YELLOW WOMAN AND A BEAUTY OF THE SPIRIT

Rating:
Summary: Silko at her best and most urgent
Review: I was extremely surprised to find this collection of essays not reviewed here. The title essay alone, "Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the spirit," carries more weight than most books in total, given the revelatory descriptions of traditional Laguna Pueblo culture.

Also, Silko's essay "The Border Patrol State" and other notes on border militarism and race related discrimination are important and timely, and increasingly relevant.

Rating:
Summary: Silko at her best and most urgent
Review: I was extremely surprised to find this collection of essays not reviewed here. The title essay alone, "Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the spirit," carries more weight than most books in total, given the revelatory descriptions of traditional Laguna Pueblo culture.

Also, Silko's essay "The Border Patrol State" and other notes on border militarism and race related discrimination are important and timely, and increasingly relevant.

Rating:
Summary: Silko at her best and most urgent
Review: I was extremely surprised to find this collection of essays not reviewed here. The title essay alone, "Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the spirit," carries more weight than most books in total, given the revelatory descriptions of traditional Laguna Pueblo culture.

Also, Silko's essay "The Border Patrol State" and other notes on border militarism and race related discrimination are important and timely, and increasingly relevant.

Rating:
Summary: Reveals The Landscape of Silko's Spirit
Review: Silko's collection of essays present an open, expansive view of her mind and art, her background and destiny. If you've read any of her other works, reading this short book will enrich your appreciation as well as assist you on the next step of your journey. If you haven't read any Silko yet, this is a gentle way to ease you into her writings.

I read it for the background that she gives about storytelling and the narrative process; for wonderful sentences like this: "The storyteller did not just tell the stories, they would in their way act them out. The storyteller would imitate voices for vast dialogues between the various figures of the story. So we sometimes say the moment is alive again within us, within our imagination and our memory, as we listen."

I read it for the wisdom of the old ways of the old-time people; like this: "...time was round--like a tortilla; time had specific moments and specific locations, so that the beloved ancestors who had passed on were not annihilated by death, but only relocated to the place called the Cliff House. At Cliff House, people continued as they had always been, although only spirits and not living humans can travel freely over this tortilla of time. All times go on existing side by side for all eternity. No moment is lost or destroyed. There are no future times or past times; there are 'always all' [her emphasis] the times, which differ slightly, as the locations on the tortilla differ slightly. The past and the future are the same because they exist only in the present of our imaginations...." and she continues, but, isn't that powerful? As well as good writing?

I also enjoyed reading of her political activism and her position on many issues of the west and Native-Americans.

For me, highly recommended. Can't you tell?

Rating:
Summary: Reveals The Landscape of Silko's Spirit
Review: Silko's collection of essays present an open, expansive view of her mind and art, her background and destiny. If you've read any of her other works, reading this short book will enrich your appreciation as well as assist you on the next step of your journey. If you haven't read any Silko yet, this is a gentle way to ease you into her writings.

I read it for the background that she gives about storytelling and the narrative process; for wonderful sentences like this: "The storyteller did not just tell the stories, they would in their way act them out. The storyteller would imitate voices for vast dialogues between the various figures of the story. So we sometimes say the moment is alive again within us, within our imagination and our memory, as we listen."

I read it for the wisdom of the old ways of the old-time people; like this: "...time was round--like a tortilla; time had specific moments and specific locations, so that the beloved ancestors who had passed on were not annihilated by death, but only relocated to the place called the Cliff House. At Cliff House, people continued as they had always been, although only spirits and not living humans can travel freely over this tortilla of time. All times go on existing side by side for all eternity. No moment is lost or destroyed. There are no future times or past times; there are 'always all' [her emphasis] the times, which differ slightly, as the locations on the tortilla differ slightly. The past and the future are the same because they exist only in the present of our imaginations...." and she continues, but, isn't that powerful? As well as good writing?

I also enjoyed reading of her political activism and her position on many issues of the west and Native-Americans.

For me, highly recommended. Can't you tell?

Rating:
Summary: Insightful
Review: The quality varies in this collection of essays, newspaper/magazine commentaries and other textual fragments. Also, because they often touch on similar topics, the book is a bit repetitive at places - especially in the case of "Fences Against Freedom" and "The Border Patrol State," which contain a number of identical passages. Even so, it is in these two pieces in particular that Silko provides some of her sharpest insights and most damning criticism of official U.S. policy toward Mexico and toward its own citizens living in the Southwest. Also interesting are Silko's observations on the concepts of collective memory and consciousness contained in the complex system of oral narratives among her own Laguna Pueblo nation. Although none of the contributions in this book are in-depth studies, taken together they all offer a great deal of food for thought.