The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams

Rating:
Summary: incredible
Review: From a storyteller talented in the wyas of making a flowing of words to creat a story in your mind, comes a river or love, dreams, blood and despair. An astonishing, educational, and necessary description of a the problems faced by a Native American today. Beautiful. All I can say is I wish I could write like Nasdijj.

Rating:
Summary: The blood runs like a river through my dreams
Review: I ran across this book in my local library. I picked it up out of curiousity, not really expecting much, and was completely blown away by it. This is quite possibly one of the best and most powerful books I have ever read. The language is at once simple, and complex. You get so caught up in the rhythm of the words that you become part of the story. You see the desolation of the Indian reservation, you feel the pain of Thommy Nothing Fancy's death. When you read this book, you don't simply go through the words, you become part of them. They pick you up and shake you around and make you look at cultures and places most people will never glimpse. You will not be able to read this book and look at the world in the same way. It's simply that incredible!

Rating:
Summary: The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams is enthralling
Review: Into the majestic desert landscape of the American Southwest, among the hard life of a Navajo reservation & into this angry man's life comes a baby boy with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome & an unrelenting & mystical would-be mother. With Tommy Nothing Fancy's arrival, the heart of this dry & sorry man is cracked open & out floods memories & all the love of the world & a father is born.

Yes, this is an angry book - there is no escaping the heartache of a people severed from their ancestry, confined to welfare misery & generations of intentional abuse by government & do-gooders. Children wrenched away to boarding schools where everything that made them who they were was systematically & brutally erased. Adults proscribed from eking out a living off their land & that ubiquitous & invidious palliative for all that pain. That assuager which brings the dread disease that destroys their children before they are born.

Read The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams for the story Nasdijj has to tell, then read it again for his lyrical language. Like paintings of sunsets over desert mountains, Nasdijj's essays are fulgent with passions, paronomasias & revelations.

I could not put this book down until I'd read the last word & even then I sat, astonished & breathless with Nasdijj's thoughts & images. I urge you to check out my eInterview with this author & my full review at: [my website].


Rating:
Summary: Well-written, but ulitmately lacking something
Review: Memoirs are easily written. That is, anyone can tell the story of his life. However, writing a memoir as a coherent whole, rather than a string of memories, is much more difficult, and that is where I felt this work fell short.

Nasdijj does have a way with words. He often captures landscapes and characters in an amazing way. Instead of a memoir, however, this was more like reading the "notebooks" to which he referred so often. It was like the journals that most writers keep to practice and improve their craft, similar to an artist's sketchbook. The sketches might be quite good, but they are still just sketches and framing and hanging them together would not be enough to get an artist a show in most gallaries. Similarly, this work, while far superior in writing style, lacked the progression of, say, an Angela's Ashes, or, in lieu of that, a coherent theme--homelessness, fetal alcohol syndrome, poverty, reservation life. If any of these themes that were touched on, ran through the entire book, it would have been an improvement.

Also, in writing the memoir of an unhappy life, one must be careful not to make it one long lament. If this was indeed his true life story, the man did deal with some real trajedies. However, based on his picture on the fly leaf, and his own admission that he "looked white," one can only suspect that any discrimination he suffered for being an Indian was more his own perception than what actually occured. Also, when the author goes directly from homelessness to a job as a reporter for a small newspaper, it's hard to feel that the odds are completely stacked against him. Near the end of the book he blames his not having been published yet on "writing and publishing [being] more of a white people game than even we gave it credit for way back then." (p.206) This is because an editor "ripped apart' (I assume not literally) his novel manuscript. However, while most writers, Indian, white, black or anything inbetween, would give their eye teeth to have an editor comment on anything they wrote rather than sending out the generic rejection slip, the author sees this as another condemnation from the world of white people, which he will never understand.

Parts of this book are very well written, and the language often verges on the poetic, but getting this published was a break for someone who, I admit, seemed to enjoy very few breaks in his life. I hope Nasdijj sees this one for what it is, and takes this opportunity to impove on his craft even more.

