the automobile affordable for the average citizen.
• Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death. Negative. What happens is that after death, soft tissues shrink as they dry out, exposing a bit of extra nail or hair length, which might give the illusion of growth.
• Jumping up in a falling elevator might spare you a grisly death. Nice, but the math doesn’t work. After three seconds of free fall, the elevator would reach a downward velocity of 96 feet per second. An ambitious leap might reach 14 feet per second, leaving you plummeting at 82 feet per second. You’d still be just as dead.
• (Mama) Cass Elliot choked to death on a ham sandwich. Nope. She died of a heart attack. The coroner found no substance blocking her airway.
• Mattress/pillow tags that say “Do not remove under penalty of law.” While these tags definitely exist, their message is not directed at the consumer. Rather, it applies to the retailer, and is intended for the protection of the consumer (although I’m not really sure what that means…).
• Olympic gold medals are made of gold. Negative. They’re made of gold-plated silver. The real gold is in the subsequent commercial endorsements. (Actually, I found that gold medals used to be made of gold, but they stopped that practice after 1912.)
• The Pennsylvania Dutch came from Holland. No. “Dutch” in this case is a loose translation of “Deutsch,” as in Deutschland. The “Pennsylvania Dutch” emigrated from Germany.

Some of the “corrections” I read were surprising, and there were others I’m not sure I agree with (more research needed). But an interesting diversion nonetheless. I hope your day is replete with interesting diversions.

Regardless, his lawsuit just skyrocketed the book to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List, so there went that effort. Oprah’s people are probably kicking the cat right now too, since the tattlefest debuted at the top of the Times list.

*drumming fingers, drumming fingers, drumming fingers*

I must buy it.

Interesting quote from Richard Roeper in his op-ed in the Lake County News-Sun (formerly the Waukegan News-Sun — remember, Mavis??):

Oprah isn’t offering comment on any of the claims Kelley makes in the book — but wouldn’t it be awesome if she booked Kelley as a guest? It would make the James Frey beatdown look like a love-fest.

Heh.

Happy Tubesday. It’s almost the middle of the week, yippity.

~

So which one is it? I’ve gone back and forth within the last 24 hours. My contract with Verizon allows for a discount upgrade this Sunday. I will choose by then. I really had my mind made up to get the Droid until I read this article in the Guardian, which suddenly found me wanting a nook all the more. Guy made me laff, too:

The lack of a cover immediately alters your purchasing habits. As soon as I got the ebook [reader], I went on a virtual shopping spree, starting with the stuff I thought I should read – Wolf Hall, that kind of thing – but quickly found myself downloading titles I’d be too embarrassed to buy in a shop or publicly read on a bus. Not pornography, but something far worse: celebrity autobiographies.

Hey, what’s wrong with celeb bios? I like ‘em…

Of course, there are far more important things in life to think and worry about than which toy I want. But at the moment, I’m having trouble coming up with an example.

Fink (pretentious wonk) out.

Not surprisingly, three of us gave/got books for Christmas. We all love it. Mine was especially fantastic!

The cover alone sparks interest. The subtitle of the book is What Your Teachers Never Told You About Famous Novelists, Poets and Playwrights. That alone’s enough to get me reading. As a writer, I am keenly interested in what makes/made other writers tick. This collection apparently answers the burning questions:

Was Kafka a nudist perv?

What happens when poets attack?

What’s up with Arthur Conan Doyle and his belief that if you looked hard enough, you could see fairies?

I’ve got some great reading material for the drive to Detroit tomorrow, as well as some startling revelations to share in future blog posts. Thank you, Kay and Bob!

I hope everyone’s having a wonderful holiday. Happy Christmas Eve to all my fiends.

Fink, smelling the delectable Christmas stew cooking

I am dealing with Christmas git lists this morning, because I adore lining up the shopping trip, getting the gifts, wrapping them all pretty, putting them under the tree, and especially watching my family open them. There’s an old cliché that says, “The joy is in the giving.” It’s not cliché to me.

clicky

Do I want a Nook? You know…I think I do.

Now, ye purists, hold thy steeds. Before you stop reading to click on “Add Your Comment,” let me say that I adore books. Books on the shelf, I mean — the ones made of paper and cardboard and cloth. I have a huge collection of them, many of which I’ll keep forever to pass on to my grandchildren. However, there are times when I’m in a place (riding in the car, in a hotel, in a restaurant while traveling, waiting after school for evening rehearsals to start, etc.) when I think it would be nice to have a selection of stuff to read, without having to have schlepped it all into a bag before leaving. Or maybe I’m in a place where I don’t want to drag a book bag around.

