[Review of] Diane Glancy. Claiming Breath

In her seventh book of poetry, Diane Glancy presents a moving account of the portrait of the artist as Native, woman, and poet. Of German, English, and Cherokee descent, Glancy\u27s prose poetry, as she states in her Preface, is often about being in the middle ground between two cultures, not fully a part of either. I write with a split voice, often experimenting with language until the parts equal some sort of a whole. The Sixty-three poems in this volume (with the last composed of eight parts) are a non-linear journey, a physical and psychological traveling through the senses and intellect. The details of the poet\u27s life accumulate initially through journal-like entries that set forth the parameters of her life: a failed marriage, two children, her many teaching trips across the Midwest as artist-in-residence, her home twice vandalized by thieves, and her mother\u27s losing battle against cancer. Ultimately, the book is about writing, or wrioting, as the title of one piece suggests, and the search to explore my memories & their relational aspects to the present. I was born between 2 heritages & I want to explore the empty space, that place-between-2-places, that walk-in-2-worlds. I want to do it in a new way

[Review of] Maika Drucker. Grandma\u27s Latkes

Grandma\u27s Latkes, written by MaIka Drucker (who wrote the acclaimed Jewish Holiday Series published by Holiday House) and illustrated by Eve Chwast, accomplishes three things simultaneously: it is an instructional story on the preparation of latkes, it retells the story of the origin of Hanukkah, and it is an endearing story of the passing down of a tradition from one generation to another. The book works successfully on all three levels, and children from the ages of six to ten will be able to understand and appreciate its rich multiplicity

[Review of] University of Wisconsin System Women\u27s Studies Librarian. Women, Race, and Ethnicity: A Bibliography

Women, Race, and Ethnicity had its origin in a series of reading lists prepared by the office of the University of Wisconsin System Women\u27s Studies Librarian in the mid-1980s; this newest edition supersedes an earlier June 1988 release. Containing almost 2500 sources, this volume provides a selective, annotated list of college-level print (including special journal issues and chapters in anthologies) and audiovisual resources, emphasizing recent materials on ethnic women in the United States (only a few Canadian materials are included). References are classified under twenty-eight disciplines and topics -- such as Anthropology, Education, Literature, Poetry, and Psychology -- and further subdivided by ethnic group: Asian and Pacific American women, Black women, Euro-American women, Indian women, Jewish women, and Latinas. There are, within each topic, subsections labeled General and Cross-Cultural Studies

[Review of] Elsie Clews Parsons. American Indian Life

In Joan Mark\u27s introduction to the Bison edition of this classic work, she offers a good analysis of the impact of these twenty-seven fictional stories written by anthropologists and first published in 1922. Anthropology\u27s radical change in methodology at the turn of the century -- of which Parsons and Franz Boas (twenty of these stories can be identified with Boasian anthropology) were noticeable figures in the transformation -- led Parsons to attempt to tackle the problem of the relation of the individual to the culture. Consequently, she asked her fellow anthropologists to write fictions about Native Americans in which they could speculate how individuals would think and feel in certain situations, issues that were lacking from strictly scientific descriptions. The result was this volume with the message that every society both supports the individuals born within it and at the same time exacts a toll on them

[Review of] Sherley Anne Williams. Working Cotton

Working Cotton is based on poems from Williams\u27s The Peacock Poems, a National Book Award nominee. Based on her childhood experience in the cotton fields of Fresno, this poignant story tells of a migrant family\u27s day from the point of view of a child, Shelan, who is a big girl now. Not big enough to have my own sack, just only to help pile cotton in the middle of the row for Mamma to put in hers.” From dawn until dusk, the family works the field

[Review of] Lois Elhert and Amy Prince, trans. Moon Rope (Un lazo a la luna)

In this children\u27s explanatory tale, Fox persuades Mole to go to the moon on a braided grass rope. After Mole slips from the rope and is carried to earth on the back of a bird, he digs a tunnel, which explains why Mole chooses a nocturnal existence. The simplicity of the story, with its trickster characteristics of Fox, belies the actual experience of reading this visually stunning, bilingual, timeless tale

[Review of] James Robert Payne. Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives

In the introduction to this excellent collection of critical essays on multicultural autobiography Payne states that what sets this work apart from most other works on autobiography, is the attempt in this volume to bring together different critical voices, each speaking from an area of expertise on a particular American cultural tradition. Drawing on concepts developed at the 1982 Reconstructing American Literature Institute at Yale, Payne did not impose any theoretical orientation on the eleven contributors. Consequently, while the contributors have relied upon the current criticism and commentary on the blossoming field of autobiography, each is a recognized scholar in the cultural traditions about which they write. In his introduction, Payne gives an overview of earlier notable contributions to autobiographical writings and views Multicultural Autobiography as furthering the understanding of the recent, most productive trend in this field: the employment of pluralist approaches to redefine the American experience

[Review of] Paul Lauter, et aI., eds. The Heath Anthology of American Literature

In the notes to the reader in this two-volume Heath Anthology, Lauter emphasizes that a major principle of selection for authors and works included is to represent as fully as possible the varied cultures of the United States. The process of compilation -- the solicitation from thousands of faculty members teaching American literature to suggest what authors and works should be considered for a reconstructed American literature text -- reflects this commitment. With the inclusion of works by 109 women of all races, twenty-five Native Americans (including seventeen texts from tribal origins), fifty-three African Americans, thirteen Hispanics (as well as twelve texts from earlier Spanish originals and two from French), nine Asian Americans, and authors from other ethnic traditions (such as Jewish and Italian), the editors have succeeded in producing an anthology that redefines the canon of American literature. It is a definition long overdue and one that portrays a composite picture of the American multicultural literary tradition and new directions in the study of the American literary frontier

[Review of] Julie Cruikshank. in collaboration with Angela Sidney. Kitty Smith. and Annie Ned. Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders

Life Lived Like a Story, a volume in the American Indian Lives Series, contains the transcribed autobiographies of three women of the Yukon: Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned. In her introduction, Cruikshank states that the book is based on the premise that life-history investigation provides a model for research. To meet this goal, Cruikshank\u27s methodology depended upon ongoing collaborations between interviewer and interviewees. The three remarkable women who share their life stories in this volume were all raised on the inland side of the high country frontier separating coastal Tlingit and interior Athapaskans; all can claim both Athapaskan and Tlingit ancestry; and all were born within a few years of the Klondike gold rush (1896-98), a period at the close of an intensive period of Tlingit-Athapaskan trade and a period of unprecedented change. Cruikshank, with her careful attention to methodology, language, and the wishes of her subjects, has produced a volume of autobiographies that uses an oral tradition grounded in local speech and a shared body of mythological and traditional knowledge. The genre successfully captures the essence of each of these three women\u27s lives -- the hardships as well as the humor -- and the genre also underscores the recurring theme of connection to both nature and other people