On the Rez - ISBNLookup.com

From Barnes & Noble

This first-person narrative of a trip to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota is a strong and natural follow-up to Frazier's Great Plains. His frank yet sympathetic portrait of the tragically impoverished Oglala Sioux stands in contrast to the image of the majestic landscape they inhabit. An excellent read.

From the Publisher

"[Frazier] makes an eloquent and impassioned argument for the United States government 's giving back the Black Hills to the Sioux. And he provides some artful digressions on Sioux ideals of heroism, on the Lakota language, and on Indian superstitions and lore . . . As for Mr. Frazier's accounts of his own travels, they are enlivened by a keen eye for detail, and the same delightful sense of the absurd that animated his humor collections."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"An astute, personal, and disarmingly frank assessment of life and conflict among the Oglala Sioux on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation . . . [A] remarkably thorough and thoroughly eclectic study."—Kirkus Reviews

"Frazier's account of Pine Ridge and of his uncommon friendship with Le War Lance is engaging, resonant."—Evan S. Connell

"No citizen interested in reservation life—or in human kindness and human troubles—should fail to read Ian Frazier's gripping story."—Tony Hillerman

"A wonderful, painful guidebook to a bitter beautiful land. It all rang true to me."—Martin Cruz Smith

"Funny, playful, sly, On the Rez may be the best and most truthful book about the American Indian available today."—Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

"[Frazier] is like an archaeologist of social sensibilities, paying rapt attention to dialect, landscapes, sounds, and political quirks, then displaying them in artfully simple sentences."—The New Yorker

"To render the complicated truth, to make a reader see . . . that something wonderful about the American Indian flourishes even in the midst of what one of the residents of Pine Ridge describes as 'just a slum' —that is very difficult. Frazier knows the difference between real emotion and its counterfeits. In his philosophy, there is room for sentiment, and in this book he makes good and evil palpable, and palpably intertwined."—Tracy Kidder, The New York Times Book Review

Don McLeese

On the Rez is Frazier's darkest, most bittersweet book to date, one that transcends the glib dandyism of the humorist's early essay collections to arrive at a troubling depiction of an American endgame, one where the lure of a wide-open highway leads either to gridlock or a reckless fatalism.
—Book Magazine, March/April 2000

New York Times

As for Mr. Frazier's accounts of his own travels, they are enlivened by a keen eye for detail, and the same delightful sense of the absurd that animamted his humor collections.

New Yorker

Frazier is like an archeologist of social sensibilities, paying rapt attention to dialect, landscapes, sounds, and political quirks, then displaying them in artfully simple sentences.

Andrew Ferguson

On the Rezis a book to admire. Fortune

Sherman Alexie

Frazier writes...with transcendent talent, with compelling metaphors and gorgeous description...
— Los Angeles Times Book Review

Scott Tobias

The word most commonly used to describe American Indian reservations is "bleak," a term supported by statistics on income (30.9% of Indians live below the poverty line) and mortality (their death rate from alcoholism is roughly four times the national average). But as much as it willingly concedes these problems, Ian Frazier's passionate and convincing On The Rez is committed to telling a story in which Native Americans' resilience and independent spirit are just as evident. Frazier, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, sees the personification of the modern Indian in Le War Lance, an Oglala Sioux he first encountered on a New York City street and described in his 1989 book Great Plains. Though their friendship is marred by Lance's tendency to borrow money and spin tall tales when he's been drinking (which is too often), Frazier is awed by his powerful sense of personal freedom and group identity. With Lance cast as a tour guide, On The Rez chronicles life on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, taking casual excursions through the arid expanse of land with a few slow days reserved to work on broken-down cars and the occasional jaunt to the dreaded White Clay, Nebraska, the closest town that sells alcohol. With his flat, no-nonsense prose and frequent digressions into important historical anecdotes, Frazier demands a lot of patience from his readers. He admits as much when he sets up the story of an inspiring Oglala hero named SuAnne Big Crow, a high-school basketball star who died in a car accident at 17, and doesn't get around to telling it until about 200 pages later. But the impact of her accomplishments, specifically the way she fits into the tribe's concept of heroism, could only fully register when placed in context, however meandering the author's account can become at times. In stories like Big Crow's, On The Rez finds strength and permanence on dwindling reservations like Pine Ridge, where Indians refuse to get with "the program" and persist in a place where "the earth is just the earth, unadorned.
— The Onion's A.V. Club

Publishers Weekly

When telling non-Indians that he was writing a book about the American Indian, Frazier (Great Plains, etc.) received a nearly unanimous reaction: that the subject sounds bleak. "Oddly," he says, "it is a word I never heard used by Indians themselves." Frazier builds his narrative--or, more deliberately, unpacks it, since he has no discernable plot, chronology or conclusion--around his 20-year friendship with the Indian Le War Lance and the Oglala Sioux of South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation. Though no "wannabe" or "buckskinner," Frazier emulates and reveres "the self-possessed sense of freedom" that he claims is the Indian contribution to the American character, adopted by the earliest European settlers and preserved in our system of government. Frazier's record of his travels with Le War Lance includes the tolls of alcohol, fights and car wrecks (Le claims to have survived 11 of them) and acknowledges the realities as well as the clich s of reservation life. But in his rendering, the calamities of American Indian life are outweighed by the pervasiveness and endurance of that same sense of freedom, a feeling that Frazier captures in his style, his organization, his wonderful eye for detail. Probably no book since Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star has so imaginatively evoked the spirit of the American Indian in American life; like Connell's tours of the Little Bighorn battlefield, Frazier's visits to Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee, and to the descendants of Red Cloud and Black Elk, frame a broad meditation on American history, myth and misconception. Funny and sad, but never bleak, his meandering narrative is, in fact, the composite of many voices and many kinds of history. Agent, Andrew Wylie. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT

