Northwest Books

this is not only a heartwarming story of the world the way it could be, it is written so well that the reader can't help but slow down and savor the rich words and imagery. if you are weary of the meaningless, "fast reads", and are looking for a first class book, buy this one, enjoy its magnificence and share it with fellow booklovers! afterward, place it in your library or bookcase, right next to the stories you can never let go of....

this is not only a heartwarming story of the world the way it could be, it is written so well that the reader can't help but slow down and savor the rich words and imagery. if you are weary of the meaningless, "fast reads", and are looking for a first class book, buy this one, enjoy its magnificence and share it with fellow booklovers! afterward, place it in your library or bookcase, right next to the stories you can never let go of....

Chasing Miracles warms your heart and soul. Springfield was a typical town until a stranger arrives and amazing, wonderful things started to happen. It became a place so inspiring that I found myself hoping that the events would start happening around me. I wish they would.

This is the most important book I have read in years. It is a love story, a lesson in living and dying, a treasure of hope for mankind. I started reading this book one evening and I did not put it down until I was finished close to dawn the next day. I went outside and I laughed and I cried. Besides just being a fantastic read, this book will leave an imprint of hope and love on your heart. Tommie Weber's book, Chasing Miracles, is for Everyman.

This books allows you to escape to a wonderful world in which we all wished we lived. It gives the reader a look at a different kind of reality. A spiritual, mystical journey awaits all those who travel through the town of Springfield with the author. This is an easy read that leaves you with the anything is possible feeling. Life is a miracle if we all just believe. Enjoy.

As a winewriter interested in all aspects of fine wines and communication dealing with wines, this is a Bible of a book. The book provides insight into not only the famous and well known winemakers and wineries, but also the least known, small production wineries. It is in this area, I believe, that the future of the real 'terroir' of the region will be discovered and maintained. The book also explores the development of the region as a vinicultural tour de force. The section on grape varieties is especially informative. The book indicates and follows the progression and sorting out of grape varieties in this region, and provides an educational backdrop to the crossover from 'Old World' to 'New World's wine production.'

There is no better guide for knowing the ins and outs of wineries throughout California. Large and small wineries they are all there. Forget some of the reviews. The background of each winery is great reading...

A vast array of information not easily available. Reliable reviews of the wines of virtually every known winery, and reliable comments about the future development and direction of wineries.

Actually it's more than that. It's like an encyclopedia, dictionary, atlas and buying guide all in one. I'm so happy to see a new addition of this book. There are so many new wines and wineries to know about that it makes my head spin. This book sorts it all out in a very concise and comprehensive format. Bravo!

I received this 11/98 version as a gift. I use it extensively as a reference for learning about different local varietals, and use it when purchasing, and then consuming, certain vintages. My one personal gripe is that I just cannot afford to try all the wines in recommendation. (Maybe that's a good thing!)

I became a vegan four months ago. The transition from eating meat to a vegan diet is difficult to pull off. I managed it initially by shopping for vegan prepared foods at up-scale grocers. I also signed up for a series of vegan cooking classes taught by the author of this book, David Gabbe, through the local community college. I was thrilled with the knowledge I gained in his classes. He taught me how to prepare affordable, simple, tasty, healthful vegan dishes that I really enjoy eating. He has fed these dishes to his family for 30 years, and it shows. This is one of the most PRACTICAL cookbooks I have ever found, vegan or not. David relies on a small set of standard, readily available ingredients that are used over and over again to prepare an astonishing array of delicious and nutritious vegan dishes. The ingredient lists are short, the preparation is simple, and the results are reliable. I highly recommend the tempeh stroganoff, the tofu 'egg fried rice', and the cashew 'cheese'. I believe that it was truly "providential" that I found David, his cooking classes, and his wonderful cookbook so early in my vegan career. I might not have succeeded without him!!! Thank you, David!

