Literary Radio Host Rills on Equality and "The Girl with Braided Hair"

Title ‘The Girl with Braided Hair’
Author Margaret Coel
Publisher The Berkley Publishing Group
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York
10014-3658
www.penguin.com
Price $16.29 Amazon
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Berkley Hardcover (September 4, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0425217124
ISBN-13: 978-0425217122

Reviewed by Connie Gotsch

Liz has to get off the rez, or angry AIM members will drive her off--into a grave. Packing her baby into her old car, she scrapes money together for gas, and heads for Denver.

With that incident, Colorado mystery writer Margaret Coel begins her thriller, ‘The Girl with Braided Hair.’ A professional historian, Ms. Coel has spent much of her career researching the Arapaho and their lives on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, first for nonfiction books, and now for novels.

She has written 13 mysteries featuring Arapaho lawyer, Vicky Holden, and Catholic priest, Father John O’Malley as protagonists. Together they solve murders. Sometimes the police, Vicky’s children, people working at Father John’s mission, or Vicky’s love interest, Adam Lone Eagle, help out. Sometimes they hinder the process.

In ‘The Girl with Braided Hair,’ Vicky and Father John must identify the skeleton of a person killed in 1973 and left to rot in a shallow grave along a highway. The plot has all the elements of a typical mystery: false leads, uncooperative witnesses, threats to Vicky and Father John, cliffhanger car chases, and an explosive climax that reveals both the killer and the victim’s identity.

This model might lead to repetitious themes and predictable twists, especially after 13 novels. Margaret Coel avoids that trap. The components required for a good whodunit serve her as a framework around which to weave thoroughly researched Arapaho history, adding education to the fun of a good thriller.

For ‘The Girl with Braided Hair,” Coel examines the American Indian Movement (AIM), its origins, the struggles that drew people into it, and the related attitudes about it that linger today on the Wind River Reservation.

Her characters come off as solidly three-dimensional against this background. Vicky Holden is a kind, sincere person who wants to use her education as a lawyer to do right for her people by supporting ordinary individuals. She eagerly accepts a request from her neighbors to find the identity of the skeleton.

Her lover, Adam Lone Eagle, carries on the struggle by looking at the actions of large entities, in this case corporations discriminating against Native Americans in hiring practices. He does not approve of Vicky’s choice to leave an important case and chase down the name of a long-dead person about whom no one has cared before.
Father John struggles with alcoholism, an impending transfer, and a spirit that would much rather deal with people than the invoices, checkbooks, memos, and papers required to run a mission on a reservation. Perhaps he also harbors a love for Vicky that he cannot fulfill

In the end, the murder victim while undeserving of death, has by choice trusted vicious people. Thirty years after the heyday of AIM, the individuals who both loved and hated this person suffer repercussions from their emotions, and related decisions.

However, strong characterization and presentation of Arapaho history alone do not raise ‘The Girl with Braided Hair,’ above the typical good ole murder thriller. Margaret Coel adds one more element to make that happen. She uses the story to introduce several good and universal questions that everyone must face in some way.

What is the right way to lead a struggle for equality? What’s important to fight for in that process? What do people do at any given time that leads to good or bad outcomes? What decisions haunt them 30 years later? How important is individual identity and why? How long should a person hold on to something he loves? When is it time to move on?

Margaret Coel’s approach makes readers think about their own life decisions, and the effect those decisions have on themselves and others. An author who does that is always fresh, even if she writes a thousand stories about a particular set of characters.
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Reviewer Connie Gotsch is the author "A Mouth Full of Shell" and "Snap Me a Future" published by DLSIJ Press.
She is featured in "The Complete Writer's Journal" published by Red Engine Press --www.redenginepress.com
She is also a radio host for KSJE.


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The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, founder of Authors' Coaliition (www.authorscoalitionandredenginepress.com). It is a free service offered to those who want to encourage the reading of books they love--and that includes authors who want to share their favorite reviews and reviewers who'd like to see their reviews get more exposure. Please see submission guidelines on the left of this page.

Harry Potter and Tolerance! Big Subject to Consider!

