신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin

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KQRS remarks upset Indian leaders

Photo by Tom Sweeney, Star Tribune

Tom Barnard, disc jockey and radio show host. Star Tribune staff file photo September 9, 1988, by Tom Sweeney

On-air comments about Sioux tribes made by Tom Barnard and his co-host sparked the uproar.

By Terry Collins, Star Tribune

Last update: October 28, 2007 –  9:53 PM

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To read a transcript of the show posted on Red Lake Net News, go to startribune.com/a3565.

                                   

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Furious over recent on-air comments made by KQRS Radio personality Tom Barnard and his show's co-hosts, American Indian leaders plan to protest at KQRS at 10 a.m. today.

Representatives of the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Red Lake Indian Reservation and urban Indian leaders hope to meet with executives from the classic-rock station (92.5 FM) at its southeast Minneapolis headquarters regarding the on-air statements by Barnard and his co-host, Terri Traen, AIM co-founder Clyde Bellecourt said Sunday.

Bellecourt said the remarks about the Red Lake Chippewa and Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux tribes were "ignorant." He compared them to comments made this spring by shock jock Don Imus, who was fired from his syndicated show for calling members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team, "nappy-headed ho's."

The KQ morning show, known for its pull-no-punches style when delivering weird news, ethnic jokes and political diatribes, is among the most popular morning programs in the Twin Cities.

Calls placed to Marc Kalman, president and general manager of KQRS, were not immediately returned Sunday.

The uproar stems from a broadcast last month in which Barnard and Traen talked about the Red Lake and Shakopee tribes while discussing a report by the state Health Department that Beltrami County has the state's highest rate of suicide among young people.

The jocks then mentioned Bemidji and the Red Lake Indian Reservation, which are both located in Beltrami County.

"Maybe it's genetic; isn't there a lot of incest up there?" Traen said about the tribe.

"Not that I know of," Barnard replied.

"I think there is," Traen continued. "Don't quote me on that, but I'm pretty sure."

"Well, I'm glad you just threw it out there, then," Barnard said to laughter in the background.

Barnard also criticized the Shakopee Sioux, who own the Mystic Lake Casino, for "doing a hell of a job helping them out."

Traen commented, "They don't give them anything?"

"Hell, no!" Barnard replied.

Another member of the morning team refers to the casino as "Mistake Lake," and calls Bellecourt, "Clyde Bellycourt."

Bellecourt said Red Lake has received nearly $4 million in grants from the Shakopee tribe since 2004 toward building a new Boys and Girls Club, assisting with the recent rebirth of the tribe's walleye fishing industry and creating a center in Bemidji to address sexual assault.

He said the Indian leaders will push the station executives to take swift action on Barnard.

"He's been getting away with this crap for years," Bellecourt said, adding that the Morning Show crew should be disciplined and be required to take sensitivity training courses.

Minority groups have long criticized Barnard and his crew for their on-air banter.

In the late 1990s, members of the Somali community picketed over Barnard and Co.'s mocking of Somali dialects after a Somali cabdriver was slain. Before that, the Asian-American community was irate when Barnard and his co-hosts made fun of a teenage Hmong girl who was charged with killing her newborn son.

They said of her potential $10,000 fine: "That's a lot of eggrolls."

Terry Collins • 612-673-1790

Terry Collins • tcollins@startribune.com

In Their Own Words

 Korean adoptees talk about finding their birthparents.

by Elizabeth Larsen

October 24, 2007

    Since the end of World War II, over 100,000 Korean infants and children—approximately one out of twelve Korean Americans—have been adopted into American families. While there are no statistics documenting what percentage of them have been reunited with their birth families, it's clear that the number is growing steadily. As the oldest and largest population of transnationally adopted people in the United States, their experiences of search and reunion shed light on what the future may hold for younger generations of adoptees from China, South America, and other parts of the world.

    When you grow up in a culture you can read cultural cues and subtleties. You can read a situation and you can make reasonably sound gut-level judgments about people and situations. But when you are going to a completely different culture, you have to learn everything new.

    Yet if you look the same as everyone else, then they have the expectation that you will automatically click right into the language and culture and understand what's going on and be able to read Korean people's behavior like Koreans can. The expectations for adoptees in Korea are of course much higher than they are for complete foreigners just based on physical appearance, which is completely unfair, but they can't tell just by looking at us that we were raised, for the most part, by white Americans.