i took a cooking class with david at the beginning of this year, and was completely blown away by how simultaneously healthy, simple, delicious, and inventive his recipes were. unlike so many vegan adaptations of non-vegan foods, mr. gabbe never resorts to cheap attempts to imitate (which often sacrifice taste, nutritional value, or both), instead forging ahead with genuinely innovative recipes that always end up both delicious and incredibly healthy. where other vegan recipes are often pale imitations of their non-vegan counterparts, these recipes stand on their own feet, and are as a result much more tasty than many vegan dishes of comparable health value.

i recommend this book especially to anyone who is interested in healthy eating but who feels intimidated by the logistical demands of cooking with healthy whole foods. no other cookbook i have read has recipes as simple to follow as these, let alone as nutritious. and because the recipes are so simple, they are very easy to modify to suit personal tastes or experimental proclivities.

this is by far my most-used cookbook and i can't recommend it highly enough.

"David's Pure Vegetarian Kitchen" is an amazingly accessible introduction to healthy vegan cooking. It provides a good overview of ingredients and nutritional considerations, and then it dives right into a diverse library of recipes. David's down-to-earth style takes all the anxiety out of trying a new genre of cooking. He's perfected vegan versions of many American staple foods - such as cake, gravy, burgers, and so on. These dishes taste so hearty and satisfying that you don't miss the milk, eggs, and other animal products. Even my non-vegetarian friends loved the dishes that resulted from the recipes in this book!

I have many, many cookbooks, but this is the one I reach for all the time! The recipes are easy to make and very tasty. For example for those of you who like rich, brown gravy, but don't want the unhealthful fat and flour, there is a recipe for Black Bean Gravy that will make you forget about "traditional" gravy!
You say you don't like tofu? That's because you have never had it prepared properly, and the recipes in this book will start you on a new relationship with this healthy food. You don't have to be a solid vegetarian to use these recipes - alternate them with your regular food preferences. Who knows- you may find you prefer the fresh, clean tastes of these foods versus frequent meat consumption! I know I do! I agree with the previous reviewer - if you can take a cooking class with David Gabbe, do it. It's a life changing event for healthy eating!!!

I really appreciate David Gabbe's simple recipes. For those of us with busy lives, his suggestions and tips make it simple to follow a healthy, whole foods (and really good!) diet. For anyone that lives near where he teaches classes, I recommend them. I've taken several classes from Mr. Gabbe and all were fun and highly informative.

My son Eric couldn't put this book down! I found it by his bedside the following morning when I went to wake him up.

I wrote this novel in college in 1988. It is the story of a young boy from Earth who is pulled through a worldgate to the magic world of Abydonne, where his father came from. Cory Avalon is quickly apprenticed to the ancient wizard Math, and summons a baby golden dragon for his familiar. Math quickly realizes that Cory is the boy of the prophecy, the promised Archwizard who will defeat the Demon Lord Asmodeus and free the Twelve Kingdoms of Man from an evil tyranny.

Awesome awesome awesome I can't belive that the an author cood right so well and make it a med-evil one I recomend that you read this book really read this book it is awsome......

wow! awsome book I can't beleve the adventures and the action if I get hold of another of his books I'd go crazy he is an awesome wrighter! I really suggest that you read this or buy it and then read it....

awesome though it took me some time to read this big bok but it was so cool all the battles the adventures awesom I suggest u read this book

In order to figure out FC switch/HBA driver/Open FCoE, I need a FC book. This is the ONE I'm looking for. Robert W. Kembel does an excellent job, and it is the 2007 edition that reflects the recent technology change, for example, NPIV. I really enjoy reading it.

Mr. Kembel is working on SAN book based on the info on the back cover. I wish we'll get it soon.

Even though there are typos and edit errors in the book, I give it 5 stars. I highly recommend it.

In the foreword to this book, Roger Cummings writes, "I can tell you with certainty that the current SAN implementations implement only a fraction of the functionality defined in the standards.". Because the standards go so much farther and deeper than the vendor's current products, this book remains ahead of it's time even though it is a few years old.

Whenever I hear about a new product or service in the FC space, or when I see an unusual problem in a fabric, this is the first book I turn to for clarity. With the abundance of vendor materials on SANs and the marketing hype associated with new products, this work remains the best book on my shelf for an in-depth understanding of the FC protocols and services. And while most people will not read this book cover to cover, every enterprise SAN administrator should have this on their shelves so they can develop context for the things they hear from vendors or customer support people. Without that fundamental understanding, you are completely at the mercy of others in your problem resolution and design decisions.