If asked about today's American Indians, most people would answer with clichés and inaccurate remarks. Few of us are aware of what life is really like on the "reservation." Here Frazier provides a detailed view of life on the Pine Ridge Reservation in Southwestern South Dakota. It is a life of poverty, alcoholism, teen suicides, and little to look forward to. Yet in this bleak environment there are rays of hope. Frazier finds one such light in Su Anne Big Crow, a high school basketball star. Her spirit and energy show what one person can accomplish. Frazier's other friend, Le War Lance, also shows another side of the "rez." The book offers a serious look at a neglected topic, yet it is not without humor or a genuine sense of appreciation. Frazier obviously cares very much for his many friends on the "rez." He includes historical episodes to ground the present in the past. A good choice for YA readers. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, St. Martin's, Picador, 311p. illus. notes. index. 21cm. 99-28353., $14.00. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Robin S. Holab-Abelman; White Plains, NY , July 2001 (Vol. 35, No. 4)

Library Journal

Following his other road books, the marvelous Great Plains (1989) and Family (1994), Frazier moved his family out West and spent several years exploring South Dakota's Pine Ridge Agency, hoping to enter (as far as "a middle-class white guy" with a ponytail can) the world of the Oglala Sioux. After starting with an uncharacteristic rant about modern American culture, he settles into his quietly observed adventures with friends Le War Lance and Floyd John, whom he fascinatedly and exasperatedly follows (and often drives) around their reservation, where local heroes include Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, and a high school basketball star named SuAnne Big Crow. While also making sidetrips into the Lakota language, Wounded Knee, Sioux political history, and the national disappearance of Indian bars, Frazier's broader interest is in the influence of Indian ideas of bravery and human freedom on the American character. His narrative tips at times between writing about his Pine Ridge friends and some Universal Indian, but the story always veers nicely back to specifics on the rez, a landscape "dense with stories." It's the seemingly casual artistry of his descriptions--of evocative prairie junk, a highway snow squall, a summer powwow in a field full of hoppers, the pure experience of roaming--from which Frazier's book gains its resonant strength. Highly recommended for all collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/99.]--Nathan Ward, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

YA-Frazier's book occupies a refreshing middle ground between sentimental worship of everything Native American and a blanket dismissal of all Indians as drunks and layabouts. Some early chapters are about the state of particular tribes today, including statistics; much of this information will be new to most readers. Most of the book is about the Oglala Sioux of the Pine Ridge reservation south of South Dakota's Badlands and about Frazier's long friendship with an Oglala Sioux named Le War Dance. Readers meet Le while he is living in New York City, where his contribution to the narrative seems obscure. Later, though, Frazier visits him on the rez, where he is the entr e to reservation life. In large part, the author observes that the women work while the men drink beer and the ensuing chaos-auto accidents, suicides, etc.-is a sad turnoff to readers. At the same time, Frazier limns the good parts: the businesses that work, and the people who make things run despite daunting odds. Much of the last half of the book is given to the short but generous life of an extraordinary high school basketball star who helped her Indian team win the state championship and whose ideals live on at Pine Ridge. From a concise retelling of how some tribes got into the casino business, or a short treatise on odd Indian names, to a portrait of the American Indian Movement of the `70s, there is something here for anyone interested in current Indian affairs.-Judy McAloon, Potomac Library, Prince William County, VA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Tracy Kidder

Readers who expect straightforward storytelling might call ''On the Rez'' disjointed, but most of the joints are in fact well made. It is only that the book is scattered in time. My experience of reading it went on occasion from wondering, ''What does this have to do with Pine Ridge?'' to thinking, ''All right, it's still interesting'' and finally to feeling, ''Oh, I see.'' I can't imagine another way in which Frazier could have written this book. It has a quality of necessary expression.
—The New York Times

Newsweek

This freewheeling tour of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation by the author of Great Planes never dodges grim realities. Maybe that' s why the joy that erupts at the end of this tale feels so legitimate.

Christine Gray

...highly readable, thought-provoking, and often very funny.
—The Washington Monthly

Conr

Readers who enjoyed Ian Frazier's 1989 best-seller, Great Plains, will not be disappointed in his newest book, and account of his travels among the Oglala Sioux of the Pine Ridge Reservation in western South Dakota...Frazier gives an insightful and richly detailed portrayal of modern-day Indian life on the northern plains, one that manages to be both deeply empathetic and wholly unsentimental...With a gentle wit and engaging style, Frazier portrays many memorable individuals who are making the best of life on the Rez, surviving, even prospering, with dignity, resilience, and a sense of humor.
—The Chrisitan Science Monitor