I think it just might be the best of both worlds, this Nook.

Now, I can hear my dad (and some of my friends, probably) saying, “We never had Nooks. We carried our books around and actually opened them and turned the pages and felt the paper.” I know, I know. And sometimes it’s fun to be a bit of a purist. I’m a pedantic schoolmarm on Church Latin and English vowel production (in rehearsals), spelling, some areas of grammar/usage, and certain store brands. Gotta have the real thing in its most pristine form. But books on an e-reader? I think it’s a great idea as an auxiliary tool. Bring it on.

I will always buy books for myself and for others. But having a little white frame containing over a million titles for books, mags and newspapers that I can carry around in my purse with me? That also sounds like fun.

There. I think I pretty much talked myself into it, ja?

What do you think of the Nook? I’d probably go for it over Amazon’s Kindle reader because of the Wi-Fi and the capability of sharing books with friends.

OK. Time to get started — Mavis’s birthday feast is today and the food isn’t going to cook its own self. If only they had an e-cooker. Shazam!

FO

PS – I positively, absolutely cannot come up with 400 more words for the thesis. I give up. I’m turning it in on Tuesday as-is.

However, this decades-long quest has also revealed some uncomfortable truths about them. Shouldn’t surprise me; everyone has their unlovely side. But John Lennon’s was of such an unappealing variety (to me, anyway), I have trouble reconciling my scream-till-I’m-hoarse, gaga teenage dreamy picture of him with the man he actually was. Unfair of me, really.

Quite possibly the most compendious — and most difficult to prosaically read — of any Lennon book I’ve read has to be the latest from Philip Norman: John Lennon: The Life.

[This was one of the best pictures ever taken of him. Home run on the cover, Phil.]

I’m about two-thirds through the book. It’s a fascinating, yet difficult, read. Very heavy, stodgy British writing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just a different way of telling a tale and I’ve had to get accustomed to it. The double edge lies in the recounting of the ease with which Lennon dealt out cruelty to the people who loved him the most: his wife Cynthia, his son Julian, his manager (and secret admirer) Brian Epstein, and his close friends.

He could be at one moment compassionate, giving and kind, and at another, unmercifully vicious. He often berated his closest friends, insulting and humiliating them in public. Epstein was the recipient of many of Lennon’s one-line zingers, and he habitually absorbed them with silence and compliance. When Brian made a rare suggestion in the studio one day, John snapped back at the crowded control room with, “We’ll handle the music, Brian. You just worry about your 10 percent.” He incessantly and openly mocked Epstein for being a Jew and a homosexual.

Explosive and reactionary, he was heard to tell 5-year-old Julian, “No, I’m not going to fix your f*****g bicycle!”

He also had a bizarre need to make fun of the physically and mentally handicapped. Old TV footage bears this out. I have often seen him on film, pretending to be crippled or making faces that suggest he is a palsy victim. I have countless pictures in scads of books that show it as well. Bizarre. Traceable in cause and nature, but still bizarre.

The man was human. I’m not indicting him for being a) an insecure artist, b) something other than an angel, or c) a product of his environment and upbringing, which we all are. I’m not indicting him at all, actually. I’m just stewing in my kettle of realization that our idols put on their socks the same way we do. And that we’re all paradoxical in our own fashion. It’s all good.

Of course, Bernie Schwartz is the real name of legendary actor Tony Curtis, and I’m reading his memoir, American Prince.

The first thing I had to do was get past the title. Juuuuust a bit pretentious, if you ask me, which you didn’t, so on we go.

Second: Boyfriend likes to drop names. What he thinks of Shelley Winters and Danny Kaye…well, suffice it to say I’m glad they’re not around anymore to read what Curtis has to say about them. However, Jerry Lewis and Debbie Reynolds are still alive…yikes.

Third: OK, so you’re not gay. WE GET IT. Methinks thou dost protest too much.

Fourth: Conversely, I don’t think a memoir necessarily needs the play-by-play (along with first and last names) of all the starlets the author, um, compromised. But as Curtis said in a recent USA Today interview, “What you’ve got is what my life was like. What was I going to do? Clean it up? Make everybody happy?” Bottom line: brother was what David Duchovny is, but they just didn’t have a name for it back then.