This is an excellent book, and I highly recommend it.

Bob Kembel has done a tremendous service for the storage networking industry by clearly explaining the fundamental components of Fibre Channel standards. His works on Arbitrated Loop, Fibre Channel technology and Fibre Channel Fabric Switches are essential reading for SAN technicians and system designers. As foundation knowledge and consistently useful reference material, keep these books close at hand.

First off let me begin this review by saying that if you are just an ordinary IT administrator that just happens to own some SAN equipment, this book is probably overkill. This book goes into detail intended for those that must diagnose issues in Fibre Channel line traces, frame by frame. That information is not particularly interesting to someone that does not own or use a Fibre Channel trace tool. For more general books, along with advice on network design, look elsewhere.

This book is intended for someone that is so immersed in the Fibre Channel protocol that the ANSI standards committee's web site is near the top of their bookmark list. (FYI it is www.t11.org) The essential idea behind this reference is to provide a quick introduction to fibre channel, and then dive right in to going over the spec. It is far more readable than the formal standards documents. However, if you are not used to reading protocol references (such as RFC's), the book may be somewhat hard to follow.

It should be noted that this book does not cover Arbitrated Loop, FCP (essentially SCSI over Fibre Channel), SAN Design or any of the FC-SW standard (such as FSPF). You will need separate books for those. FC-AL and FC-SW are covered in other books by Kembel. For a similar book on SCSI (by Deming), google for "SCSI Solution Technology". (It is not available through Amazon.)

This is a valuable reference. I use it in conjunction with the Fibre Channel documents. The text is clear and concise. The drawings are well-planned and easy-to-follow. The Bibliography contains an exhaustive list of Related Books, Papers, Articles, and Standards. Of the books that I have read about Fibre Channel this is one my team members most often steal (I mean borrow ;D) from me. If you are interested in learning about the Fibre Channel or desire a concise explanation of the overwhelming number of specifications, this text will interest you.

If you are interesting in plants, and you live in latin_america this is a book for you!! Al Gentry give us a view of tropical plats...in a taxonomic way... but includes practical and field tips to recognize families and some genera, and includes some simply and helpful illustrations . This "little" field guide it is some like the "Botanic Bible" of tropical American botanists (However I am a template Southamerican, I found this like a book of "head"....!!)

The best avaliable guide to the wood plants of this region of South America that I am aware of.

I'm an amateur naturalist -- and had the plants of the Eastern US pretty well under control. All that went out the window when I moved to Nicaragua. This is the first broad, clear, complete guide to neo-tropical woody plants (and lots of the herbaceous plants as well) I've seen. Although it was written for Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru, it does well enough for Central America. Just leafing through the illustrations has given me the family, and often the genus, of lots of the plants I've seen in our cloud forests. The author has a very readable style, laced with an understated sense of humour that bubbles to the surface on several occasions. See the entry for Euphorbiaceae, for example.

The book is not, however, for the complete beginner. Unless you are thoroughly familiar with the arcane botanical terminology, you will need a botanical dictionary. "Plant Identification Terminology" by Harris is a good one.

I'm an amateur naturalist -- and had the plants of the Eastern US pretty well under control. All that went out the window when I moved to Nicaragua. This is the first broad, clear, complete guide to neo-tropical woody plants (and lots of the herbaceous plants as well) I've seen. Although it was written for Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru, it does well enough for Central America. Just leafing through the illustrations has given me the family, and often the genus, of lots of the plants I've seen in our cloud forests. The author has a very readable style, laced with an understated sense of humour that bubbles to the surface on several occasions. See the entry for Euphorbiaceae, for example.

The book is not, however, for the complete beginner. Unless you are thoroughly familiar with the arcane botanical terminology, you will need a botanical dictionary. "Plant Identification Terminology" by Harris is a good one.

This book is the only one to cover so extensively the flora of Colombia in such an accessible way. You won't regret this purchase. It certainly deserves five stars.

