Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West - Dee Brown

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was a title I’d always heard without knowing much of its contents. Its connection with American Indians was obvious from context, but whether it was a film or a novel or what I didn’t know. As it happens, the book is a historical chronicling of America’s western expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century, told entirely from the perspective of the tribes that were displaced or destroyed. It is a sad book, sympathetically told, and an important one, in that it collects the words and recollections of a people who were rarely allowed t ospeak for themselves—certainly not in as wide a forum.

There is a depressing repetitiveness to the book, which proceeds chronologically forward and, for the most part, geographically westward. In each chapter we meet (or occasionally revisit) a tribe, and watch as the same cycle repeats itself: pressure fro mwhite settlers forces the indians to accept some sort of treaty. The treaty is either a swindle from the outset, or bargained in good faith but reinterpretted later to be more beneficial to the United States government and less to the tribe. Tensions rise until the tribe is corralled into a reservation or goes to war with an enemy it cannot beat. Tactical intelligence sometimes brings brief victories, legal or martial, but the tide is inexorable, and it sweeps always west.

Though unflinching in its portrayal of history, this is not a bitter book. There are good white men who see the Indians as human beings and want to do right by them, and cynical tribes who ally with the American soldiers against other Indians in order to secure better terms for themselves. Yet individual goodness cannot perservere against an unfeeling system, and those who attempt to resist are either worn down into apathy or destroyed. In this sense it reminds me a bit of The Wire, a more modern example of flawed but good people bashing their heads against an unfeeling system in an effort to budge it an inch, and coming away with nothing for their troubles but pain.

Brown’s writing is strong and crisp, capturing some of the poetry of the men for which it speaks. Long passages are sometimes quoted which give particular evidence to the lyrical nature of native tongues, rich in metaphor and anchored closely to the land. I wouldn’t call Bury my Heart a light read, but it is an engaging and important one.

Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists - Napoleon Chagnon

Noble Savages is another book scooped from my wife’s collection of library checkouts. I read it on her recommendation, and didn’t know anything about the subject matter before picking it up. The book is a memoir by cultural anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, a man I’d never heard of but who was apparently the main flashpoint of a controversy that tore the discipline into two camps: those who view anthropology as a fundamentally scientific pursuit in alignment with biological principles, and those who view it as one of the humanities with a mandate principally to identify and right the wrongs of past colonial encounters with native populations. Chagnon is staunchly a member of the first group, a leaning that is alluded to often throughout the book and becomes the central issue in its final chapters.

But despite being a memoir, the book isn’t as much about Chagnon as about the principal subjects of his decades-long research career: an Amazonian tribe called the Yanomamö, who were at the outset of his fieldwork in the late 60s among the last of the human tribes that could reasonably be called “untouched by civilization.” They had encountered the modern world, of course, but such encounters were fleeting, and their way of life remained as it had been for thousands of years before.

Chagnon describes his first encounter in detail, but much of the book takes a non-chronological approach, focusing instead on different aspects of Yanomamö culture as an organizational principle. After a lifetime of writing academic works, Chagnon seems incapable or unwilling to deviate from his observational stance, which makes it a bit unusual as a memoir, though also makes it more interesting overall to someone unfamiliar with the Yanomamö. His respect for them as a people is clear, and while he does not hesitate to point out their foibles, he does so in a way that acknowledges their full humanity. This stance seems to implicitly argue that kid gloves approach of his opponents, who see the West as the aggressor and native tribes as fundamentally innocent, is an infantilizing and ultimately prejudiced viewpoint, denying the Yanomamö the full gamut of human traits, good and bad.

Its final chapters shift to his life after his research was curtailed by interference from local missionaries, who he claims saw him as a threat to their dominance, and pressure from rival academics, culminating in a hatchet job book that appears at this point to have been largely discredited. His bitterness is apparent but understandable. I have studied only his side in detail, but his arguments are convincing, and the bit of reading outside I did seems to confirm the perspective that the was wrongly accused of unethical conduct. His true sin seems to have been his unwavering conviction that Yanomamö follow biological imperative, and that basic biological drives—procreation, namely—drive their conflict more than scarce access to resources, which is the Marxist perspective.

All in all, an interesting book. I don’t think I’ll necessarily get out his other, more academic work, but i greatly enjoyed learning about the Yanomamö.

Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer

I’d read a couple of Jon Krakauer’s books already, most notably the excellent Into the Wild, but I didn’t feel much interest in reading Into Thin Air, I guess because mountain climbing doesn’t strike me as terribly interesting. My wife raved about the book, though, and when she brought it back from a neighbourhood Little Free Library I decided to give it a shot.

I’m glad I did. The story is well-written and compelling, as it chronicles a disastrous expedition to summit Mount Everest in the spring of 1996. Krakauer frames the story expertly, beginning with the momentary triumph and a brief portent of things to come, before backing up on the circumstances that led to his joining the expedition, the preparation, and the multi-stage ascent. He weaves in background to give the story greater context, giving the history of the mountain’s discovery by western surveyors (locals knew it long before, of course), the early aborted attempts at the summit, and Edmund Hillary’s 1953 triumph.

With the groundwork laid, the story builds towards the seemingly inevitable tragedy, as Krakauer chronicles with clinical efficiency the dozens of tiny failings (including his own), missteps, and unfortunate circumstances that cuminated in one of the worst single-day disasters in the mountain’s bloody history. A post-script discusses the controversy that emerged in the book’s aftermath, and dismantles some of the claims made against its accuracy. I haven’t read the counterpoint, but Krakauer’s rebuttals are convincing, and it certainly seems that his breadth of after the fact interviews was much greater than those of his detractor.

Krakauer’s prose is elevated but visceral, painting a clear picture of the prolonged misery of trying to climb the world’s highest mountain. I obviously never thought it would be easy, but wha tsurprised me was the time committment involved. I didn’t know that simply reaching the summit required nearly a month of acclimatization efforts simply to ensure you didn’t drop dead once you passed 28,000 feet. Doesn’t seem worth it to me, frankly, but I guess it takes all kinds. I’ll stick to reading about it afterwards.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari

I put a hold on Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind about half a year ago, after reading the first few pages of my father-in-law’s copy. Based on that sampling, I’d assumed the book was a work of popular anthropology, and would focus on the rise of Sapiens alongside the other Homo species alive in prehistoric times.

It turns out that is only the first chapter.

Sapiens is, in fact, a much broader and more ambitious book than I’d expected. Its goal is no less than to present an encapluated history of the whole of humanity, describing a few touchstone events, but focusing at its core of the nature of what a human first was ,what it is now, and what it might one day become.

I’ve read that academics have criticized the book as unserious and lightly sourced. There is some truth to this, but Sapiens doesn’t present itself as a detailed accounting of human history—how could it? there’s an awful lot of it for one book—but instead invites the reader to question a lot of basic assumptions about what humans are, and how they have become the dominant species on earth. One part I found particularly interesting was his suggestion of why Europe, and not the economically and numerically superior China, went on to conquer the world through empire (he suggests it was the scientific revolution, which was underpinned by the European midset that huamn knowledge is incomplete, and the shift to capitalist doctrine that celebrated growth).

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of the book is that Harari’s writing is in no way strident. He sees humanity neither as a divine being nor pestilential evil. He simply recounts things as the yhappened, and draws no moral conclusions (with the slight exception of animal rights, where he shows his cards a bit).

One critic likened the book to dorm room chatter, and while I can see where he’s coming from, this is chatter form a very bright student indeed. Sapiens is well-written and it made me think. I can’t as kfor much more than that in a non-fiction book.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Joan Didion

Joan Didion was one of those names that cropped up for me during six years of University English courses, without being clearly moored to anything. I knew she was a writer, and that her work (or rather, her most significant work) occured somewhere in the middleo f the 20th century, but that was about it. Something goaded me to finally look her up and request her most celebrated book from the library, but I can’t remember what exactly it was.

In any case, it was fortuitous, since Slouching Towards Bethlehem is an intriguing piece of work, a collection of essays written over a period of several years and capturing, among much else, the sour notes of the Summer of Love that would burst into promenance after the Manson Murders. Her gaze is incisive but not uncharitable, and she treats her subjects humanely without coddling them. There are some more reflective pieces itself, such as On Morality and much of the latter section, Seven Places of the Mind, which includes meditations on different locales where Didion spent some time. I didn’t agree with all of her conclusions, though I enjoyed reading them.

Didion’s prose is excellent, sleek and beguiling, filled with rich imagery without getting bogged down in itself. The grouping of pieces may be somewhat arbitrary, decided I’d guess more with what she thought was her best work rather than for any deeply held thematic ocnstant, but I think that works fine. It was nice to bounce around between subjects and styles, to get a sampling of her work rather than a one-note treatment. I’ll be interested to seek out some of her lesser known work in the future.

