Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsentertaining, informative......and unsatisfying
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 3, 2013
This book is very readable with dozens of stories that tell of the awful and unrelenting process of land-taking that non-natives ("Whites", according to the author) have generally successfully embarked upon. The book doesn't pretend to be a scholarly analysis and in that it succeeds. It is important to hear the stories, to wince ( as a "White") at the nasty and dishonest -nefarious may be a better term - machinations that all levels of government and the societies they represent have deployed to transform Eden into something closer to Hades. What is ultimately unsatisfying, though, is that the author chose not to grapple with the drive and energy of those who came to North America, who fought for and largely won the land and resources they sought. It is foolish to idly demonize a huge part of human history as though it were a plague that has only caused desolation. The people who were here when the explorers and settlers first arrived from Europe were not living a separate reality, floating on a separate stream, just one that had not yet blended with this European torrent. From that time on, the figurative waters carried both cultures along and not comfortably. I wish that the author had put his mind and wit to work on the reality - the on-the-ground reality - that aboriginal people and "Whites" are in this together and being rivals has not been an even affair. As far as I know, history everywhere has stories of conquest, seizure, horror and injustice. Britain, from where I and at least some of my ancestors come, was once overrun by Romans, then Saxons, then, Norse etc but what came out of all that was, for a while, a great nation of great accomplishments to temper the horrors. I would like to read some ideas on how the future might possibly unfold for this land of ours and by ours, I mean all of us who inhabit it.