    It's under these circumstances. . .that we are trying to re-enter contemporary Korean society and build relationships with people who are both completely foreign to us and who are also our families. Neither we nor our families are guaranteed to be people who are patient, gifted with languages, and culturally flexible, or possess the economic means, time, and lifestyle necessary to actually build a relationship over these almost insurmountable barriers. Nor are we guaranteed to be psychically strong enough to handle the extreme stressor of a reunion in our lives, especially after the adoption and separation itself takes such an emotional toll on mothers and adoptees.

    —Jane Jeong Trenka, author of the memoir The Language of Blood and coeditor of Outsiders Within: Writings on Transracial Adoption

    I've been in reunion for ten years. When I see my birthmother I've definitely seen the pain and the hurt a little bit less, but it still is there. And I wonder if it is still valuable for her to see me. I know she feels guilty and I know she feels shame and that it's an awkward relationship because she knows that in some ways she failed. I'm there to let her know that everything is okay. But I also question whether or not it is helping her.
    The second time I met my birth mother, I wanted to give her money. I was with a second-generation Korean American gentleman and he said, "No, you can't do that." And I asked, "Why not?" I didn't have a lot—I was 25 years old—but I wanted to give something. And he said, "I can't explain it, but you just can't do it." So I ended up going with him and taking my birth mother to a Korean barbeque, which is an expensive meal in Korea, and she just ate a small little bit of rice and water and didn't touch any of the meat. And she asked, "What kind of parent am I letting you pay for this meal?" And that's when I got it:  Nobody could have explained it but just from observing her I understood that in Korea you take care of your child, even if that child is 25 or 30. That is the relationship. For me to give her money would have lowered her status as a parent. Now that I'm married it's different and I can give because it's like I'm a different kind of person. But one n!
eeds to be respectful of all of these cultural nuances.

    —Hollee McGinnis, policy director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a research and advocacy institution.

    When we first met I thought, "Wow, I could have had this parallel life in Korea and it would have been a lot different." It was the best choice for my dad to put me up for adoption. I could definitely see where he was coming from and what he thought would be the best option for me. But I don't really dwell on it because it's not my life. In truth you can't regret that other life because it's not yours. I think of both my families as one unit. I feel pretty comfortable saying, "I'm going to see my family," but it kind of confuses people because I don't distinguish between my Korean dad and my American dad because I see them both as my dad. They feel like one family to me. It feels like my family has grown. Really all my connections to Korea have made me a better person.

    —Daniel Martig, an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota

    When she was dying, my mother told one of my brothers, "You have a sister and she went to America." But there was no context for that statement. And so when my brother asked their father—who was not my father—what she meant he just said, "I don't know." That happened quite some time before I found them.
    [Having a relationship] is not easy because they don't speak English and I don't speak Korean and they live in Korea and I don't go there very often. But certainly I'm in contact with them when I'm going to go. I have friends who are willing to be go-betweens for us and send messages back and forth. It's not an easy relationship just in terms of logistics.
    The difficulties are much less emotional because we are siblings [and not child and parent], but even so there are many. For example, I had so many questions to ask them such as, "Why was I adopted?" And they were really quite puzzled by this because other countries aren't so open about their feelings and emotions on any level—and certainly not about something as intimate as adoption. You cannot just transfer Western culture and feel like this is the way it should be.

    Susan Soon keum Cox, vice president of public policy and external affairs at Holt International in Eugene, Oregon

    Adopted children whose birth parents named them deserve to carry that piece of their heritage with them, as it is one of the few parts of their birth histories they can lay claim to as part of their very own, real, authentic, true-life stories. Adoptees, such as myself, whose names were given to them by social workers, nurses, or orphanage intake workers may find that although those names don't represent a piece of their birth histories or bloodlines, they nonetheless represent pieces of their rightful histories.

    Of course others among my fellow adoptees will feel differently—perhaps ambivalent or otherwise less attached to their pre-adoptive identities, as I have at various stages of my life. But for me, today, Ji In, although not a name given to me by my umma or abeoji, is as real a part of my Korean heritage as I'll ever have.
    It reminds me that I am who I am today because of the choices made for me by other people. It represents to me the wrongs done to my umma and many, many others like her that left her with no freedom and no chance to give me a name that linked me to her or to my sisters. The fact that my Korean name is dissonant among the matching names of my three Korean sisters, whose names fit together as harmonies in a chorus, is a scar on my flesh that I bear proudly and with a sense of profound loss. We do not match, but we know why.

