Field of Honor (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, V. 48)

Rating:
Summary: A new genre
Review: In his first novel author Donald Birchfield may have created a new genre - a madcap combination of suspense, Indian history and military farce. A member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and a professor of Native American Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, Birchfield is known by his peers as a man of dry wit and expertise in Choctaw history.

One wishes to have read Birchfield's soon-to-be published history of the Choctaws before reading Field of Honor, for it would surely enrich the cunningly imparted Choctaw history in this book. But it's not just history Birchfield imparts, but a witty lampoon on whites, academia, Christians, the military and even, at times, Choctaws. It's a wild ride, one that only the author of "The Oklahoma Basic Intelligence Test, and Other New and Collected Elementary, Epistolary, Autobiographical, and Oratorical Choctologies" could conceive of.