Fifth: Curtis is to anti-Semitism what Al Sharpton is to racism. Really. You can’t go three pages without reading about some guy on the street or a movie producer or director or fellow actor who looked sideways at Tony, undoubtedly because “I’m a Jew.” At least he admits to being ultra-sensitive about it, whereas our friend Sharpy McSharperton…

Tony Curtis, then and now

~

Truth is, I wouldn’t want the book to read any other way. I mean, so what? So he’s Narcissus, gazing into the reflecting pool of his long-ago gorgeousness. So he’s tremendously bitter towards Universal and the movie industry in general for not giving him roles that would have let the world know what a truly great actor he was. So he slightly overstates his influence as a genuine American phenomenon of the 1950s and 60s. No matter. He has lived an amazing life and has the stories to back it up. If you’re not familiar with his work, check it out here.

OK, gotta hit the shower and then the school house. Yes, fiends, I am going into school today. There is work to be done and I’m finally in a position to not be distracted by upcoming exams. I might actually get something done today, as opposed to pacing my classroom like a caged tiger, trying to memorize outlines.

FO

Photo credit: USA Today

If you haven’t read Og Mandino, you must. I was required (meaning dragged, groaning and complaining) to read three small mass-market paperbacks by Mandino way back in undergrad school, when I took a sociology/family psychology class. What began as drudgery ended up as joy. The only bummer is that over the decades, I forgot about them.

Get thee to the library or half.com (where you can buy them for less than a buck) and check out The Greatest Miracle in the World, The Greatest Salesman in the World, and The Greatest Secret in the World. I think I need to buy them all again.

Elegantly written by one of the premier inspirational authors of the 20th century, these three books have been credited with changing people’s lives. I remember them having a profound effect on me. What I originally thought were going to be snoozers turned out to be late-night page-turners. I recommend them highly.

And now…off to rehearsal. Yay.

RF, draggin’ her tail a bit

Photo credit: OgMandino.com

Good Reasons:

• I’m fixing to bake a 3-layer marble cake. It’s Jon’s (my future son-in-law) birthday feast tonight, and that’s his fave dessert. I do love cooking/baking/general culinary fun. It’s one of exactly three things in life I’m good at. Update, 12:25 p.m. – it’s done. Yay! On to the lasagna…
• Jakey is coming tonight, too. Yay.
• I’m putting the finishing touches on some choreography I started last night.
• Simone is coming over to help assemble the lasagna. (Hmm…I think I’ll call Helen and invite her, too…)

Not-So-Good Reasons:

Oh wait. I said I was going to try to be more positive about B***on Uni*****y. Scratch that.

So I read a review on the new Brendan Fraser movie, Inkheart. Critics aren’t too thrilled with it, but it doesn’t matter. I usually don’t much care what critics have to say, as I have often liked movies that they panned. Meh. (But I will admit it is a slippery slope, transferring a book to the screen. You drag along lots of people’s contextual baggage.)

Anyway, I’ve read two of the books in the trilogy (Inkheart and Inkspell). They are very good juvenile fiction. I lost interest after the second one, but I might pick up Inkdeath and add it to the stack of about 14 books that I have to get around to reading.

Last night, I finished the first book in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. I wanted to read it before I saw the movie, which I will rent when it comes out on DVD. I love vampiric stuff, as many of you know, so it was an enjoyable read. I’ll start the next one tonight.

Don’t you just love to read?

Fink out.

Photo credit: New Line Cinema (IMDB)

I was wrong.

Right now, Mavis and I are reading the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton (come on, a girl’s got to have some reading material that does not involve research methodologies). I love all things vampiric; always have, ever since picking up Interview With the Vampire after seeing the movie back in the 90s. Her stories are great, and there’s always an unexpected deus ex machina moment, designed to assure the reader that the stories will continue. Total fun.

Anyway, while reading the first book, Guilty Pleasures, I noticed a couple of errors. You know, minor things, like transposed letters or a missing word in a sentence. I thought, that’s all right, just a typo. No problem.

However, with each successive book in the series, the mistakes began to pile up. Things like “I was loosing the battle,” and “He was smarter then that,” started to irritate me — a lot.

Hamilton’s rampant use of alright is bothersome, too, although the word has been so overused that it’s now a basically accepted part of the American lexicon. Still, why wasn’t it caught and corrected? It makes the word nerd in me absolutely howl.

Then there’s this, over and over and over:

“‘Oh, really?’ She made it a question.”

“‘You knew about this?’ I made it a question.”

“‘Are you in love with him?’ He made it a question.”