    —Ji In, a Hawaii-based writer and editor and the author of Twice The Rice, a blog that in part explores her experience as a transnational and transracial adoptee

Elizabeth Larsen has worked for both Sassy and the Utne Reader. She wrote about her daughter in this year's Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion.

@2007 The Foundation for National Progress

Read the article online:

   

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/11/in-their-own-words.html

Check out the latest from Mother Jones at:

   

http://www.motherjones.com

New(ish) poems published

If you're interested, please check out my poems on this very cool journal/project:

http://lafovea.org/sun_yung_shin.html

Book of the week: Out of Place

I am loving this book, a memoir by Edward Said. In his tortured relationship with his rigid and domineering father his relationship reminds me of Franz Kafka's relationship with his feared father.

It's a portrait of the development of an incredible mind and consciousness,as well as a very personal experience of the tragic disappearance of a Palestine.

Shannon Gibney at the mic

Resource Committee of Adopted Adults (RCAA) Speech   

WHAT: Speech to adopted adults on "Growing Up, Growing Through Adulthood: The Role of Creativity and Community in Adoptee Development." This talk will discuss how self-expression and community-building can be excellent vehicles to explore and reconcile adult adoptee identity.

WHEN: Saturday, November 17, 4:15-5:15 pm    

WHERE: Meeting Hall at University of Minnesota and Goldy's

This event is free and open to adult adoptees.

After many years, we are home

http://www.startribune.com/462/story/1481968.html

Photo by David Joles, Star Tribune

Rachel Kupcho, left, reached across Duane Reynolds to give Odanas Day'Castro a comforting squeeze at a gathering of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. Kupcho and Reynolds were adopted as children by non-Indian families. The band may be the first to formally welcome back adoptees.

At a homecoming on the White Earth Indian Reservation, some who were adopted out were welcomed to their place in the circle.

By Curt Brown, Star Tribune

Audio slide show : Stand inside the circle

• More information

Kupcho had never met until last weekend, when they each drove 250 miles from their suburban Twin Cities homes to the lake-dotted land of the White Earth Indian Reservation in northwestern Minnesota.

Amid the sweet smell of burning sage and the heartbeat thumping of Ojibwe drummers, Reynolds, 60, and Kupcho, 30, stood side by side in a circle of 60 people as tribal spiritual elder Joe Bush prayed and performed pipe rituals.

The hand-stitched banner on the wall proclaimed in Ojibwe: Ishkwa Niibawa Dasobiboon Niiawind Abi Endad. And in English: After Many Years, We Are Home.

With the all-day healing ceremony, White Earth became Minnesota's first reservation, and perhaps the first in the nation, to formally welcome back some of the thousands of children adopted off reservations under a decades-long federal policy that encouraged their placement in non-Indian homes.

"Just to literally be on this land has been incredibly powerful," said Kupcho, who grew up in Chanhassen. "When I drove up and saw the sign, I just started crying. I've always believed my relatives are from here, so it's an emotional time, but a good time."

With so many children unaware of their roots and heritage, the White Earth ceremony is one that Native organizations across the nation are watching closely.

"The White Earth band is on the forefront and taking the national lead on a very important trend we hope will take off across the country," said Terry Cross, founder and director of the Oregon-based National Indian Children Welfare Association. "Tribes are collections of families, and to be healthy and intact, they must know who all their members are."

The adoptions were common until 1978, when Congress enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act that gave tribes more control over adoptions. But at the peak of assimilation, roughly one in four Indian babies was adopted out, according to Cross and White Earth Chairwoman Erma Vizenor.

Federally funded programs enabled nonprofits, counties and states to remove children from reservations. The practice was often prompted by good intentions to help kids escape poverty. But many Indian leaders insist it came at an insidious price by forcing native people to forsake their culture and heritage.

"Many of these people have been stolen from their relatives, and we have had these people stolen from the tribe," White Earth Chief Tribal Judge Anita Fineday told the group of 20 adoptees, including Reynolds and Kupcho. "We need these people to come back. We need to make these connections.

"We need these resources to make the tribe whole again. So our arms are open to those adopted out to reconnect."