Rating:
Summary: Sustaining Hope, Love, Life - Despite the Odds
Review: Nadijj writes his memoirs with tenderness, compassion, insight, and matter of fact clarity. He writes stark naked sentences that speak volumes of truth in very few words about difficult life situations. The author recalls tangible things that remind him of his 6 year old adopted son, who we learn had died of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). The baby had acquired this disease from a mother who drank alcohol while pregnant. The author reveals the challenging social and economic conditions of growing up in a Native American culture without harshness or bitterness. The author "walks between two worlds", the Native American and White culture. He inherited the physical features of his father who was White yet he does not identify with the White culture. He absorbed the spirit and soul of his mother who was a Navajo (American Indian) which is evident by his use of imagery, descriptions of nature and wild life, and use of language. This book reveals how the author developed and transformed his life, despite poverty, and within the chaotic and often harsh circumstances of migrant work. His parents traveled all over the country working on ranches or farms. It is amazing how he maintained a sense of inner balance and harmony while the outside conditions were anything but that. The author describes a situation where his work with high school youth disillusioned him and yet later he was able to salvage one young Indian teenager's life through sustained interaction and discipline. We also are shown the seedy and underside of life for Native American teenagers when interventions are unsuccessful. In the midst of so much sadness and hardship one senses the hope and dreams upon which to build a better future. Past Native American defeats by the dominant culure and subsequent humiliations have permeated the mind-set of many Native Americans. While many aspects of the Native American culture have disintegrated there is a reawakening to traditions which is helping to revive the spirit and renew the dignity of the culture. This author describes heart-breaking life events of vulnerable people with understanding and compassion. His writing style, choice of words, and imagery are exceptional. I read this book in one sitting - unable to put it down. One learns about the shadow side of life but one also learns how the light of love and caring make even the most difficult situations bearable. This book is highly recommended. Erika Borsos (erikab93)

Rating:
Summary: finding something positive in all that negativity
Review: Nasdijj
The blood flows like a river through my dreams

Modern day America throws a cold shoulder in the way of the Native Americans and their struggles, we wouldn't call it racism, but more that the American people are ignoring the Native American lifestyle and the hardships they have endured. Nasdijj exploits this and shows what life in the reservation is like. Being an almost homeless Indian writer he lives day to day on the payoff of Newspaper articles. He shows the way life really was and the joys and sorrows these people had.
Nasdijj had the ill fate of being diagnosed with FAS, a syndrom that affects the children of alcoholic mothers. The disease has been affecting peoples lives since the introduction of alcohol to this society. We think this gives him reason for many of the things that he says in the book.
We think the negativity in the book is what gives it a positive point of view. It's like learning from your mistakes. All the mistakes and bad choices made are exploited to maybe show the society what not to do. Also we think it is the negative part of the book also because he not only shows and extremely racist point of view toward the American country and the people. We think that he is over exaggerating the negative part of euro-American history.
Overall the book is very enjoyable and we found it enlightening. We felt like it held our attention until the end, but at times we found ourselves rereading paragraphs because of the complicated sentences and ideas he has.. We think that most people will enjoy this book and we give it a "B"

Rating:
Summary: First hand experience in and with FA
Review: The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams -- by Nasdijj

This book was recommended to me by a friend who is a parent navigator and training coordinator, who is also an adoptive parent of a FASD child. Since my wife and I are also adoptive parents and have a child, now young adult, with FASD the book was wonderful to read for several reasons. Not least of which was enjoying the efforts of the author who himself has FAS and is describing his relationship with his adopted FAS child - though the sad part of this is the loss he experienced with the loss of that child. Here is first hand experience dealing with the effects of FA in first person and caring for others.


Rating:
Summary: Breathtaking!
Review: The writing in this book is so wonderful that, since finishing it, I wonder if I will ever be able to read another book.The author is a poet at heart and his words are beautiful, evocative and haunting. The chapter about his work with a young boy who has been written off as incorrigible is inspiring and should be mandatory reading for anyone involved with troubled youth. Amazing book!

Rating:
Summary: A POEM SET TO TEXT
Review: Transferring thought patterns into words of distinction is the modus operandi here and success is the ultimate result. Apparently this is the first book by Nasdijj and a winner it is. His vocabulary is outstanding and the force of his words are delightful. I did not realize what a alcoholic mother does to her forming baby, but it is terrible. Nasdijj lived in abject poverty and pulled himself up by the bootstraps by teaching at a college from time to time. He doesn't go into any of his accomplishments and I am sure that would make a fine story if told by him.

This could be a very quick read, but you do slow down as you wish to savor his thought process.

Rating:
Summary: Brought Home With Nasdijj's Words
Review: While viewing books in a bookstore in Boise, ID, Nasdijj's memoir caught my eye. The title drew me in, since I am a poet. The first chapter made me sit down. Chapter three brought me to tears, as he writes of Mariano Lake, which is home. I am Navajo and live next to the school. The wild horses Nasdijj wrote about are my uncles'. They are still there, running and creating dreams and fantasies in boys' eyes. And the goats and sheep are my grandmother's, my mother's and mine, they still graze around the school and in the baseball field. The school officials always tell us not to graze them there, but we tell them the goats were there before we permitted the school to be built. They leave us and the goats alone now, until new administrators arrive. My grandmother (the old lady in the book) died September 11th. My mother took her place with the goats and sheep.
I read the whole book in the bookstore, then I bought it. Now, the children in Mariano Lake are reading the book. I have to send five new copies, soon. Nasdijj has literally painted a picture of my community and Navajo life, in general, with words which is hard to do. This book is more than a treasure. The simple sight of it reminds me of home, with Nasdijj's empowering colorful words.