Short Title: Prejudice in Harry Potter
Full Book Title: Prejudice in Harry Potter's World: A Social Critique of the Series, Using Allport's "The Nature of Prejudice"
Genre: Commentary on popular culture and literature; Literary Criticism
ISBN-10: 1602641536
ISBN-13: 978-1602641532
Author's Website: http://www.thelppc.com/featuredbook-prejudiceinharrypotter.html

Summary:

Prejudice in Harry Potter's World is a very readable academic study and a social commentary which the author discusses the discrimination issues raised in Rowling's series. All types of societal prejudices are metaphorized through Rowling's subplots: For example, the conditions in which werewolves live is a social parallel for disability prejudice in the modern world. And, of course, the Mudblood subplot teems with racial and anti-Semitic overtones. There are many other examples, all of which are highlighted and explained in Brown's work. These Harry Potter-related issues have so far been ignored or glossed over by the mostly-mainstream Harry Potter audience, commentators and literary critics. Of all the companions, study-guides, commentaries, etc., that have been written about the Harry Potter books, none have dealt with its social themes in depth until now. Brown's study is therefore the first of its kind, and a very worthy piece of scholarship.


Comments made by Erin Jade on Book-Related Discussion Topic (This is NOT an Amazon review):

"I actually just finished writing an essay on this very subject for a British Lit class. I always thought Rowling's themes about prejudice, racism, and discrimination were very clear, but discussing the books with others they always said they "hadn't thought about it," which I found disturbing. In searching for sources for my paper, I only found a few sites/books that mentioned it at all (and I must admit, I checked our library for your book, but with no luck). I think that it's partly because people are afraid, but also because the topic makes most people very uncomfortable.

One thing I pointed out in my essay is that Rowling has characters that are both good and bad display prejudice and discrimination, because we are ALL prejudiced in one form or another, and I believe that having to think closely about their own prejudices makes people horribly uncomfortable."

(Source: http://www.amazon.com/tag/harry%20potter/forum?%5Fencoding=UTF8&cdForum=FxZZNCHJFAFY3A&cdThread=Tx10XJ3SA8YY7CI )

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The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, founder of Authors' Coaliition (www.authorscoalitionandredenginepress.com). It is a free service offered to those who want to encourage the reading of books they love--and that includes authors who want to share their favorite reviews and reviewers who'd like to see their reviews get more exposure. Please see submission guidelines on the left of this page.

An Amazing Cross-Cultural Story

Title: Running From Coyote: A White Family among the Navajo
Author: Danalee Buhler
Publisher: iUniverse, August 2007
ISBN 978-0-595-40543-5
E-mail: danaleebooks@gmail.com
See Kirkus Discoveries review on author web site.
See Amazon Shorts story, "Finding a Navajo At The Bottom of the
Baptismal Tank"

Pre-print quotation from Tony Hillerman

"Running From Coyote is a remarkable book, a brilliant example of how a
writer can use memories of her own childhood to introduce the world to
another culture. Not only does Ms. Buhler provide a clear view of the
Navajo people, my own favorite Native American culture, she also tells
a wonderful story of a white girl growing up between the Sacred
Mountains. If I were still teaching my University of New Mexico
classes, I would have it on my required reading list."

The book is available from iUniverse, Amazon, Powells, Barnes and
Nobel, and other internet book stores.
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The New Book Review is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, founder of Authors' Coaliition (www.authorscoalitionandredenginepress.com). It is a free service offered to those who want to encourage the reading of books they love--and that includes authors who want to share their favorite reviews and reviewers who'd like to see their reviews get more exposure. Please see submission guidelines on the left of this page.

Memoir, Tolerance and, Incidentally, a Run for President

Dreams from my Father, A story of Race and Inheritance
By Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press

Reviewed by Maryanne Raphael

In Dreams From My Father, Obama wrote of his efforts to understand his family, the leaps through time and the collision of cultures hoping to shine light on the question of identity and race in the American experience.
He described the “underlying struggle between worlds of plenty and worlds of want, between modern and ancient cultures.” He admired those “who embrace our teeming, colliding irksome diversity while insisting on values that bind us together”. And he feared “those who seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text,to justify cruelty towards those not like us.”

