Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (Arena Books) |
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Dee Brown
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Pages: 512 (Paperback)
ISBN: 0099526409
Pub: Vintage
Pub date: 1998-01-03
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 4125
Reader Reviews:
Gone but should not be forgotten (0/0 people found this helpful)
A fantastic book which everybody should read - we owe it to the people who were wiped out. They lost their lives, but the world lost as much - a brilliant culture and people who really appreciated nature and showed enormous wisdom and magnanimity. In the short time they were allowed to survive alongside the white man they sowed the seeds of the ecology movement, which might help to save the planet. So their lives were not in vain - and they gave us Johnny Depp and Cher.
The Truth Hurts! (1/1 people found this helpful)
This book makes you ashamed to be a white man, it angers you to hear how the native american indians were treated.
I knew before reading the book that the white man had treated the indians so badly, but I was not ready to read exactly how badly.
As an indian says in the book " They broke all there promises, except one. they promised to take all our land".
My heart goes out to all the native Ameican people.
A Classic (0/0 people found this helpful)
This book is a classic and a big inspiration for my own work on the Lakota Sioux and Wounded Knee: They Never Surrendered: The Lakota Sioux Band That Stayed in Canada.
Bury my heart at Wonded Knee - Dee Brown (3/3 people found this helpful)
An amazing book - amazing for the stories of misery and deprivation heaped on the Native Americans by the civilised white immigrants. It's not a book to sit back with a coffee and enjoy; in fact it made me so sad that I had trouble reading it. As for how well the book 'works' as a read: I found it mainly a collection of stories about specific tribes and families. It's not a connected narrative - it's basically a chronology split into chapters by the individual tribes. Chapters chronologically over-lap. In literary terms I don't think you can sit back and read through easily. This is not a criticism but I found it more of a reference type work and one where you can easily dip in to. No disputing that it's facts are awful but it's essential we read the history of white colonisation of the USA, Australia and other places and I hope we learn from the many mistakes.
Truth and historical fact, painful and compelling (5/5 people found this helpful)
I'm quite an emotional person, but this book angered me and hurt me in equal measure throughout, so much so, that its probably the most emotional account of historical significance I have ever read. I have cried throughout.
I first came across the book in 1982, when a science teacher of mine brought it into class after an American holiday. He smuggled it out of the States, he claimed, and its story touched me then. I didn't read much then, but now I have my own copy, it touches me more deeply than I could ever have imagined. Its a difficult and upsetting read.
Genocide, or attempted genocide is something civilised people simply do not do. But what Dee Brown captures in all too few words is genocide on a brutally wide scale, by a supposedly civilised nation. Its possibly more shocking than the treatment of black people in pioneer America.
The stories are heart rending and made me feel ashamed to be descended from the kinds of people that make this book so shocking.
I once saw a series on the televison called How The West Was Lost, and this book explains in graphic detail what that series shied away from. Here are the well known names from American Indian history, but also names not so well known. Long forgotten by outsiders, they crop again and again to remind the reader that the so-called Indian Wars were not simply personalities matched against each other, but horrificly planned exterminations.
It is said that history is written by those who hang heroes, Dee Brown has written a history of the hanged.
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Categories
Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories:
Books -> Subjects -> History -> North America -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> History -> Social & Economic History -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> History -> Cultural History -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> History -> Countries & Regions -> Central America & Caribbean -> 19th Century
Books -> Subjects -> History -> Countries & Regions -> Central America & Caribbean -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> History -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> Society, Politics & Philosophy -> Social Sciences -> Multicultural Studies -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> Society, Politics & Philosophy -> Social Sciences -> General AAS
Books -> Refinements -> Language (feature_browse-bin) -> English
Books -> Refinements -> Format (binding_browse-bin) -> Paperback
Books -> Refinements -> Font Size (format_browse-bin) -> Regular Size