The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir - Softcover

Hogan, Linda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393323056 ISBN 13: 9780393323054

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002

Synopsis

"A deeply courageous account of Hogan's personal and tribal history...staggering."―Pam Houston, O Magazine

"I sat down to write a book about pain and ended up writing about love," says award-winning Chickasaw poet and novelist Linda Hogan. In this book, she recounts her difficult childhood as the daughter of an army sergeant, her love affair at age fifteen with an older man, the legacy of alcoholism, the troubled history of her adopted daughters, and her own physical struggles since a recent horse accident. She shows how historic and emotional pain are passed down through generations, blending personal history with stories of important Indian figures of the past such as Lozen, the woman who was the military strategist for Geronimo, and Ohiesha, the Santee Sioux medical doctor who witnessed the massacre at Wounded Knee. Ultimately, Hogan sees herself and her people whole again and gives an illuminating story of personal triumph. "This wise and compassionate offering deserves to be widely read."―Publishers Weekly, starred review

About this title

About the Author:

Linda Hogan was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Mean Spirit. Her other honors include an American Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Tishomingo, Oklahoma.

From Publishers Weekly:

In a Cree Indian story, Wolverine convinced the animals of the world to keep their eyes closed, so humans wouldn't see their "inner fire" and try to steal it. People, too, can close their eyes and protect their inner fires even if it means those fires may burn them, observes Hogan (Mean Spirit), an award-winning Chickasaw novelist and poet. She herself was seared by such bottled-up fire throughout her girlhood. Raised by an alcoholic, army sergeant father and a pathologically silent mother, she turned first, at age 12, to a steady older lover, then to alcohol. Her adult life, too, has been a series of struggles adopting two seriously disturbed children, enduring amnesia following a head injury and coping with her fibromyalgia but she has learned from each experience to find beauty and grace even in darkness. Hogan's memories spill out in waves of layered associations: from fire to pain, from "phantom pain" to "phantom worlds," from glaciers to dreams. Into her personal history, she integrates stories from the American Indian past. In Hogan's writing, the smallest detail can evoke a whole history: that Chief Joseph's skull was sold to be used as an ashtray sums up the tragic mistreatment of American Indians at the hands of whites. Wiping out so much Native wisdom has left our world diminished, defoliated in "landscape and spirit," in Hogan's eyes. Still, Native culture is beginning to thrive again, reminding us that just as every "before" has an "after," "beginnings" have "returns." Life, Hogan concludes, "may never be easy but may be beautiful," even in this "broken world." This wise and compassionate offering deserves to be widely reviewed and read. Agent, Beth Vesel, Sanford J. Greenberger Associates. (June)Forecast: Deep and full of grace, Hogan's writing is every bit as good as ever. Anyone who knows anything about Native American writing will rush to buy it.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0393323056
• ISBN 13: 9780393323054
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 4
• Number of pages: 208