The book shows how powerlessness twists children’s lives in Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way it does on Chicago’s South Side and how quickly despair slips into violence. It discusses how the powerful respond with a dull complacency until violence threatens them and they then use force,(longer prison sentences and more sophisticated hardware) inadequate to the task.

Obama struggles constantly to understand this problem and his place in it. He is now professionally engaged in a broader public debate that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come.

If he had known his mother was dying so young, he would have written a different book, less a meditation of the absent parent and more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in his life. He shares some of the stories his mother and her parents told him when he was a child. ”

Obama feels we have all seen too much to take his parents’ brief union, a black man and a white woman an African and an American at face value. He says when black or white people who don’t know him well, discover his background they no longer know who he is.

This is the record of a personal interior journey, a boy’s search for his father and a workable meaning for his life as a black American.

Obama says, “I can embrace my black brothers and sisters whether in this country or in Africa and affirm a common destiny without pretending to speak for all our various struggles.”

Much of this book is based on journals or oral histories of his family. Obama says he tried to write an honest account of a particular province of his life.’

Without the love and support of his family, his mother, his grandparents and his siblings, stretched across oceans and continents he could never have finished it
He was born in Hawaii, lived several years in Indonesia, then lived in New York City where he went to Columbia University. In 1983 he was a Chicago community organizer and a civil rights lawyer.

His Aunt Jane whom he had never met called him from Kenya to say his father was killed in an auto accident. His parents had divorced when he was two years old and he had only seen his father for one month when he came to visit Obama and his mother in Hawaii.

When Obama went to Kenya his half sister Auma and his Auntie Zeitumi met him
They took him to meet Aunt Jane and other African family members.

Family seemed to be everywhere in Kenya and Obama found himself meditating on just what is a family He sat on his father’s grave and spoke with him through Africa’ red soil.

When he returned to America he met Michelle, who had been raised in Chicago. After their engagement he took her to Kenya to meet his family there They returned to the United States and married.

This is an absorbing and moving tale of a man who takes a journey to his father ‘s home, where he lived much of his life and died. Obama re-evaluates his relationship with the myth of his father and the meaning of his own life. It is a quiet but intense examination of a man’s past and his son’s attempt to understand it.
Examining his family’s life and thinking about his own, Obama finds a certain relief reliving times and behavior that had slipped into the undifferentiated past and finally arrives at some kind of understanding.

The writing style is exciting, a well written blend of memoir and history. The rich narrative and interesting characters keep the reader turning pages. Obama’s sensual descriptions made the reader feel he is visiting south side of Chicago, Harlem, Indonesia or Kenya. You see the people, hear their voices, taste and smell the food, feel the breeze and smell the ocean.

This is a book I would have enjoyed even if had not been written by a well-known, fascinating man beginning to put his mark on the world.
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Reviewed by Maryanne Raphael www.authorsden.com/maryanneraphael
"No matter what I'm doing right now, I would rather be writing."

Garden of Hope for Tolerance, Love Marriage and More

Garden of Hope: Autobiography of a Marriage
By Maryanne and Lennox Raphael
Hopewell Publications, 2006
Trade paper, 221 pages.

Reviewed by David Henderson for Tribes.org

Lennox and Maryanne Raphael were extremely connected from the beginning of their courtship and subsequent marriage that took place in exotic regions of Mexico and Central and South America in the early 1960s. An interracial couple, the story of their 11 year marriage, is told in Garden of Hope: Autobiography of a Marriage from both of their points of view.

This unusual and intriguingly successful dual autobiography written long after their marriage ended in divorce in the early 1970s reveals that they are still uniquely connected. Each writes passages under their own names, usually in tandem. The book ends soon after the birth of their son, Raphael, a day after Christmas in 1968. This work is dedicated to their son and his new family in more ways than just the words in the frontispiece. Over the dedication “For Raphael, Ginger and Zeal” is a photo of them. As divorce is often most difficult for the child, this book could also be looked at as a loving explanation that they all participated in. The son, Raphael, now, in his late 30s, wrote the foreword. He speaks gratefully of being able to share in their beatific romantic moments when they came together as a couple. He is also able to understand some of the problems that led to their divorce. He is glad they live in the present having never allowed their problems, that seemed so huge at the time, to destroy their future Being too young to have remembered them together, he is grateful “to find a forgotten snapshot of [his] parents in love.” He notes with happiness that today they are still “optimistic, exceptional and bubbling with creative enthusiasm.”