What does that mean? Of COURSE it’s a question. So, you’re asking a question, then telling the reader that you phrased the question as a question…STOP IT. I am going mental.

While I love the story lines, and Hamilton’s style is hip and smart-aleck, I can’t get past the myriad mistakes in usage and spelling, and her bewildering phraseology (not to mention an annoying penchant for committing paragraph after paragraph to describing what a character is wearing). Does that make me a bad person? I make this a question.

I went to LKH’s MySpace page the other day, and read that she doesn’t maintain it herself. But the site assures that she does read it. It also unfortunately says that Laurell “definately is enjoying MySpace.” Arg. More points off. Her own website — laurellkhamilton.org — is equally amateurish. **FAIL.**

Who knows…maybe Penguin Books thinks people who buy mass-market paperbacks won’t know the diff. But if I were a #1 New York Times Bestseller List author, I’d for dang sure make certain that everything going out to the public under my name was at least grammatically correct.

Hey Laurell — fire your editor and HIRE THE FINK!

Last night I was recording some Romantic era stuff for my music history class, and ran across “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s opera, Turandot.

Pavarotti. Like Elvis, Madonna and Prince, he’s known worldwide by simply one name. I know there are opera singers out there who think it’s passé to like Pavarotti, but I don’t care. OK, so maybe he was a total brat sometimes, but he was also funny and silly, and I never saw an interview where he didn’t win over the journalist, the crew, and anyone else watching.

I read the tell-all book by his former manager, Herb Breslin. The King and I was a bit harsh on Big Luciano, but I’m sure it had at least some truth to it. I mean, you can’t be that adored the world over and not be a spoiled-rotten baby some of the time. [I think I still have the book if you want to borrow it...or maybe I gave it to Kay to read on the plane. Can't remember.]

But back to The Voice.

He was one of the few singers who would barely move his face and still reduce you to tears. Quite possibly the most beautiful operatic aria I have ever heard has got to be his rendition of “Nessun dorma.”

If you’d like to see it, here it is. If you’re not an opera fan, it’s ok. You don’t need to be. The only thing you need to enjoy this video is a soul.

The story of the aria is this: The prince has solved all three riddles in order to win the hand of the princess in marriage. She fears the prince — he’s sort of a cad. He tells her that if she can guess his real name by tomorrow morning, he’ll go away and call off the marriage. But he knows that his identity is secret, and that nobody, even if they stay up all night, will guess it. Therefore, he sings “Nessun dorma” (None shall sleep).

He ends the aria with the powerful declaration, “Vincero!” (“I will win!”). I heard he had the same attitude when pancreatic cancer was tearing his insides apart. He lived a full life — the cancer finally won in 2007 when he was 71 — but still, he was taken away too soon.

Quite possibly the most amazing thing about this performance is that he was 62 years old when he did it. Incredible.

Give yourself three and a half minutes of beauty today. Watch and weep.

But certain titles stand out over nigh these many decades. The following list is by no means complete – for instance, all the fabulous juvenile fiction I like to read (Artemis Fowl, the Pendragon series, etc.) is not included – but it’s a good representation. Bet you’ve read some of these, too.

Top Ten Books, According to Me

10. The Odyssey - Homer. Yes, Virginia, you can enjoy a book that was written in 800 BC. Here is an entertaining version in which all 24 chapters are reduced to one paragraph each. Funny.

9. The Cry and the Covenant – Morton Thompson. A novel based on the true story of Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor who was ridiculed and shunned by his colleagues for claiming that women and their babies were dying of fever after childbirth because doctors didn’t wash their hands. After handling infectious sores and wounds of other patients and the innards of rotting cadavers, European physicians would simply wipe their hands on their lab coats, then go to the maternity ward to do pelvic examinations on laboring moms. It’s a truly sad story of a dedicated doctor whose unrewarded work in the area of germ theory later made Joseph Lister a very rich man.

8. The Man in the Iron Mask – Alexandre Dumas. Fascinating and horrifying tale of revenge and love by the author of The Three Musketeers. Empathy queen that I am, I had a horrible time wrapping my brain around the idea of being ruthlessly framed, having a cast iron mask bolted to my face, and dragged to a secluded prison to rot, while my twin took my place in real life. Icky. A cruel, uncomfortable premise, but the ending is brilliant and worth the suffering.

