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Near Fine in Near Fine jacket. First edition. 170pp. Illustrated from sepia toned photographs. Near fine with slight toning in a near fine price-clipped dust jacket with a chip and slight fading.
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Seller's Description:
Near Fine in Near Fine jacket. First edition. Octavo. 170pp. Illustrated. binding trifle cocked and with a tiny bit of light foxing, near fine in price-clipped, near fine dust jacket with a very lightly sunned spine. Inscribed by Momaday on the front fly: "For Gloria, with thanks, best wishes, and much affection. Scott Momaday 18. vii.77."
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Very good. Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!
N. Scott Momaday's The Names is a book of origins, of ancestors, of creation tales, and of the power and splendor of words. By tracing the courses of his entwining blood-lines--his Kiowa grandfather Mammedaty, the outlaw Kentucky frontiersman on his maternal side, Mammedaty's grandmother, a Mexican captive--the author contextualizes his family's story within the larger narrative of native people, the frontier's "dark and bloody hunting ground," and the land itself, particularly the Great Plains and the American Southwest: "place[s] of strong magic."
If the tragic resonances of history reside in place--the author alludes to the Trail of Tears, the Indian wars, the appropriation of land, the loss of tradition--the grandfather Mammedaty also inherits an ancestral stoicism, will, and pride, the Kiowa people possess vitality and distinction, the Nez Perces seemed "a regal people. . .of legendary calm and courage," while Momaday's mother, a Southern belle, forcefully lays claim to her native heritage as an "attitude of defiance. . .it became her." This "act of imagination," this deeply American act of self-invention, is central to his mother's life as it is to his own. The first American Indian awardee of the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, House Made of Dawn, in 1969, Momaday reinforces the significance of that act by imaginatively reconstructing his ancestors' lives in The Names.
As in his description of Monument Valley, Momaday's prose rises to a pitch of lyrical ecstasy when he evokes the land: "The most brilliant colors in the earth are there. . .and the most beautiful and extraordinary land forms--and surely the coldest, clearest air, which is run through with pure light." Elsewhere, he demonstrates an acute understanding of Southwestern cultural hybridity: "The Roman Catholic churches of the pueblos are so old, many of them, that they seem scarcely to impose an alien aspect upon the native culture; rather, they seem themselves almost to have bene appropriated by that culture and to express it in its own terms." In Jemez, New Mexico, he comes to the end of childhood. The boy journeys on his horse Pecos, loping among a herd of buffalo, out onto the Staked Plains, the infinite earth: "There was no end to the land, and the land was wild and beautiful, and always there was a wind like music on the land."