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Post date: Jul 29, 2013 1:54:42 AM
When Jane and I arrived at Nancy's a bit early, she confided that she was worried we might be more or less the whole group, and wondered whether it was really worth it to have meetings in summertime. We sat down around her dining room table to be close to the goodies, and just kept pulling up more chairs as others arrived. In the end, a perfectly respectable group of us were there. It took awhile for us to get to a discussion of the book, but eventually we did. Appalling and heartbreaking, was the theme of the responses to this well written and engaging tale of a remarkable slice of California history. Not all of us were aware of quite how cavalier and brutal attitudes towards murder of Native Americans had been. A few felt the book dragged a bit now and then, but all of us were very glad we had read it, and felt Theodora Kroeber had done a good job of portraying Ishi in a respectful way.
A piece of trivia: Writer Ursula K. Le Guin is in fact Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, the daughter of Theodora and Alfred Kroeber. I found the fact that she was the child of anthropologists interesting, in light of the content of her fiction, which "often depicts futuristic or imaginary alternative worlds in politics, natural environment, gender, religion, sexuality and ethnography" (as Wikipidia puts it).
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