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by Susan McElheran
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 The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom
by Slavomir Rawicz
1956, 242 pages, $14.95
The Lyons Press
In 1940 the Russians sent Slavomir Rawicz, a Polish soldier, to a Siberian prison camp. Along with thousands of other men, he endured a freezing month-long train ride in a cattle car then a two-month winter march to reach the prison.
That killing journey, however, was not Rawicz’s “Long Walk.” In April, he and six other men escaped. Able to take few supplies with them, they initially survived by luck, fortitude, and occasional thievery. While still in Siberia, a 17-year-old escapee from a women’s work-camp joined them; Kristina was to become like a sister and a daughter to all of them.
Enduring extreme hardship and deprivation, they walked through Siberia, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, the Himalayas, and finally to India. They ate desert snakes; they thrashed rye in exchange for a meal; generous shepherds slaughtered precious sheep for these haggard strangers; and in the Himalayas they saw two Yeti.
Only four of the eight survived the year-long walk, and Rawicz ended up in England after the war. In the 1950s, while seeking accounts of the Yeti, a journalist learned of Rawicz’s story and helped him write the book, which has since been continually published.
Doubters have questioned the authenticity of this incredible story; none of Rawicz’s companions could be found to verify his account, and he died in 2004. In 2006, documents surfaced in the former Soviet Union that claim Rawicz could not have been on this journey. Still, he has many defenders because so many people had similar experiences during that time and because his details are highly accurate. I believe that this amazing book is essentially factual, but perhaps it isn't really important whether it is nonfiction, fiction or a mixture of both. Rawicz said, “I hope The Long Walk is a reminder that, when lost, freedom is difficult to regain.”
That is a truth that does matter.
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by Susan McElheran
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Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
by Richard Louv
2005, 334 pages, $13.95
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
In which of the following activities will a child learn most about nature: riding an OHV through the desert, researching the rainforest on the internet, or building a fort in the woods? Louv contends that the latter, with its intimate contact with nature, will foster self esteem, reverence, creativity, serenity, humility, survival instincts, and more.
I distinctly remember feeling peaceful while sitting beside the spring at the end of the path, and feeling awe while gazing at the stars from the backyard—I sensed my place in the universe. And I can’t tell you how many forts I built in the woods; even today my brothers claim that I built the best forts. Unfortunately, treehouses as well as other forms of nature play are outlawed in many places today due to litigation, environmental protection, and obsession with order, not to mention the loss of natural places to urbanization.
Louv coined the term “nature-deficit disorder,” but he is not alone in his concern. Quoting numerous experts, parents, and children, and using his own insight and poetic language, Louv brings into focus a phenomenon that is altering human psyche.
One child told him, “I like to play indoors because that is where all the electrical outlets are.” Despite this pervasive outlook, Louv is hopeful that parents, educators, and society can meet the challenge. If we simply allow children to be in nature, they will often create their own relationships. Referring to a nature preserve where he was attending a charter school, one inner-city 19-year-old said, “When I come here, I can exhale.” For the sake of all humanity, we must allow our children to breathe.
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by Amy Calhoun, reviewer
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 Essay by Keith F. Davis
Interview by Michael Torosian
Chronology by April M. Watson
251 pages, Yale University Press
Reality is greater than our dreams
Yet it is within ourselves that we find the clues to reality
Clues are essences and keys and keys are stronger
Than the doors they open
Life itself is not the reality
We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles
If we did not dream reality would collapse
(F.S., Aperture 10, no. 4 (1962)
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by Michael French
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 Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
By William McDonough and Michael Braungart
2002, 186 pages, $25.00
North Point Press
“Less bad is no good,” say designer William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart. “Less bad,” the compromise of many environmentalists, means a deteriorating environment, moderated but still harmful pollution, and a delayed but inevitable decline of natural systems and human civilization. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things offers another course. Good design, the authors say, can build a better kind of economy, one that generates prosperity and supports a healthy environment.
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Read more...
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by Susan McElheran
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 Indian Yell: The Heart of an American Insurgency
by Michael Blake
2006, 170 pages, $21.95
Northland Publishing
Michael Blake, author of Dances with Wolves, and Northland Publishing of Flagstaff should be very proud of Indian Yell. The book chronicles the seizing of the immense western landscape and the subjugation of its free-roaming inhabitants from 1864, when a settler’s “decrepit cow” wandered into a Sioux encampment, leading to the massacre of 86 Sioux - mostly women and children - by US infantrymen, until 1891, when soldiers slaughtered several hundred Sioux - again mostly women and children - at Wounded Knee.
Photographs and Blake’s storytelling bring to life the Indian leaders who were as great as many men in White history: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Satank, Geronimo, Cochise, and more. We catch glimpses as well of White men who were downright lowlifes and of some who might have been great had they not been caught up in such a dirty campaign. One name resurfaces throughout the book: Custer.
General George Armstrong Custer “identified deeply with [the Indian’s] way of being and especially their wild, unharnessed way of living,” Blake said. Yet he led march after march against the Indians for a government intent upon annihilating that which he admired. The Indian wars and Custer himself manifested a dichotomy that plagues human society and human psyche: the clash between wildness and civilization, between freedom and encumbrance, flow and form, need and greed, passion and control.
Custer died facing the enemy, the death that every warrior he fought against dreamed of for himself, and “civilization” won the Indian wars - with acts of treachery and unbridled savagery. Now, time and the hindsight afforded from a position of victory allows us to admire those great Indian leaders. As poet Wayne Dodd says about Satank, there is “something fine” about a 70-year-old warrior who will tear away his own flesh to escape manacles and die facing the enemy rather than be sent to rot on the reservation.
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