Garden of Hope concentrates on the high points of their marriage. Perhaps a new genre is born here, The Raphael’s union began in the earliest and perhaps most difficult days of the 1960s, well before the assassinations of President John F, Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy. And at the threshold of Flower Power, Black Power and The Summer of Love.

The young couple, in their early 20s, met in Kingston, Jamaica, in April of 1961 and came together almost at once. Lennox was a Trinidadian journalist who was building a career having left a local newspaper in his hometown to take a job with a magazine in Kingston. Maryanne, a more than promising scholarship student at Ohio University, had joined a Black sorority as the sole white person and for that was featured in Ebony Magazine and on the cover of Jet magazine, the two major African American magazines of the time. She had graduated with the highest of honors and won a scholarship to the Sorbonne (in part for a manuscript written in French). She completed the program and traveled through Europe. In 1961 she was in the West Indies living on her own.

After a rather whirlwind courtship that was based on an intense meeting of their minds and spirits and complete truthfulness, they married in Tampico, Mexico and for the next several months were never apart. They lived on very little money. On a whim they traveled to Brazil where they had many adventures and became well known as poets and painters, even to the point of appearing on TV. But they had insights about Brazil as well where there would be a particular South American surprise twist to their own interracial marriage:

In fact, we found the Brazilian boast of racial equality very shallow. . . . both black and white Brazilians praised their country as a racial utopia and loved to point the accusing finger at the United States where, in fact, its citizens (fellow Americans) were making active progress towards racial understanding. . . . Much unlike Brazil where (we were assured by many) the cosmic solution for all racial problems was for blacks to marry some one as light as possible so their children would be lighter than they were; and would in turn marry lighter until the dilution process had eliminated Africa as a recognizable identity.

They topped their south of the border adventures by traveling across the southern United States by bus at the height of the Civil Rights movement — and not once, but twice! They both seem to have had a guileless naiveté that may have helped to protect them from suffering any outrageous consequences of their actions. These adventures were witnessed by Greyhound passengers and the mysterious local policemen who appeared, seemingly, out of nowhere to silently accompany them as they waited in white waiting rooms (this was still the late Jim Crow era when there were separate facilities in the South for blacks and whites).

Maryanne Raphael writes eloquently of the inequality of those facilities personally experienced when she had traveled alone through the southern United States. By insisting on staying in the black sections her unusual positioning made it possible for her to go back and forth between the black and white Jim Crow facilities. When Maryanne and other women were in need of sanitary napkins; she was urged to go into the white facilities.

At this particular stop, the Blacks were forced to use two outhouses, one for men and one for women: and they were lined up around the corner. However, the Whites had a large waiting room with enough toilets for thirty women. They even had showers for 25 cents. And, of course, vending machines for Kotex, or Tampax, as the white women chose; and for toothpaste, deodorant, combs, perfume, etc.

For some, those physical aspects of American history may be a surprise and could be in danger of being lost to public cognizance.

But it would also be in Brazil where Maryanne had a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized for some weeks. Looking back they both admit it was the very beginning of the end of their marriage. But it would take years to jell. Lennox, having to be very careful with Maryanne and watch her and protect her from being institutionalized again, gladly took on that role as a young husband. But he had to admit, looking back, that that began to wear away the youthful blush of their young love. It was very interesting to get a retrospect point of view throughout a quite moving love story.

After her recovery in Brazil they traveled to meet his family in Trinidad and then on to Waverly, Ohio in southern Appalachia to meet her family. If the breakdown in Brazil was the beginning assault on their union it just may have been the interaction with her strictly catholic family that was the most difficult to bear.

There were childhood memories regarding African Americans that she had confided to Lennox early in their courtship that gives some indication of the state of that region and some of the conflicts that came from their visit.

