The Education of Little Tree

Rating:
Summary: My feelings about this book
Review: Being a life-long Appalchian native myself, I found the "Education of Little Tree" to be quite a realistic depiction of cultural and personal experiences of the rural, old-time Appalachian life style. This story hit home with me on a personal level like nothing else I have encountered! This was an experience which was uplifting, passionate and enlightening despite the fact that the story contains many disheartening and even somewhat cruel extractions from the time frame and cultural environment in which it takes place. This story is a deviation from the main stream for most folks, yet it evokes feelings and values which will bring together people from all walks of life in a heart-felt manner by engaging the most powerful, but basic emotions in one and all! The characters bring about an interesting combination of personnas as they blend the Native American life styles and beliefs into the Anglo-American culture which is bent on pushing its inflexible attitudes upon everyone that it touches. This is an adaptation of exploring the harshness of life in rural Appalachia and the culture shocks of the time. This will be an eye-opener to those not familiar with Native Americans in Appalachia and their struggles fitting into a rigid, ever-growing white society. This story also contains an insightful mixture of sorrow, humor and seriousness with more fact than fiction while ultimately teaching us all something about ourselves, as well as Little Tree! ...

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Summary: Not a True Story! Wait Until You Find Out About the Author!
Review: I have to give the book 5 stars, because as a novel, it is up there with the best: well-written, compelling, sweet, interesting characters, thought provoking, educational.

However, this book is described as being a "true story." With that in mind, and because I so enjoyed the book, I began to reesearch Forrest Carter. What I found was that these events never occurred to him; additionally, he was a racist, a drunk, and a criminal (not to mention a famous speech writer).

I am amazed that he was capable of writing a novel with such feeling. I don't know how he did it. If my comments seem bitter and untrue, search for yourself. I was shocked what I found by simply doing a search on "Forrest Carter" in Google.

Rating:
Summary: Big Triump for Little Tree
Review: I read The Education of Little Tree, which is one of the best books I have ever read. The story was an extremely easy read, as it kept my interest from beginning to end. My only question is why Carter chose not to have his work edited since there were some parts of the reading that were slow to get through with the spelling and grammar mistakes.

Nevertheless, the novel helped me to recognize some of the history and culture of the Cherokee people. I felt embarrassed that people would make fun of or mistreat other ethnic groups before they understood them. For example, when the bus driver said, "How!" and laughed, I felt disgusted that he wasn't more of a professional.

On the other hand, the "farm in the clearing" part of the story where the soldier left gifts, including a mule and corn seed, for the poor family made me feel cheerful. The white Union soldier added a caring balance to the cruel white folks.

I thought his use of detail throughout the book was terrific, and it made me feel as if I was there with him. One of my favorite scenes was the night on the mountain, when him and Granpa slept in the cedar tree and watched the moon slip over a far mountain and dawn streak across the sky in pink, red, yellow, and blue. I was enticed to read the book outside where I could enjoy the serenity of nature. This fascinating autobiography has earned its spot in classical literature and will continue to intrigue one and all for generations to come.

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Summary: Visit Little Tree's secret place
Review: In the years since this book was published, controversy has erupted surrounding Forrest Carter's writing career. Some have accused him of not being a Cherokee, or of renouncing his Native American heritage when it suited him, then exploiting it later in life. There is also evidence that he was a speech writer for the Ku Klux Klan early in his career, before having a change of heart and writing the works for which he is better known. Does this affect one's reading of this book? That's a harder question. I can say for sure, though, that this book is the real deal. It is a deeply felt, honest (if occasionally idealized) account of what it meant to be raised Cherokee in the 1930's. It describes beautifully the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern North Carolina, and it is a powerful argument for a return to some of the old ways of the indigenous people of the American Southeast. Deeply moving, extremely humorous, and carefully told, this is one of America's greatest stories. Treasure it, and read it again and again.

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Summary: The Education of Little Tree
Review: The Education of Little Tree is a book about the childhood of a young Cherokee. At four years old, Little Tree's parents died and he therefore chooses to live with his grandparents. During the time he stayed with them, he learned The Way of the Cherokee. Being such a young child, he was ladled with heavy responsibilites. His granpa soon became his mentor in his quest for the knowledge he greatly seeked. It was only when his familar family and friends departed, that he truly aquired the basics of the Cherokee life. When his grandparents died, he learned that he was truly a Cherokee, since he could still feel them in the wind and sense them in the mountains. Overall, I would say that the book is definatly one you should consider reading if you are an outdoor enthusiast.

