Rez Road Follies: Canoes, Casinos, Computers, and Birch Bark Baskets

This book is brutal without being harsh, funny without being lightweight. In a society where everyone (and I do mean everyone) is made to feel guilty for everone else's suffering, this is a breath of fresh air. The problems Northrup faces every day are aired alongside with the joys. For every pain, he offers a happiness.And he never says you can't understand. He just offers another way to see his life.

Don't buy Ian Frazier's book if you want any kind of accurate picture of today's Indians. Buy this one instead - this is the book to get if you want to begin to understand the complexities of being an Indian. The author speaks to both the initiated and the ignorant. It's both a moving and a fun read.

While not particularly eloquent, Follies hits like a velvet hammer. Northrup's story should be required reading for anyone who has ever used the phrase: "I'm not racist, in fact I'm part indian." The storyline jumps around a bit and the prose isn't always the best, but Northrup more than makes up for it with honesty and the ability to convey his feelings for tradition, family and place. A quick read and very, very good. Highly recommended.

Northrup manages to take traditional storytelling and gives it a twist of seldom heard, outside-rez-life irony. During the spring 1998 semester, my students read a chapter and out of all the readings, this was the one that was most often used as an illistration on their final exam. Highly recomended for all, and yes, Jim Northrup does write the same way he speaks.

Jim Northrup tells true stories about life near and on the reservation that show more humor, truth, and survivance that most other writers. He writes about what he knows, writes with an sense of the ironies of racialism in Indian/non-Indian relations, and writes well. In one of Sherman Alexie's stories a character says he laughed so hard he fell out of the chair; he must have been reading Northrup at the time. This book is comic in the truest sense: it provokes understanding of the tragic poses of colonialism in everyday life.