She had told of “some of the terrible games that sought, unsuccessfully, to shape my life.” She had resisted those forces that “would make me a faceless, formless, conscienceless white American girl of catholic upbringing.”

When we went swimming, someone always shouted, ‘Last one in is a nigger baby!’ And we would scramble head over heels because nobody, even me, wanted to be a nigger baby.

We kids never made a choice without counting, ‘Eanie, Meany, Minny Moe, catch a nigger by the toe; if he hollers let him go … ’

We learned very early to spin our superstitions around Blacks, Whenever two kids started picking on one, the solitary one would say, ‘Two on one is a nigger’s fun.’

Whenever someone made an unpopular or uncalled for suggestion, he was told, ‘No remarks from the colored section,’ and we all would laugh ourselves to tears and wet pants.

The grownups, like my father and uncles and the teenagers around said, ‘I’m sweating like a nigger at election,’ or if someone took a drag of their cigarette and wet it, he was told, ‘Stop nigger-lipping my smoke.’

Ohio was an essential territory of the underground railroad for slaves seeking freedom, often from the southern border states of Kentucky and West Virginia. Some of the sayings that got into the lexicon dealt directly with the heritage of slavery and the social conditioning, especially during the formative years of white children. This was necessary to perpetrate “the peculiar institution,” and the subsequent institutionalization of racism. But there were other institutions that were also problematic.

They had given her parents the impression that Lennox was Catholic and that they had been married in the church. During their visit they confessed to her parents that they had had a non-Catholic wedding. But to Catholics and those from many other religions as well, to marry outside of the church is tantamount to not being married at all.

Maryanne’s parents were of that conviction.

The young interracial couple struggled through the two week visit, and then came to New York City, where they would begin to realize their goals as writers, and embrace a community that accepted them as they were. Brief mention is made if their involvement with the Umbra Workshop and with Lennox’s important work for the East Village Other, an influential weekly newspaper of the time.

One of his most memorable assignments was to cover Martin Luther King’s funeral. Their son was conceived during that time. Amusingly enough Maryanne became the first pregnant “Slum Goddess” in EVO. And as a result became a well paid model for medical magazines where she was photographed in her ninth month completely in the nude. It is too bad those photos are not in Garden of Hope.

But there are decent photos of the attractive young lovers in this surprisingly delightful and fulfilling book. Looking back, both have produced significant works and their impressive literary activities continue. Maryanne Rafael has intriguing books about Mother Theresa, among many others, and Lennox Raphael, who now resides in Copenhagen, continues to write poetry and plays, and work within artistic organizations. His ground-breaking play “Che,” is significant in theater history, especially in relationship to the City of New York in the 1960s.

Garden of Hope is certainly a successful collaborative autobiography and could be an inspirational model in many ways.

Perhaps it will encourage more couples to write the stories of their romance.
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© David Henderson

Website © A.G.O.T.T. All Rights Reserved.

A Personal Review--Heart to Heart

The Fallen by Gigi Miner
By Gigi Miner
Publisher: Lulu
Supernatural Mystery - Erotic Aesop's Fable
ISBN: 978-1-4303-0182-0

Reviewed by Yvonne Perry

The Fallen, has made such an impression upon me. My love for humanity has been rekindled and my awareness heightened by reading it.

It may seem like a fiction novel, but the spiritual impact it carries, caused me to see that it indeed contains a greater truth. We are the fallen angels; you, me, and so many others regardless of what course our lives take.

The characters in your book have come to life in the faces of those I love; even in those I do not understand or particularly enjoy being around, because now I know and recognize them as kindred spirits. Already, I feel less judgmental and more compassionate towards those who have forgotten who they are.

You’ve bravely delved into a place of pain where we abuse ourselves and others by the choices we make. Your book will help many realize that all of life is about choice and free will. Hopefully humanity will begin to make better choices that will bring peace to this planet rather than continuing to destroy it with hatred and retaliation.

Thank you so much for sharing your book, your love and your heart with me and all your readers.

Sincerely,
Yvonne Perry
Author of More than Meets the Eye and owner of Write On! Creative Writing Services
Discuss spiritual topics on our blog at http://weareoneinspirit.blogspot.com/