'I really wondered'

For the first 59 of his 60 years, Reynolds, a social worker from New Hope, knew nothing of his White Earth roots. His parents, Stella and Robert Brown, married in 1946 and separated a year later when he was a toddler.

Reynolds grew up in Northeast Minneapolis, taking his name when his mother remarried and his stepfather adopted him when he was 9.

He never met his birth father. His only wisp of a clue came from five words his mother uttered only once when he was 7.

"Your father was part Indian."

Talking in the circle of adoptees last weekend, Reynolds said: "I carried those words around in my head my whole life. Like anyone with a parent they don't know, I've spent time looking out the window of my house ... wondering who those people might be."

By the time his curiosity grew, no one was left to ask. His mother died when he was 27. He'd once asked about his dad. But his mother, trying to protect him, lied that his father had died.

In fact, his father had tried to find him, but his mother refused to help. So Reynolds never said a word to his wife of 39 years, Patty, or their two now-grown daughters in Crystal.

A call and an epiphany

Last Dec. 21, a tribal probate attorney called out of the blue, hoping to close his father's case.

Robert Brown had died in 1994.

 

 

 

In the past year, Reynolds tracked down his uncle, Gaynard Brown, whose kidneys were failing in hospice care in Seattle.

Gaynard died 10 days later, but not before telling Reynolds how his father had grown up on White Earth, been bused to Indian schools, joined the service and moved to Seattle to find work building planes.

"Hearing about his escapades was like an epiphany," Reynolds said. "I was finally facing someone who could answer my questions, and I learned that my father fought his demons, but was an honorable, honest person."

Reynolds has exhaustively researched his family tree and determined that he's three-sixteenths White Earth Ojibwe. He has met other cousins, and the trek to the reservation "is part of an ongoing process that gives me an opportunity to learn more. ..."I've had a wonderful life, but there has always been a fleeting sadness," Reynolds added. "Coming here, to this homecoming, puts some of the questions to rest and gives some meaning and truth to what my mother told me so long ago."

"I know I'm amongst family"

Rachel Kupcho's adoption papers were sealed in 1977 when her birth mother gave her up in a voluntary private adoption through Catholic Charities. She grew up in the western suburbs and was surrounded by adopted siblings of Irish, Filipino, German and African-American descent.

She had never stepped foot on White Earth.

She's petitioned Ramsey County to obtain her birth certificate, but so far has been rebuffed. The White Earth Tribal Council is now trying to help.

All Kupcho has to go on were the words of a social worker who oversaw her adoption 30 years ago. The woman said her mother was from White Earth.

As she stood in the circle of adoptees, she said: "What I do know here today is that I have relatives here -- whether I know who they are or not. I know I'm amongst family, and that feels good."

Kupcho said her adoptive parents, Lisa and Keith Kupcho of Chanhassen, have always encouraged her to be proud of her American Indian heritage.

"They had given me all of the love and support parents can give, but I think realized there was always something they couldn't give me," said Kupcho, who monitors youth court proceedings in Hennepin County. "And that's what I can find here."

Walking two roads

In the hall of the casino, Joe Bush, the spiritual leader, talked about what was going on at White Earth last weekend, that his people "travel two roads -- the red road and the white road."

To see those on the white road returning to the red road that their ancestors had followed brings him pride.

"Today is a first, and the White Earth band is the first to welcome home those adopted far away," Bush said. "I hope to see more reservations take the same step and initiative to welcome back those lost."

Sandy White Hawk, who runs the First Nations Repatriation Institute in St. Paul, organized the ceremony and expects other tribes to follow suit.

"You are here because of the prayers of your ancestors," White Hawk told the adoptees.

"They don't know your names and you don't know their names. But the Spirit knows, and all those prayers for health and happiness have been heard."

White Hawk, now 54, returned to the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota 19 years ago.

It was the first time she'd been back since her mother passed her through the window of a pickup truck to a Christian missionary when she was a toddler.

Since unlocking her past, she has organized healing ceremonies for others of similar circumstances.

"As Indian people, we believe we are all part of the sacred circle of life that has no beginning or end," White Hawk.

"There is a sacred energy that connects us in this circle. As you come back to the circle, know there is space waiting for you."

With that, each adoptee walked from outside a circle formed by tribal members and stood in its middle where they each embraced one another -- and their now less-distant pasts.