Bill Hess as created a masterpiece. His grainy and moody black and white capture the bowhead hunt, Point Lay beluga hunts and Inupiat life in respectfully frank perfection. The book contains several stories that are threaded in and out of the Inupiat Bowhead hunts and gives a good look into the subsistence lifestyle of the Eskimos who live on the edge of the Arctic ocean.

Hess' journalistic writing style is easy to read and appreciate. He was able to get a close-up view on many things most will never have a chance to see from subsistence hunts, search and rescue missions and the 1990's attempt to free three ice-trapped gray whales which had captured the medias attention. It was interesting how different the story that reached us was compared to the situation and conclusion was on the ice.

If you have interest in whale hunting or Eskimo lifestyles, get this book. It is a great visual and prose look into this arctic world.

This book is a milestone among recent publications on Alaska because it portrays Alaska's Native people in an unvarnished and realistic way. This is NOT a commercial "coffee table book" or a series of pretty pictures suitable for note cards. A short story, hopefully, will illustrate my point.

When I was living in Barrow in the late 1980s, the mayor asked me to meet with a visiting photographer who had requested information on traditional whale hunting (I was a staff anthropologist at the time). The Anchorage photographer [NOT Bill Hess] wanted to "reconstruct" a whale hunt. This commercial photographer pleaded to have me call him in Anchorage next time a whale was harpooned so he could catch the next plane to Barrow (he had already talked the airline into sponsoring him). He promised that he would stage the photograph to show the local people in the best possible light and make them appreciated by all the tourists who come to Alaska.

After nearly throwing up, I politely told him that the Inupiat whale hunters were quite capable of taking care of themselves and did not need to be "airbrushed" and marketed for popular consumption.

Then I met Bill Hess. I immediately connected with his visceral understanding of Inupiat culture which he communicates so elegantly in words and photos in this book "Gift of the Whale." This book communicates a vision of contemporary Inupiat life that is unvarnished and somewhat raw; but - from my firsthand experience - authentic.

Bill Hess knows what it's like to sweat while breaking a sled trail through jumbled ice floes at 20 below. He earned his unique chance to communicate the symbiotic relationship between Inupiat hunters and the bowhead whale. This book takes the reader out onto the Arctic Ocean (in both its frozen and liquid state) and into the skin boats, skiffs, snowmachines and tents of crews who provide their families with life-giving food. The real stories (illustrated with stunning duotone photos of the people and the animals that are simultaneously revered and killed for survival) are more interesting and insightful than any pseudo-reality a market-driven journalist could create.

Bill Hess, through his photos and stories in this book, communicates how Inupiat culture continues to focus on the communal hunting and sharing of food for survival. This book communicates in vivid detail how impractical contemporary Western values of individual ego-driven materialism are when it's 20 below zero with the snow blowing sideways, and a fellow hunter is lost on the tundra. Bill illustrates how Inupiat society is built on respect and reverence for the resources and each other, keys to long-term survival in the Arctic. This book provides a visual banquet allowing the reader to enjoy and appreciate contemporary Inupiat whaling, life, and culture.

Bill Hess is a very gifted photographer, who works almost exclusively in black and white. He has spent a great deal of time with the people the people of the North Slope whose lives are shared in this book. For a number of years he was under contract to the North Slope Borough to produce a magazine about life on the North Slope (Uinniq-The Open Lead, which makes it clear that the people of the North Slope felt that he represents them clearly and fairly.

One could enjoy this book for the photography alone, but it is so much more than that. Whaling is a central focus of North Slope Inupiat culture; it is an inextricable part. People here know that; and the whalers carry it out as a sacred trust on behalf of the whole community.

This is a stunning visual presentation combined with a moving, unpretentious text. The drama of the three grey whales, the search for footprints . . . it is all powerful stuff. I have only been living in Barrow for nine months but so far there isn't a word that doesn't ring true.

I have done a great deal of reading in my life, yet never have I been more absorbed in a book than I have in 'Gift of the Whale'. I highly recommend this elegant, enjoyable and informative piece of work.

