The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams - Hardcover

Nasdijj, .; Nasdijj

3.72

250 ratings by Goodreads

9780618048922: The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618048928 ISBN 13: 9780618048922

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000

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The son of a Native American mother and cowboy father describes life growing up on the harsh fringes of American society and his own adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, the victim of fetal alcohol syndrome, and their final fishing trip together. 25,000 first printing.

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Review:

The language and form of this searing book are as powerful as the life experience that inspired them. In a series of essays that cohere into a spiritual autobiography, the author writes prose that's deceptively simple yet rich in metaphor. An wild horse living in the parking lot of a Navajo school becomes a symbol for living creatures' intrinsic wildness, tamed only at a terrible cost. "We are all runaway horses" is one constant refrain, as is the reminder "you are your history." The author's history is painful: born in 1950 the son of an alcoholic Native American woman and a white cowboy father who "would sell my mom to other migrant men for five dollars," Nasdijj grew up a "mongrel" and an outcast, contending with his violent father's demons while his mother beguiled them with Indian stories. Living on a reservation, never fully accepted because of his white skin, he adopted a baby boy with fetal alcohol syndrome who died at age 6. The book's most beautiful passages meditate on Tommy Nothing Fancy's short life and express his father's love. Nasdijj has been homeless, he has taught Indian children on a reservation, he has retraced with a historian friend the dreadful forced march to Bosque Redondo, where the Navajo and their culture were nearly exterminated. These and many other ordeals are related in the agonizingly lucid words of someone who has turned to writing as a lifeline. This remarkable memoir has its share of bitterness and anger, but Nasdijj transcends both in his acceptance of the world that made him and in the knowledge that "the reservation runs like blood through a river of my dreams." --Wendy Smith

About the Author:

Nasdijj is told he was born in a Navajo hogan in 1950. His mother was a Navajo, his father a cowboy. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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