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain

I’ve always had a bit of a contrarian streak when it comes to things everyone tells me I should love. Once discourse over a movie, show, book, or even a person becomes too fawning, I get my hackles up and develop a distinctive and entirely unjustified dislike of the subject. So it was with Anthony Bourdain, whose boudless adoration made me reluctant to watch his shows or read his books. Who was this guy that everyone was going on about? With the release of a documentary about him and the controversy resulting from the director’s use of deepfake audio to replicate Bourdain’s voice, I started hearing his name again, and I overcame my prejudice long enough to check out his breakthrough book, Kitchen Confidential.

I’ll say this about Bourdain: the man could write. There are two common methods that weak writers use to write books. The less self-conscious among them simply write as if speaking—or, in all likelyhood, speak and have their words transcribed. The result is bland prose, but easy to read and engaging enough if the story itself is interesting. The second technique, common to non-writers with literary pretensions, is to adopt a stilted, overly complex language, cramming adjectives and metaphors into simple ideas to bloat them into some facsimile of depth.

Bourdain adopted neither of these strategies. His prose is eloquent and conversational, allowing flourishes where appropriate without lettting them overpower the text. His language is peppered with expletives, but in a manner that feels natural—there was never a “fuck” or “asshole” that didn’t feel like it emerged spontaneously, they way it would in conversation after a few drinks.

The structure of the book is loose, begining with an episodic biography of his childhood (not nearly as hardscabble as his hagiographers imply, by the way: he went to private school and enjoyed a summer in France as a child, not something poor American kids get to do much) and continuing in bursts through his early and middle career. He is honest about his faults, and reveals enough warts that I expect most of what he says is treu in spirit, even if the details are sometimes exaggerated. Some of the characters he describes feel a bit larger than life, and I’m guessing he allowed himself a bit of poetic license when describing the debauchery of their lives, extent of their unmatched skills, and floridity of their language. Here, for instance, is a snippet of speech supposedly representative of what a cook from an Italian resaurant would regularly say:

'You, sir, are a loathsome swine. Too damn ignorant to pour piss from a boot! Your odor offends me and my shell-like ear gapeth to hear thy screams of pain. I insist you avert your face and serve me a libation before I smite your sorry ass with the tip of my boot-you sniveling little cocksucker!'

Has a human being ever said anything like that sincerely? Probably not, though I don’t doubt that’s how Bourdain rememebrs it, more or less.

After the biographic portions, the book fragments into different topics: tips for aspiring chefs, inside secrets about how food is prepared and what the discerning diner should avoid, character sketches of people he’s worked with (always celebratory, if not unaware of the individual’s flaws), a detailed desciption of a day in the life of an up-scale chef. I found all of it interesting, and read through the whole thing quickly.

All in all, I can’t say I’m in the hardcore Bourdain fan club, but I’ve lost my prejudice toward the guy at least. He seems like a talented chef and writer, and no doubt brought joy to a greater number of people than those to whom he brought pain, as addicts always do (he is upfront about his checked past and addiction, though doesn’t wallow in the details too heavily). A good book worth reading.

Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression - Studs Terkel

I came across Studs Terkel years ago after reading Max Brooks’ World War Z and learning that he’d modelled the book’s conceit off of the older journalist’s work. Terkel is, along with Svetlana Alexievich, the foremost practitioner of oral history, a form if journalistic prose that compiles stories individuals transcribed from different individuals and stitched together into a cohesive whole. The result is a kind of tapestry, through which a larger story emerges from the mingling of various strands.

Hard Times covers the Depression in the United States, ranging all over the country and a ross time, with a focus on recollections from 1928 to the early 40s, though participants are free to go where their reminiscions take them. While there us no shortage of hard luck tales, Terkel avoids homogenaity, talking to union men and big business types, artists and activists, socialists and staunch Republicans. He speaks with major figures, including members of Roosevelt's cabinet and the man who ran against him in 36, but also a lot of ordinary folk. Plenty of those he speaks with cruised through the depression just fine, while others suffered terribly. Interestingly, he speaks with some folks who were too young to experience the Depression firsthand--often the relatives of participants who had--offering an interesting counterpoint.

There isn't much to say about the prose, as nearly all is transcriptions, but the interviews are sharp and focused, the anecdotes interesting, and you don't get the sense that Terkel took pains to sanitize unpopular opinions. Some of these folks are downright unpleasant, but they still get their say, same as everyone else. Anything less would be untrue.