The subtitle of this book is "A History of Alaskan Salmon Trolling and the Tragedy of the Dammed Columbia River." In this compelling historical novel, Colvin "tells the other side of the story" of what we as a nation have lost in the name of progress. By imagining the life of one man (aptly named Sammy) the author provides a dramatic and personalized view of the changes that destroyed, in one lifetime, the salmon trolling industry. While this is ultimately a story of loss, I found that Sammy's story also includes joy and suspense. What fisherman wouldn't thrill to the catch of a nearly hundred pound "June Hog," truly the king of salmon. Sammy faces many perils, such as deadly storms and an earthquake, but he also has the opportunity to witness the pristine and awe-inspiring beauty of the Alaskan wilderness. I enjoyed being a part of Sammy's life; I was fascinated with the evolution of the salmon trolling industry; and I was shocked at the way we as a nation destroyed it. While we can't undo the past, we can be vigilant in our future treatment of our planet earth.

The Last Fisherman is a fantastic read for anyone, but especially for those who love historical novels, or for those whose interest is in the commercial fishing scene of Alaska. Personally, I love historical novels, but knew nothing about Alaskan commercial fishing.

I found the fishing life style and the information provided, fascinating. More serious than humorous, the book nonetheless has some very entertaining funny moments. There are some great bear stories!

I used to wonder whether the environmentalists exaggerated the effect of dams on the salmon runs, or if the story from the dam builders was so much public relations spin. Now I know!

The book is easy to read, and you won't want to put it down.

Dan Dunn, M.D., Scott City, KS

Captivating account of an adventuresome life style with amazing details of the navigational skills & seamanship necessary to both survive & succeed as a commercial fisherman in the coastal waters of wilderness Alaska.

Excellent book - excellent writing. Could not put the book down. A great read for just about anybody but particularly those interested in the truth about the fishing industry and what the Government has done to it. Cannot wait for this to become a movie!

I highly recommend this book - not just for those who personally experienced salmon fishing on the west coast, but for anyone who loves the outdoors and understands the importance of our natural resources, and the role the independent fisherman has played in our history. This book is well written and very enjoyable.

I am in awe of the labor of love here, a compilation from all kinds of Alaskans and of all kinds of Alaska. The author is open-hearted and open-minded. I am sorry I had not read this one sooner, but better late than never (so many great books by smaller presses go unnoticed due to lack of marketing budget).
I hope to see more by Wayne Mergler, maybe for 2008.
Lesley Thomas, author of Flight of the Goose

Having been there to see Alaska only whets the appetite. Do you have imagination? Then, whether you've never been, only cruised thru, or passed thru via Anchorage, don't wait to purchase this the finest collection of stories of the true Alaska you will find. Feel what it's like to freeze to death, hunt the Great Whale, live the ways of the original Alaskans...without having to. Immerse yourself in poetry only a great land and great people could create. In short, enjoy this collection. Savor it. Send it to friends as I have. And, pick it up again and again and again.

This book is a delight. Well chosen and skillfully edited material covers all aspects of the Alaska experience -- from native myths to the burly Alaska of the wild. This is a perfect book to read before your first trip to Alaska. If you have visited Alaska, reading this book will help you savor the Alaska experience. There are also several short pieces which make great bedtime reading for young children. One of my best purchases in years.

Although many great literary minds have been inspired to write about Alaska, it is impossible to find a single work that can completely describe the "Alaskan Experience". This great land is simply too vast in size, and rich in history and cultures to be described by any one author at any one time. In his anthology, Wayne Mergler selected excerpts from classical stories of Alaska, along with modern works and Native lore. He transports the reader through time and culture to give a fuller view of what it is to be "Alaskan".

