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Title: The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir by Linda Hogan ISBN: 0-393-32305-6 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The woman who writes a gift to the world...
Comment: A few years ago, I had a phase where I read memoirs seeking insights into how to live a full meaningful life. To my innocent surprise, I instead found that many people write their memoirs as versions of the lives they WISH they had lived rather than the real thing.
"The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir" by Linda Hogan is much more than the real thing. This memoir is a kind, loving, forgiving and nakedly honest look at a life; the hopes and dreams encapsulated in one Native American woman's reflective survey of history and its intersection on her unique life. Whether she's talking about her tabooed love affair as a twelve year old girl, the unavoidable coldness of her mother, her own struggle with her adoptive daughters, her horse accident and subsequent convalescence -- Hogan locates herself within a greater context: the world of family, friends, direct and indirect ancestors and the legacy of a difficult and brutal American history.
This book is not meant to be rushed through but savored. It's small enough to read in a single sitting, but the lessons, explorations and stories deserve the luxury of time. Read a chapter and come back to it later. It's a real treasure.
Rating: 5
Summary: Thought-provoking essays by a fine Native American writer
Comment: The West has been vanishing almost since it was first inhabited by Europeans, and as a Native American writer, Hogan is devoted to the recovery of what has been nearly lost -- in particular, the culture and history of Native American tribes. This collection of personal essays, part memoir, argues that history lives, often unacknowledged, in our bodies. The catastrophe of shattered Indian cultures lives on, generations later, in the shattered lives of so many descendants of those tribes.
Hogan is of Chickasaw descent, her ancestors inhabitants of what is now Tennessee and Mississippi, forcibly relocated over 100 years ago to the "Indian Territory" of Oklahoma, a journey remembered as the Trail of Tears. Her father an Army sergeant, she spent her first years in Germany, and in later years lived in Colorado. It was a difficult childhood, including a teenage "marriage" to an older man, a silent mother terrified of other people, her father often absent. She writes of her own alcoholism and adoption of two Lakota sisters, both deeply scarred emotionally by a history of severe child abuse.
Hogan's book is an account of her emergence from the "dark underworld" of her early life and the discovery of her own humanity and capacity for love. There is the love for her troubled daughters and the love she learns to feel for her parents, in particular her father, who grew up as a cowboy and whose world forever made cowboys and horses appealing to her.
There is much about pain in Hogan's story -- physical, emotional, spiritual. There is the pain of cultural genocide, and its aftermath in the scourge of alcoholism, poverty, domestic violence, and child abuse. There is the pain of her own troubled life and that of her daughters. There is also the pain of a debilitating physical condition, fibromyalgia. Finally, there is a near fatal accident when she falls from a runaway horse, causing a head injury and fractured pelvis and requiring many months of recovery.
Besides her own story, there are illuminating ruminations in this book on memory, dreams, lost souls, horses, the body, landscapes, identity, and myth. You put the book down after the last page with a sense that you have been on a long, deeply experienced personal journey. Hogan makes reference to Andre Dubus, another writer whose life was abruptly changed by an accident. As a companion to this book, I'd recommend his collection of essays, "Broken Vessels."
Rating: 4
Summary: "I want to tell you my story."
Comment: "As an Indian woman," Linda Hogan writes in her haunting new memoir, "I have always wondered why others want to enter our lives, to know the private landscape inside a human spirit, the map existing inside tribal thoughts and traditional knowledge. It is a search, I think, for a sense of meaning and relationship" . I discovered Linda Hogan through her "sister writer" , Brenda Peterson. Hogan is a Chicksaw poet, novelist, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. "This is a book about love," she writes. "It didn't begin that way. I sat down to write about pain and wrote, instead, about healing, history, and survival. The work revealed to me that there is a geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples" (p. 16). Hogan's writing here is confessional and painfully honest.
In her memoir, Hogan travels her personal geography of having an "illegal," sexual relationship as a twelve-year-old-girl with a man twice her age --"it was love and it was also wrong," she admits , surviving alcohol, adopting two children with "attachment disorders" , attempting to understand her mother ("Silence is my Mother"), and sufering a closed-head injury and amnesia. Along the way, she offers us huge lessons about hope, forgiveness, and healing.
Linda Hogan is an authentic voice who deserves our attention. I read her 207-page book slowly, in a single sitting, and in awe. When you've finished this heart-moving memoir, then go to its back cover, and make a note to also read the writers included there who praise this book--Brenda Peterson, Barry Lopez, and poet Joy Harjo.
G. Merritt
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Title: Power: A Novel by Linda Hogan ISBN: 0393319687 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: November, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Children of the Roojme: A Family's Journey from Lebanon by Elmaz Abinader ISBN: 0299157342 Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press Pub. Date: December, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: DWELLINGS : A Spiritual History of the Living World by Linda Hogan ISBN: 0684830337 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 17 September, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing on the Green World by Linda Hogan, Brenda Peterson ISBN: 086547625X Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 21 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Book of Medicines: Poems by Linda Hogan ISBN: 1566890101 Publisher: Coffee House Press Pub. Date: August, 1993 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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