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Summary: Grandpa's Trade
Review: The Education of Little Tree is a very good book. I would have to say that it is one of the better books I have read. I gave this book 5 stars because I believe any book that is able to make me want to read it deserves 5 stars. The Education of Little Tree is wrote in the first person narrative which makes it feel like you are right there next to Grandpa and Little Tree while they are making moonshine. I feel it is important that the author wrote this book in first person because I don't feel that you would get the proper experience from the book if it was wrote any other way. So I can say that this book deserves the ABBY award and any other awards it might recieve.

Rating:
Summary: I focused on the book, not the author.
Review: The Education of Little Tree is presented as the autobiography of the author, but it is a fictional story of a 5-year-old orphan boy named Little Tree who is raised by his full Cherokee Grandma and his half Cherokee Grandpa in their small mountain home during the depression.

The Education of Little Tree was originally published by Delacorte Press in 1977 and reprinted in 1986 by the University of New Mexico Press. The author, Asa Carter, adopted the pseudonym, Bedford Forest Carter, when he started his career as a writer in 1970 at the age of 45.

Carter is an engaging storyteller who draws his themes of courage, honor, kinship, and blood feud from his knowledge of the Civil War and his Cherokee heritage. Because Carter falsely claimed his book was an autobiography, the reader may wonder what else in the book is false. For example, how do we know if he wrote accurately about the Cherokee's history or life style?

Most of Little Tree's education takes place at his grandparent's small farm, where his Grandma (Bonnie Lee) and Grandpa (Wales) not only teach Little Tree that they love him, they teach him "The Way" of the Cherokee. His Grandpa explains one aspect of "The Way" by saying, "Take only what ye need. When ye take the deer, do not take the best. Take the smaller and the slower and then the deer will grow stronger and always give you meat." Quote from page 9.

His half-Scottish Grandpa also teaches Little Tree how to run a whiskey still, a trade his Grandpa's Scottish ancestors practiced for over 100 years. His Grandpa believes that Little Tree needs to learn a trade and whiskey making is the only trade his Grandpa can teach him. Their still is their only source of cash, since the European settlers have forcibly taken almost all of the land the Cherokee once occupied in seven southern states.
Little Tree's Grandpa believes it is important for him to know the history of the Cherokee. He tells him about the 18,000 members of the tribe who were forced by the US government in 1838 to abandon their family farms and walk the 900 mile "Trail of Tears" from Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee to the "Cherokee Nation" in Oklahoma. They were forced to walk during the four coldest months of the year and at least one fifth died of starvation and exposure.

The tribal members at the time of the "Trail of Tears" were not nomadic savages but a people who built roads, schools and churches, had a system of representational government, and were farmers and cattle ranchers. Many Cherokee, like Little Tree's great Grandma, had intermarried with European settlers.

The 18,000 who were forced to walk the "Trail of Tears" to Oklahoma were part of the 100,000 Indians forced to give up their homes and lands to European settlers and move west of the Mississippi. Of course the "Cherokee Nation" the US government promised the Cherokee was only briefly established in Oklahoma before white land hunters broke it up.
Little Tree's ancestors didn't trust the US government, so they were among the one thousand Cherokee who hid out in the Smokey Mountains while the Cherokee were being gathered up to walk to Oklahoma. Little Tree's Grandpa frequently reminds him to never trust a politician.

When Little Tree's grandparents teach him how to outwit government bureaucrats, Christian Missionaries, and big city mobsters, the humor is slapstick comedy. When they read and discuss the classics of Western Literature around their fire at night, their comments are insightful and amusing.

The beautiful descriptions of the "Cherokee Hills" illustrate their tremendous love, reverence, and respect for their land. The following, from page 131, is Little Tree's description of one morning when he was on the top of a mountain.
"There is not anything like dawn from the top of the high mountain.¼ The sky was a light gray, and the birds getting up for the new day made fuss and twitter in the trees. Away across a hundred miles, the mountaintops humped like islands in the fog that floated below us.¼Above the rim of the farthest mountain, on the end of the world, a pink streak whipped across, a paintbrush swept a million miles across the sky.¼The mountain rim looked like it had caught fire; then the sun cleared the trees. It turned the fog into a pink ocean, heaving and moving down below."

The author, Asa Earl Carter was born in Alabama in 1925. Carter did not become an orphan at age five, nor did his grandparents raise him, but Carter did grow up in the same area and during the same time period as the hero of his story, Little Tree. The story Carter wrote about Little Tree is clearly not Carter's autobiography, but he writes with love, understanding and compassion about the Cherokee. Carter description of Little Tree's life with his grandparents made me wonder how many of the readers of the book wish they could have had such loving grandparents.

