The Place Where Souls Are Born

...This passage sets the tone for the rest of the book, which is replete with historical vignettes, culled from the books listed on the acknowledgments page, interlaced with personal reflections...

...Considering this handicap, it might have made more sense to focus on how Native Americans are faring in the "European" Southwest of today...

...The unanimous answer was yes...

...of the books that helped Keneally along the way, while four lines are given to the names of the people...

...We cannot go back to the savages," he wrote, "not a stride...

...Keneally, apart from his obvious respect for these peoples, seems to delight in the very mention of their names and the names of their settlements...

...Fisher, Herbert Gold, and William Murray...

...more decent voices than mean-spirited ones...

...Like the Celts, they honored warriorhood...

...Rarely are we introduced to living people, and when we are, rarely do they speak...

...In fact, that Southwest is curiously absent from these pages...

...Though, as I've said, we hardly hear of them, they are always silently present, keeping the author from getting around and meeting the people who would give his book life...

...Instead of a revealing portrait, we get a confused mosaic...

...Keneally, calling Lawrence "an unrepentant Caucasian," claims that his point is "the crucial debate in our relationship to tribal people and is still being argued in New Mexico and elsewhere...

...Almost the entire page is taken up with the titles hateful ones...

...Sad but true," added Jan Morris...

...A pause was thereby brought to the essential Eagle Clan and Arrow Shaft ceremonies...

...New books, like new cars, should be looked over carefully, front and back, before being started...

...They are death-birds, life-haters...

...Last year at the Key West Literary Seminar on Travel Writing, a distinguished panel was asked if travel writing had to be a solitary pursuit...

...But Keneally 's real interest is with the Indians...

...The other problem with the book is that Keneally depends so heavily on secondary sources...

...We can be in sympathy with them...

...It helps your natural dubiousness to learn that the Australian is the highly regarded Thomas Keneally (author of, among other books, Schindler's List) and the Welsh woman is the doyenne of contemporary travel writers, Jan Morris, who over the last few years has enlisted some of her favorite authors as contributors to a travel series called "Destinations...

...My advice to Keneally: Next time, leave home without them...

...I suspect that the culprits here are Keneally's wife and daughter...

...The history of the native peoples of the American Southwest is ancient and complex, and so does not lend itself to this sort of passing glance...

...Keneally starts off, outside Denver, with some recreational skiing and lengthy ruminations on the Ute Indians...

...Thomas Swick Here is an interesting idea: A book by an Australian, introduced by a Welsh woman, about the least "European" region of the United States...

...A travel book—especially one built, like this one, around a journey (as opposed to the "sedentary" travel books of Gerald Brenan and Elliot Paul)—is by nature cursory and impressionistic...

...The Ute were intransigent nomads....They were dangerous fellows, a peril to European livestock and to European stock...

...But the book is not concerned with the mechanics of travel—we hear little about the long drives from state to state and almost nothing about the author's wife and daughter who are accompanying him—but rather the ravages of history...

...So many 'reformers' and 'idealists' who glorify the savages in America...

...There is virtually no dialogue—a critical failing for a travel book...

...With The Place Where Souls Are Born, Keneally joins an impressive list that includes M.F.K...

...Other Hopi in Oraibi, Waipi, Shungopovi, and Mishongnovi, so that they could take over the ceremonies and continue the cycle, decided that the population of Awatobi should be massacred...

...The journey covers four states: Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico (all decoratively mapped in the front...

...We can take a great curve in their direction....But we cannot turn the current of our life backwards...

...But, sad to say, it is not much argued in these pages...

...And Rodney King's poignant question hangs in the air: "Can we all get along...

...How hopeful the reader feels after reading them will depend on how fairly one supposes they represent the American generality...

...Apart from some brief descriptions of the suburban sprawl of Phoenix and Albuquerque, there is little sense of contemporary life...

...Commonweal 5 June 1992: 23...

...From the former activity, we get: "Aerobics at high and lovely altitudes have a very humanizing influence on a marriage"—an observation that is felicitous even while being somewhat pompous...

...Renegades...

...They were stubborn...

...On the strength of what has happened over the last five days—I write on the Sunday following the Rodney King beating verdicts—Hacker's pessimism seems more justified than Terkel's hope...

...This, I thought to myself, could be a long haul...

...There seem to be two fundamental problems with Keneally's approach...

...I am sorry to report, however, that his book is not as engaging as the others in the series...

...He spends entirely too much time with his history books, especially for a man who is so seemingly enamored of the intuitive ways of native peoples...

...My suspicions were aroused when I turned to the acknowledgments page at the back...

...One of the most interesting parts of the book, for me, is the discussion of D.H...

...Too many passages, with their recollections of the past, sound as if they were written—or at least could have been—back home in Sydney...

...Lawrence—a superb travel writer himself— and his relationship to this part of the world...

...By the time we get to New Mexico, having made a counterclockwise loop from Denver, we have read 22: 5 June 1992 Commonweal about more tribes than we can remember...