7. The Vampire Lestat – Anne Rice. One of the best books of the “Tales of the Vampires” series, the first of which was Interview With the Vampire (made into a movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt back in the 90s). I like her writing style; her descriptions about old New Orleans make you feel you know the place. And I do so love the vampire experience…

6. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee – Dee Brown.

5. The Stand – Stephen King. I own every one of his books, and this is one of the best. “Randall Flagg” makes a huge appearance in this one, as he does to a lesser degree in many other King books. [Hmmm...Randall Flagg, Rat Fink. Coincidence?]

4. Dracula – Bram Stoker. I think I’ve read it four times since the seventies. It’s the vampire thing again.

3. Chronicles of Narnia – C. S. Lewis. Awesome series of beautifully written fantasy that every man, woman and kid should read. Incomparable.

2. Harry Potter series – J. K. Rowling. Loved them all. Still can’t convince Kay to read them, though. Stick-in-the-mud, she is.

1. The Dark Tower series – Stephen King. Best read ever, hands down. Someday soon, I’ll start at the beginning again.

If you haven’t read any of these, get thee to the library or local Barnes and Noble. Or borrow from me.

It’s Wednesday – 2 more days until the weekend! (What am I so chirpy about? I have homework all weekend. Sheesh.)

Frieden und Liebe,

Book Fink

Every American needs to read the book I read last summer, after I’d forgotten about it for almost 30 years. Click the picture to get a better look so you can identify it at the library or the bookstore. You could also borrow my tattered copy.

Why do I say read this ? Because if you think that America has always had her arms, lands and ports open to the tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free — you need only look as far as the United States government’s shameful behavior from 1840-1890 to be slapped back to reality.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is based on first-person and government sources, interviews and actual letters written by Native Americans and US military and government personnel. Author Dee Brown unearthed documents that were hidden away – and likely forgotten – for a hundred years. What resulted in 1970 was an account of the real experiences of “Indians” in America (by the way, they were the true Americans – not the white people who came from Europe). It is a profoundly heartbreaking account of lies, intolerance, cruelty, ignorance and ultimate betrayal.

Here is an exercise in empathy.

Imagine being offered a beautiful gift by someone you trust; someone who you believe has your best interests at heart and who cares about the welfare of your family. As you reach out to accept this lovely gift, your friend slaps your face as hard as he can.

A little while goes by, and your friend returns, bearing another gift. You are a bit wary…you still remember the sting and humiliation you suffered last time. But your friend is sincere; he wants you to know that he is being truthful and all is well. He looks at you with eyes full of respect and friendship. Your heart melts and you are won over. With a smile on your face, your faith restored, you gratefully reach for the gift, only to be slapped across your face once again — except harder this time.

And that is what happened to Native Americans at the hands of their “friends,” the United States government. Over and over and over. Gifts of treaties, treaties and more treaties — as if the land was the white man’s to give in the first place. Treaties and promises, all broken. All lies. All in the name of greed, but covertly painted the pretty colors of Christianity and Manifest Destiny.

Feh.

You might wonder why the Indians kept believing the promises of the “Great Father” (whatever American president was sitting at the time). Were they just gullible? Stupid? Both?

Not by a long shot. They simply believed that people were inherently good and respectful of those who had lived on the land for generations beyond memory. Unfortunately, they sorely misjudged the American military.

Navajo, Sioux, Cheyenne, Ute, Peyote, Apache. All viewed as “savages” because they dressed differently, worshiped differently, and lived by different laws. Armed with a pathetic mission based on selfish lust for more and more land, the US government set about driving these people from their ancestral homes, and eventually onto reservations, where they lived a humiliating and suffocating existence. And the story only worsens from there.

Bury My Heart is not beach reading, for sure. It takes a considerable amount of fortitude to read chapter after chapter of accounts of inhumane (and indeed, inhuman) treatment of people whose repeated arguments that “we can all live together in peace, and share the land” went unheeded, and were repaid with such cruelty that some tribes were obliterated completely from existence.

The Native Americans had finally had enough, and started to fight back — and sometimes, to fight first. Humans can only be pushed so far.

Read this incredible book to see just how far they were pushed. It will amaze you, anger you, and break your heart.

Side note: I want to rent the movie that HBO made of the book. It won the Emmy for “Best Movie Made for Television” in 2007. If you’ve seen it, let me know what you thought of it.

~~~~~~~~~~

Photo credit: Treaty signing by William T. Sherman and the Sioux at Fort Laramie, Wyoming.
Photographed by Alexander Gardner, 1868. The National Archives: www.archives.gov