Curt Brown • 612-673-4767

Curt Brown • curt.brown@startribune.com

I get to read with Graham Foust this Saturday!

A Priest Methodically Reveals Ukrainian Jews’ Fate

The Saturday Profile, NYT

Efrem Lukatsky/Associated Press

Over four years, the Rev. Patrick Desbois and his group have identified more than 600 common graves of Jews in

       

By ELAINE SCIOLINO

Published: October 6, 2007

PARIS, Oct. 5 — His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine — as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.

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Witness to Genocide (memorialdelashoah.org)

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Antoine Antoniol for The New York Times

"I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will stop."
The Rev. Patrick Desbois

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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

In a World War II photograph, a member of a Nazi SS paramilitary group prepared to execute a Ukrainian Jew, one of 1.5 million put to death during the war.

They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their stories and searching for the unmarked common graves. He knows that they are an unparalleled source to document the murder of the 1.5 million Jews of Ukraine, shot dead and buried throughout the country.

He is neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but a French Roman Catholic priest. And his most powerful tools are his matter-of-fact style — and his clerical collar.

The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold.

Knocking on doors, unannounced, Father Desbois, 52, seeks to unlock the memories of Ukrainian villagers the way he might take confessions one by one in church.

“At first, sometimes, people don’t believe I’m a priest,” said Father Desbois in an interview this week. “I have to use simple words and listen to these horrors — without any judgment. I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will stop.”

Over four years, Father Desbois has videotaped more than 700 interviews with witnesses and bystanders and has identified more than 600 common graves of Jews, most of them previously unknown. He also has gathered material evidence of the execution of Jews from 1941 to 1944, the “Holocaust of bullets” as it is called.

Often his subjects ask Father Desbois to stay for a meal and to pray, as if to somehow bless their acts of remembrance. He does not judge those who were assigned to carry out tasks for the Nazis, and Holocaust scholars say that is one reason he is so effective.

“If a Jewish taker-of-testimony comes, what would people think — that this is someone coming to accuse,” said Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “When a priest comes, people open up. He brings to the subject a kind of legitimacy, a sense that it’s O.K. to talk about the past. There’s absolution through confession.”

Unlike in Poland and Germany, where the Holocaust remains visible through the searing symbols of the extermination camps, the horror in Ukraine was hidden away, first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets.

“There was nothing to see in Ukraine because people were shot to death with guns,” said Thomas Eymond-Laritaz, president of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Ukraine’s largest philanthropic organization. “That’s why Father Desbois is so important.”

The foundation helped underwrite a conference on the subject at the Sorbonne this week — the first to bring together Western and Ukrainian scholars — and has begun contributing funds to Father Desbois’s project.

Some of the results of Father Desbois’s research — including video interviews, wartime documents, photographs of newly uncovered mass graves, rusty bullets and shell casings and personal possessions of the victims — are on display for the first time at an exhibit at the Memorial of the Shoah in the Marais district of Paris.

The exhibit shows, for example, images of the 15 mass graves of several thousand Jews in a commune called Busk that Father Desbois and his team discovered and began excavating after interviewing several witnesses. Among hundreds of other items on display is a black-and-white photo from 1942 that shows a German police officer shooting naked Jewish women lying in a ravine in the Rivne region.

Traveling with a team that includes two interpreters, a photographer, a cameraman, a ballistics specialist, a mapping expert and a notetaker, Father Desbois records all the stories on video, sometimes holding the microphone himself, and asking questions in simple language and a flat tone.

In Buchach in 2005, Regina Skora told Father Desbois that as a young girl she witnessed executions.

“Did the people know they were going to be killed?” Father Desbois asked her.

“Yes.”

“How did they react?”

“They just walked, that’s all. If someone couldn’t walk, they told him to lie on the ground and shot him in the back of the neck.”

Vera Filonok said she was 16 when she watched from the porch of her mud hut in Konstantinovka in 1941 as thousands of Jews were shot, thrown into a pit and set on fire. Those who were still alive writhed “like flies and worms,” she said.

There are stories of how the Nazis drummed on empty buckets to avoid having to listen to the screams of their victims, how Jewish women were made sex slaves of the Nazis and then executed. One witness said that as a 6-year-old he hid and watched as his best friend was shot to death.