I have lived in Alaska all of my life and I have never found anything that described this land to its fullest. Wayne Mergler's anthology is one of the few works that takes both Alaskan and non-Alaskan authors to describe not only the adventures and dreams found here, but also the riches. Included in this Anthology, are authors like Jack London, John Haines, Nick Jans, Margaret Murie and many others. From poems and legends to excerpts of novels, this anthology has something for everyone. This work is not only a good book for Alaskans to read, but also any people in the lower-48 who ahve never been here, or still think that Alaska has nothing to offer except snow and ice

"The Lesser Blessed is a coming of age tale told in photo-booth snapshots and raunchy one-liners. It is poetry and prose and locker-room boasts and puking-your-guts-out shame. It's sex that transcends tragedy. It is loud and rude and high. It's a shaker."
--John Burns for the Georgia Straight (Nov. 28, 1996)

"[Van Camp] does not stumble over nostalgia or romanticism or careless diction. He loves words-his own, his Nation's, rock and roll's-and slips perfect ones into atrociously profane and perfect sentences..."
--Lorna Jackson for The Malahat Review (Summer, 1997)

The Lesser Blessed. Richard Van Camp. Douglas & McIntyre, 1996. Reviewed by Dr. Geary Hobson.

In virtually every generation, in the realm of literary activity, there comes along a
book that, by the very nature of its subject matter and place and the sheer exuberance
of its utterances reverberant of the place and people depicted, introduces not only a
little-known terra firma and people, but sometimes becomes the definer of that era in
which it is produced. Not surprisingly, these books are usually the products of younger
writers. Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, Jane Austin's novels, the
work of the Brontes, Stephen Crane's stories, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises
ushering in the Lost Generation, Kerouac's Beat Generation introduced in On The
Road, Salinger's Holden Caulfield wandering through Catcher in the Rye, the jaded
"me"-obsessed teens in Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, Native American
sensibilities in Momaday's House Made of Dawn, and a generation later, Alexie's The
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven-all these books and writers burst forth
in such dynamic ways that not only defined their respective eras, shook the accepted
literary standards of their day, but expanded and extended the English lan-{78}guage,
while at the same time occasioning the debut of sometimes extraordinary new literary
talents.
In my view, Richard Van Camp, a Dogrib Nation writer born in Fort Smith,
Northwest Territories, Canada, in 1971, is accomplishing virtually the same thing in his
first novel, The Lesser Blessed, as Hemingway, Kerouac, et al. did in their times.
Given the smaller spectrum of Native American literature within (or without, as many
Native writers would have it) the larger context of American, British, and Canadian
literatures, Van Camp's novel introduces a new terrain and language that nonetheless
has roots in the fiction of Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch, while
simultaneously exploring the same subject matter as the contemporary stories of
Sherman Alexie, Adrian Louis, and Lorne Simon.
In The Lesser Blessed, a Dogrib Indian teenager named Larry Sole narrates his
story and thus invites the reader into the little-examined world of contemporary Dogrib
(a part of the Dene, or Athabaskan-based, tribal people of the Northwest Territories
of Canada). More specifically, Larry embodies a modern Indian teenager's view of his
particular tribal culture and of the Indian world in general, acknowledging them and
appreciating them along with his fondness for Iron Maiden, Bruce Springsteen, Ozzy
Osbourne, occasional pot-smoking, getting "hamburgered" ("Raven" talk--Larry's own
take on his tribe's trickster figure's language for "drunk," Larry tells us), and trying to
get closer to his own particular Juliet (and, incidentally, the girl's actual name in the
novel) whom Larry remembers as "the first girl in grade school to swear at a teacher."
A North of 60 Romeo, Larry is in love with Juliet while she throws her sexual favors
to Johnny Beck, Larry's best friend, who is scornfully casual to her attentions.
Van Camp's method of characterization is strikingly vivid. At seventeen, and tall
and skinny, Larry describes himself as having "spaghetti arms and daddy longlegs,"
and at one point he visualizes himself as a Dogrib hunter of an earlier time as he
watches Juliet, "seen in his sights as a white caribou, pure, but (whom) he let go out of
respect and awe." Larry and his mother, a night school student at Arctic College, live
in Fort Simmer, a north-of-the-60th parallel town near the border of Alberta. Jed, his
mother's on-again, off-again boy friend, is a traditional Slavey Indian trapper whom
Larry identifies as a father-figure, and who promises to take Larry out "on the land" for
a season of trapping. Larry is amenable to this, but he is still comfortable in his
high-school world of hanging out with Johnny, lusting after Juliet from afar, {79} trying
his best to avoid the numerous school-ground fist-fights, and playing his tape deck
"cranked up" with AC/DC, Judas priest, and Iron Maiden.
Slowly, through a number of finely crafted, fragmented flashbacks, the reader
learns of Larry's past, in which his biological father physically and sexually abused him
and later died in a cabin fire that Larry himself may have started. Like Welch's
emotionally frozen nameless narrator of Winter in the Blood, Larry gradually awakens
to love and affection--after he surprisingly (to himself most of all) consummates his
sexual desire for Juliet in a brief relationship--and learns to retrust his mother and to
give himself fully in a father-son relationship with Jed. The Lesser Blessed, incredibly
funny and wise-cracking in many places, is nonetheless filled with the genuine
ingredients of a well-wrought tragi-comedy.
The Lesser Blessed is also the harbinger of a sophisticated Arctic literature, and
of a bold new direction for contemporary Native literature. And while it is perhaps not
the first novel to come out of the Canadian Northwest Territories, it is certainly the first
work of fiction by a Native writer from that vast region. By all accounts, it is a
masterful achievement.