Although Carter's book is fiction, The Education of Little Tree describes in detail the incredible strength, tender compassion, high intelligence, fearless courage and delightful humor Little Tree's grandparents exhibit as they work hard to survive under difficult circumstances. I wonder if Carter wants his readers to accept his description of Little Tree's grandparents as a description of the Cherokee as a tribe. If so, he has paid the Cherokee a tremendous compliment.



Rating:
Summary: My feelings about this book
Review: The Education of Little Tree Review

This novel, The Education of Little Tree, is about a 5 years old Cherokee boy named Little Tree who has to go live with his grandparents. Living with his grandparents in a cabin, in the woods taught the way of life and how to survive in the wilderness. This whole book is about his life with his grandparents as he grows up.
I think this is a great book that everyone should read. This book will make you laugh at some points, but will also make you cry at others. This book made me laugh when Little Tree and Granpa were looking for Mr. Chunk and Mr. slick in the woods. This book also made me sad when Granpa is telling the story about the farm in the clearing. I also like this book because it's very descriptive and well written. The author wrote this novel with great detail. You will be able to imagine and see every thing the characters are doing. The author puts so many details into this book so you know exactly what something or someone looks like. The author really made the characters come to life with the details about their personalities and about their outer appearance. In one part of the book the author explains an extremely detailed scene where Granpa and Little Tree are spending the night under the star-filled sky with a full moon and fog over the mountains in the distance. When I read that scene I felt I was right there under the stars with Granpa and Little Tree. This is an exciting novel that everyone should look into reading. This book is one of the best books I've ever read.

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Summary: The Education of Little Tree Book Review
Review: The Education of Little Tree, (supposedly) by Forrest Carter, was an excellent book to learn from, but not as enjoyable to read for one's own pleasure. The story is of a boy named Little Tree of Native American descent whose parents die. He is sent to live with his grandparents, and there, he learns about nature and the Cherokee way of living in harmony with the earth. He learns about racism and what it means to be different from others. Later on, he is taken from the home he loves with his grandparents to an orphanage where he is treated badly because he is a bastard and a Cherokee.
This book teaches a hard lesson about poverty, that people should not want things they cannot ever have and that dreams are a bad thing. This is shown when a sharecropper is forced to whip his own children because they dreamed of fancy things that they would never have. One also learns about discrimination through an interesting point of view, a young child's eyes who does not understand why the people are laughing at him; he merely thinks they are being friendly. This book contains excellent morals and values, and is an excellent read for in class. Although the book is very slow-paced, this helps to give it the nature of the simple view of a six-year old which aids the reader in understanding Little Tree's point of view. It would not be a good book for solo reading, because the plot is secondary, and there is not quite one story, but series of small events, each pertaining to Little Tree's gaining knowledge. These are more fit to be discussed in groups and taken in small amounts. However, this was one of the only books I have read that has made me cry because of the sense that the protagonist is helpless. The fact that he does not understand the racism, and why what he does is "bad" makes it a tear-drawing read. Issues such as death are covered, as Little Tree's grandparents die, as well as all that remains of his old life. Surprisingly, the author was a member of the (...), a white supremacist, association that promotes racism, who took on a pen name of Forrest Carter instead of his real name Asa Earl Carter. Because of this, throughout the book, characters accept discrimination as their "place" and forbid their children from attempting to rise in society (as in the sharecropper example before). This shows that the (...) member's opinion was that they should learn to accept being what he considered them, "inferior".
This book covers some difficult issues that are better to be discussed, than read on one's own. It is an excellent book to cry over, and an excellent book to learn from, but not a particularly excellent read just for enjoyment, as the story is not thrilling nor interesting to anyone who is not particularly interested in Native American culture.

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Summary: The Education of us All
Review: The education of Little Tree, by Forrest carter is a book about a family of native americans living in a world of people that don't understand and criticise their culture. The young boy, Little Tree, with the help of his grand parents learns the way of life and his culture. The young boy is often confronted with teasing and racial slurs from those around him. Being young and new to this world he doesn't understand why people are saying what they're saying. This poor lonley family, trying it's hardest to make it's way through the precicution of the people that they live around, shines a light into the world of the unknown for our own. This book is great, written in the same type of text as Huck. Finn this book gives a great insight to the characters way of life. It lets us look deeper into another view of life. It's almost like looking into a mirror that shows us through the eyes of another. It's very well written in such a stylized way, that gives it amore of a feeling of being there; actually watching every thing happen. Most books that people reas come from our way of life and the culture of the "Americans." It's time that we coome out of that comfort zone and open up our eyes to a world we hardly think about. This is a great book, if any thing it will enlighten the reader, and make them more concious about their life style, and way of life.