Oklahoma Books

If you like Louise Erdrich's Tracks or Love Medicine, you'lladore this little novel by Gordon Henry. Like many Native American writers, finding a niche in the publishing world is difficult. With the publication of this one, publishers may be knocking on Henry's door for more. I hope so! Pay attention when you read this one, it isn't escapist fluff, there's meat on these bones (an insider's chuckle, for those who've already ready the book).

Examines every aspect of the Lincoln County War in such detail that you feel as if you know more about what happened than the actual participants did. I would recommend it to any Lincoln County afficionado.

LIVING ON HOLSON CREEK, brings the memories flooding back! Being Neal's 6 year younger brother, as I read this journal, I re-lived the times, if not the specific escapades of Neal and Wylie. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I read it from cover to cover without so much as a break. Being raised with Neal on Holson Creek, I can recall hundreds of adventures yet to be told. Holson Creek was a wonderful place to be raised, Polly and Rubin were the perfect, loving parents,and looking back, R. C., Neal, Judy and Sandy were the perfect Brothers and Sister to have been raised with.

I do hope you will see fit to write another book soon. I loved this one, and believe me brother, YOU have a lot of things you need to confess to! I love ya Neal - your brother Ronnie

Ray A .Williamson, now of the Space Policy Institute at the George Washington University, has written an important narrative and analysis of the astronomy and cosmology of Native America. Concentrating on the American Southwest and the Great Plains, especially the Pueblo, Navajo, and Pawnee, Williamson carefully reconstructs the astronomy of these native peoples and how those understandings related to the manner in which they lived their lives. He emphasizes the role of archeoastronomy in this process, harnessing history, science, sociology, and anthropology to uncover a long distant and poorly understood past in North America.

Williamson finds that "To live in harmony with the world and its cycles is the goal of traditional Native Americans. Their patterns for living derive from a deeply held attention to the rhythms of the sky and earth" (p. 319). The result is an important study illuminating the Native American view of existence.

David La Vere's Looting Spiro Mounds has the informality of a great afternoon conversation at the local coffee shop. La Vere is the guest who knows just about everything there is to know about what used to be termed the "Southern Death Cult" but is now called, less dangerously, the "Southern Cult"--a complex of artistic motifs, architectural styles, burial characteristics, and ritual behaviors among North American Native Americans dating from around the first century A.D. Archaeologists call this the Missisippian period, but most people of the 19th and 20 centuries knew this as the time of "the Mound Builders" and invented all kinds of strange tales about Europeans, Egyptians, Extraterrestials and just about everybody else building the massive structures at Cahokia, Etowah, and Spiro, Oklahoma--the subject of this book. La Vere gives us the low-down on just what went on at Spiro, beginning all the way from the first paleo-Indian inhabitants to the final ritual actions of a handful of elite rulers and priests who built a remarkable burial chamber in the center of the largest mound before abandoning the city c. 1450 because of radical climate changes. La Vere speculates that the creation of this tee pee within a tee pee-shaped chamber filled with "power" objects and the bones of powerful ancestors was a last-ditch effort to somehow focus the sacred energy of the group and adjust the weather back to within more manageable parameters. When the prayers and other rituals enacted atop the mound did not have the desired effect, everyone gave up and left.

As La Vere tells us the story of ancient Spiro that archaeologists have patched together, he also recounts a cautionary tale (really a tragedy) of archaeology and economics that took place in the 1930's when a group of down-and-outers decided to create a mining company to recover saleable objects from the Mounds. Depression-era American witnessed the rise of arrowhead collecting as a hobby along with big-budgeted local museums eager to purchase impressive examples of "Indian" artifacts for their shows. Laudably, La Vere points out the paradox that a mere fifty years earlier the American government was busily stamping out the last traces of Native-American culture, yet somehow prehistoric artifacts--dating from before the time of Sitting Bull, the Trail of Tears, Tecumseh and the other "trouble makers"--had become fair game for amassing and display. The end result of this dangerous mixture of available money in a time of general poverty, with a dash of the anti-intellectualism celebrated in American culture, was the spectacle of these uneducated half-dozen men destroying the great burial chamber at Spiro to sell the incredible artifacts that they haphazardly recovered for mere pennies on the dollar. In addition, to keep the Oklahoma state archaeologists from recovering more material, they spitefully dynamited what was left of the chamber. We will never know for sure what the original burial chamber was like though La Vere give us all the details of what those who were actively involved saw. No photographs were taken. No drawings were done. The opening of the mound was just--apparently--a scrimmage of greed. Think of all the information that was forever lost.

Some impressive artifacts were recovered, however, and photographs of these are included in the book. I was most intrigued by the fact that examples of 500 year old cloth were found and preserved.

This book is lucidly written in an attractive, informal style. Mr. La Vere can tell a story well--even one as saddening as this.

This book is a layman's history of nineteenth-century Cimarron country which encompasses southwestern Kansas, southeastern Colorado, and the neutral strip of Oklahoma and Texas Panhandle.

Characters included outlaws, ruffians, buffalo hunters, cowboys, settlers, with eventual cattle ranches and resultant cattle drives. Mr. Chrisman chronicles all of the above and more. The book also includes maps and illustrations in the telling of these life stories. Mr. Chrisman was a journalist/newspaperman from Liberal, Kansas, being the author of other books such as Fifty Years on the Owlhoot Trail, Tales of the Western Heartland, and 1001 Questions About the American West, among others.

As usual, The University of Oklahoma has done an impressive job with the wrap around cover painting and the general quality of this book. Being the satisfied ownere of hundreds of U of Ok books, this one included, both hardcover and trade it is not possible to overpraise the University and its press.

Semper Fi.

This work acts as a social history of the rise of nationalism in Syria during the short-lived Faisali gov't prior to the implentation the French and British Mandates following WWI and the King-Crane Commission. He aims at challenging two views prevalent (though quickly dying) of Arab nationalism: 1) that what occurred was an awakening of a perennial identity in remission rather than a construction of a national identity and 2) that intellectual histories of elites suffices to show the development of nationalism in the Middle East. Using an uncanny array of sources, novel approaches to investigation, and a particularly lucid picture of Syrian events of the time, he successfully demolishes both views.

What emerges in its place is not only more cogent and probable but also bespeaks the multi-layered experience of nationalism and mass politics as it developed in Syria as he narrates the dialectic between the top-down efforts of the Faisali administration to secure a broad and stable influence over society and various, polyvalent efforts of local popular committees to appropriate national discourse into their own emerging interpretations.

Gelvin's work should be read by any student of the modern Arab World.

This is the only work dedicated in whole to mammals in and around Oklahoma and the south central plains, and as such, it is an indispensible tool for my research as a grassland ecologist. Range maps for each species and references make this worth its weight in, uh, mammals!

I have bought about eight copies of this wonderful cookbook to give to friends after buying one for myself. It contains beautiful photos of the Oklahoma governor's mansion and delectable food made from recipes served at the mansion. It makes a wonderful gift because as well as having recipes you'll use over and over, you also get an Oklahoma history review. It's delightful to look through even if you never use it as a cookbook.

Excellent international service, book delivered in just over a week to UK and in pristine condition. Great service