Month: January 2017

Clyde Warrior was a Ponca Indian who in the 1960s was one of the founders of the “Red Power” movement for the rights of Native Americans. While his name may not be as well-known as that of other civil rights leaders of that decade, as Paul McKenzie-Jones reveals in this biography Clyde Warrior: Tradition, Community, and Red Power (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), he was as just as pivotal a figure as many such figures who are household names today. Growing up on his grandparents farm in Oklahoma, Warrior was immersed in Ponca culture and became renowned for his prowess in the Fancy Dance competitions in the postwar Southwest. In college he embraced student activism, and went from participation in Indian student groups to the establishment of the National Indian Youth Council in 1961. As an advocate of self-determination, he was soon at the forefront of the movement for greater Native American rights, even coining the phrase Red Power in 1966 to encapsulate his goals. As McKenzie-Jones demonstrates, Warriors premature death cut short his promising career but left a legacy that would be carried on by others in the decades that followed.

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We talk to the acclaimed Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard about A Death in the Family, volume one of his remarkable series of memoirs My Struggle.

Knausgaard writes with painful honesty about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and dangerously unpredictable father, and then his bewilderment and grief on his father's death. Becoming a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for a young family with his determination to write great literature.

A Death in the Family is an exploration of the author’s past from which emerges a universal story of the struggles, great and small, that we all face in our lives.

(Photo: Karl Ove Knausgaard. Credit: Sam Barker)