Other witnesses described how the Nazis were allowed only one bullet to the back per victim and that the Jews sometimes were buried alive. “One witness told of how the pit moved for three days, how it breathed,” Father Desbois recalled.

Father Desbois became haunted by the history of the Nazis in Ukraine as a child growing up on the family farm in the Bresse region of eastern France. His paternal grandfather, who was deported to a prison camp for French soldiers in Rava-Ruska, on the Ukrainian side of the Polish border, told the family nothing about the experience. But he confessed to his relentlessly curious grandson, “For us it was bad, for ‘others’ it was worse.”

There were other family links to the German occupation of France. One maternal cousin who carried letters for French resisters perished in a Nazi concentration camp. Father Desbois’s mother told him only recently that the family hid dozens of resisters on the farm.

After teaching mathematics as a French government employee in West Africa and working in Calcutta for three months with Mother Teresa, he joined the priesthood. His secular family was horrified.

He started as a parish priest, studying Judaism and learning Hebrew during a stint in Israel. He asked to work with Gypsies, ex-prisoners or Jews, and was appointed as a bridge to France’s Jewish community.

It was on a tour with a group in 2002 that, visiting Rava-Ruska, he asked the mayor where the Jews were buried. The mayor said he did not know.

“I knew that 10,000 Jews had been killed there, so it was impossible that he didn’t know,” Father Desbois recalled.

The following year, a new mayor took the priest to a forest where about 100 villagers had gathered in a semicircle, waiting to tell their stories and to help uncover the graves buried beneath their feet.

He met other mayors and parish priests who helped find more witnesses. In 2004, Father Desbois created Yahad-In Unum, an organization devoted to Christian-Jewish understanding run from a tiny office in a working-class neighborhood in northeastern Paris, backed and largely financed by a Holocaust foundation in France and the Catholic Church.

To verify witnesses’ testimony, Father Desbois relies heavily on a huge archive of Soviet-era documents housed in the Holocaust museum in Washington, as well as German trial archives. He registers an execution or a grave site only after obtaining three independent accounts from witnesses.

Only one-third of Ukrainian territory has been covered so far, and it will take several more years to finish the research. A notice at the exit of the Paris exhibit asks that any visitor with information about victims of Nazi atrocities in Ukraine leave a note or send an e-mail message.

“People talk as if these things happened yesterday, as if 60 years didn’t exist,” Father Desbois said. “Some ask, ‘Why are you coming so late? We have been waiting for you.’”

Book of the Day: The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense (Hardcover)

                           

I really enjoyed this collection.It made me consider Oates' childhood; I also recommend her book on writing and life: The Faith of a Writer. -SYS

by Joyce Carol Oates Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The words gothic and macabre rather than mystery and suspense might better describe the 10 beautifully told stories in this superb collection from the prolific Oates (The Female of the Species). In the startling opening tale, Hi! Howya Doin!, an overly friendly jogger encounters someone with a less rosy outlook on life. In the horrifying Valentine, July Heat Wave, an estranged wife finds a very unpleasant surprise in the home she once shared with her academic husband. In the haunting Feral, a near-death experience transforms a much-loved only child into something wild and unknowable. The title story concerns a horrific exhibit in the home of an aging coroner in upstate New York (whose behavior is even more troubling). The book's best story, The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza, about an aging boxer in a bout that will make or end his career, happens to be the least gruesome. Powerful narratives, a singular imagination and exquisite prose make this a collection to relish. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.    

      

From Booklist
All crime stories implicate the reader in some way--if you weren't thrilled by criminal acts, you wouldn't be reading about them, would you?--but in two of the tales in this new collection, "Hi! Howya Doin!" and "Stripping," Oates takes that concept one step further, implicating the reader by use of second-person point of view. In other stories, guilt shifts more unpredictably: in "Suicide Watch," a father ponders his own culpability for a horrific crime that he thinks--he can't be sure--his son has committed; in "Bad Habits," the children of a serial killer find similarities between themselves and their father's victims; in "Valentine, July Heat Wave," a philosopher plans revenge against his less-intelligent wife, whom he blames for their impending divorce. Oates clearly isn't interested in the usual suspects. It's almost customary, when reviewing her, to get off a crack at her prodigious output. But the care and intellect she applies to all of her projects, even what is theoretically "just" genre fare, are anything but jokes. These stories sizzle, and turning pages only fans the flames. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved