Searching for Lost City: On the Trail of America's Native Languages

Rating:
Summary: Title says it all
Review: As much as I admired the author's conviction and skill, "Searching for Lost City" seemed to me a missed opportunity. By taking such an elegiac and despairing tone, Elizabeth Seay manages to depress the reader without conveying much of the beauty and complexity of Native American language and culture. Her quest, as exemplified by the title, is to find something lost-large communities of people speaking Native American languages in Oklahoma. Very early in the book the reader is told this is a near-hopeless task, and the tone of the book takes a fatal downward plunge. Her extensive reporting and research are apparent, but I struggled to motivate myself to keep reading. Why not celebrate the language communities that do exist, even if you have to leave Oklahoma? That said, this book did beautifully describe a part of the country that few go out of their way to visit, and Seay made a convincing case for Oklahoma as an underappreciated landscape with a fascinating history and mix of people. Overall, well done but a major downer.

Rating:
Summary: Title says it all
Review: As much as I admired the author?s conviction and skill, ?Searching for Lost City? seemed to me a missed opportunity. By taking such an elegiac and despairing tone, Elizabeth Seay manages to depress the reader without conveying much of the beauty and complexity of Native American language and culture. Her quest, as exemplified by the title, is to find something lost?large communities of people speaking Native American languages in Oklahoma. Very early in the book the reader is told this is a near-hopeless task, and the tone of the book takes a fatal downward plunge. Her extensive reporting and research are apparent, but I struggled to motivate myself to keep reading. Why not celebrate the language communities that do exist, even if you have to leave Oklahoma? That said, this book did beautifully describe a part of the country that few go out of their way to visit, and Seay made a convincing case for Oklahoma as an underappreciated landscape with a fascinating history and mix of people. Overall, well done but a major downer.

Rating:
Summary: Mixed Reaction
Review: Seay is a wonderfully descriptive writer, and this book is refreshingly nonacademic -- especially considering the subject matter. She read the right works and talked to the right people. However, her unrelenting negativism is hard to swallow. This is definitely a "glass half-empty" book. I've had the pleasure of meeting many of the people mentioned in the book and was astonished by the unflattering portraits she painted of them and their work - sometimes just insulting. Several things people told to her in confidence do not really seem appropriate to be published. The vast majority of this book revolves around Cherokee, when there are over 30 Native languages spoken in Oklahoma. Despite the dour tone, I'm glad the book was written but would only recommend it to people with little or no familiarity with the Native American world.

Rating:
Summary: Original thinking, beautiful writing, excellent reporting
Review: This book is a rare combination of excellent, original reporting and beautiful, heartfelt writing. Seay has taken on a topic we hardly ever think about: What is the price of losing a language? She also introduces readers to a subject we may know very little about: the lives of Native Americans. Some of the most interesting parts of the book are her descriptions of unique characteristics of each language: in one Indian language, for example, she says there are various words for each variety of tree at different hours of the day. Those examples help you understand why it is such a loss when a language disappears--because these languages contain not just words that are alien to us, but whole concepts that represents another approach to life. Seay's tone and style is a real pleasure: she's not academic nor self-righteous, as a lot of authors can be when they feel like they're speaking for an oppressed group. Instead, she puts her energy into looking for the big picture and the details, the facts, backup for her ideas, all the while keeping her eyes open for those bits of humanity and humor. Some passages on characters she meets bring you so close to the people that you feel sad when the chapter ends and you move on to another part of the journey. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Searching for Lost City
Review: This book was a joy to read. It felt like I was reading Seay's journal of her adventures in seeking Native American speakers in Oklahoma. I never would have thought I'd be interested in the subject matter, but the book, given as a gift, was truly fascinating. It was written beautifully, with detailed descriptions of the people,the landscapes and the her feelings of seeing it all. I learned a great deal from a serious book that read like a novel. She made it all come alive. I highly recommend this book!

Rating:
Summary: An important subject, a wonderful read
Review: This could easily have been one of those dull-but-important books but it's not. Elizabeth Seay is a skilled writer and a knowing and compassionate observer who takes readers on an interesting and informative journey through a world little explored and all too neglected. Though ostensibly about the struggle of Native American languages to survive, the book at heart is about the universal and essential role that languages play in defining not just cultures but unique ways of seeing and expressing the world. Thus their loss is a loss for us all. Seay captures this through keen storytelling and a sympathetic but never patronizing rendering of her characters and their struggles, against poor odds, to keep these languages alive.