Dr. Geary Hobson

Richard Van Camp¡¦s novel "The Lesser Blessed" is rooted firmly in the tradition of the coming-of-age, Bildungsroman genre that appeals to all who have survived the teen years and lived to tell about it. Or in this case, lived to read about it.

Writing from the sensibility of a Canadian aboriginal artist, a First Nation author speaking from within the experience of life as a member of the Dogrib nation, Van Camp imbues his novel with a definite sense of the indigenous culture situated within the history of Canadian social colonization. His 16-year-old narrator and primary protagonist, Larry, is comfortable with the First Nation culture passed down to him by his family. However, Larry truly finds himself coming alive in the stories told by his mother¡¦s firefighter boyfriend, Jed.

As the novel progresses and we discover the dark ¡§devil¡¦s kiss¡¨ secret that weighs so heavily upon Larry¡¦s heart, it becomes increasingly clear that Jed the firefighter is there to save Larry from burning in the flames of guilt and shame. The quenching waters that he offers the tormented teen are his stories, histories and mythologies. Indeed, the chilling influence of Adrian C. Louis and Leslie Marmon Silko is recognizable in this novel at its darkest moments. This is certainly not a childhood story of nostalgia and happiness, but neither is it a tale overwhelmed by sadness and self-destruction.

The sharing of stories helps Larry survive the challenges thrown at him as a North American teenager: experimenting with drugs; dealing with bullies; controlling sexual urges; getting into fights; and making friends. Scattered across the pages of almost every chapter is the music of the period, as Larry also draws strength from his favorite band, Iron Maiden. Band names and song titles are peppered throughout the novel. Most post-teenaged readers will probably smile as they remember how very important music was to them as teens.

Especially satisfying is Van Camp¡¦s playfulness with language and his creation of a jargon that is both pleasant and jarring, such as the hyper-speech that Larry calls ¡§Raven talk.¡¨ The dialogue is often fast and funny, although the humor tends toward the darker edges of comedy. Most intriguing are the flashes of memory offered up in dreamlike and psychedelic patterns. Watch out for those blue monkeys.

If the novel has any failing, it is the brevity of the work. The story takes place in the space of a few weeks, and though ¡§manhood¡¨ or ¡§adulthood¡¨ remain far from Larry¡¦s grasp, he revels in his life experiences and fancies himself lucky to be alive. For the cynical adult reader, Larry's joy represents his naivety; his faith in love seems misplaced. Poor Larry just doesn¡¦t know what kind of mud the world still has in store for him, for us all. But maybe, just maybe, he¡¦ll survive better than the rest of us because he¡¦s got stories, Jed¡¦s stories and his own, to keep him going.

Timothy R. Fox
Kui Xing: The Journal of Asian/Diasporic and Aboriginal Literature
http://www.kuixing.panopticonasia.com
Join the Kui Xing Discussion Group

"THE LESSER BLESSED is easily one of the most truthful, painful, powerful novels I've ever read."

-Joseph Bruchac