Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative Book

I loved this book - picked it up on a whim and ended up completely beguiled by the beautiful phrasing, the gorgeous stories, and the fantastically sharp cultural analysis.

King begins and ends all but one chapter in the same way, with the same words, instilling a sense of continuity and thoughtfulness in the text, and forcing the reader to consider stories from a new angle. (Am I losing my mind? Didn't the last chapter start this way? Wait, this is the same ending . . . Oh, I see what he's doing, yep, there's the ending again, Hello intro, thanks for welcoming me . . . ) Between those words are lodged different stories - some traditional, from his own Native background; some political (Enron, Exxon, Bush's wars); some are humorous, some are not; some are about family, some are about people he'll never meet. But each one makes a profound point about the way North Americans think about race and worth (the border between the US and Canada is, he points out, pretty meaningless if you're a Native person from lands that straddle both sides of a line some white people drew about a thousand years after you got there).

I need to read this again, to savor the ideas he offers, the critiques he makes. For now I'm going to tell everyone I know that they should read this book - should make it one of the stories we tell about our world.