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- Hardcover: 352 pages ;
Dimensions (in inches): 1.21 x 9.59 x 6.45
- Publisher: HarperCollins; 1st
edition (October 2, 2001)
- ISBN: 0060194456
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Book
Description
When Tony Hillerman looks back at
seventy-six years spent getting from hard times farm boy to
bestselling author, he sees lots of evidence that Providence was
poking him along.
For example,
when an absentminded Army clerk left him off the hospital ship
taking the wounded home from France, the mishap put him on a
collision course with a curing ceremony held for two Navajo
Marines, thereby providing the grist for a writing career that
now sees his books published in sixteen languages around the
world and often on bestseller lists.
Or, for example,
when his agent told him his first novel was so bad that it would
hurt both of their reputations, he nonetheless sent it to an
editor, and that editor happened to like the Navajo stuff.
In this wry and whimsical memoir, Hillerman offers frequent
backward glances at where he found ideas for plots of his books
and the characters that inhabit them. He takes us with him to
death row, where he interviews a man about to die in the gas
chamber and details how this murderer became Colton Wolf in one
of his novels.
He relates how flushing a solitary heron from a sandbar
caused him to convert Joe Leaphorn from husband to widower, and
how his self-confessed bias against the social elite solved the
key plot problem in A Thief of Time.
No child abuse stories here: The worst Hillerman can recall is
being sent off to first grade (in a boarding school for Indian
girls) clad in cute blue coveralls instead of the manly overalls
his farm-boy peers all wore.
Instead we get a good-natured trip through hard times in
college; an infantry career in which he "rose twice to
Private First Class" and also won a Silver Star, Bronze
Star, and Purple Heart; and, afterward, work as a truck driver,
chain dragger, journalist, professor, and "doer of
undignified deeds" for two university presidents.
All this is colored by a love affair (now in its fifty-fourth
year) with Marie, which involved raising six children, most of
them adopted. Using the gifts of a talented novelist and
reporter, seventy-six-year-old Tony Hillerman draws a brilliant
portrait not just of his life but of the world around him.
Kirkus
Reviews
"A warmly old-fashioned reminiscence
from the dean of the American regional mystery."
NY Daily
News
"[Tony Hillerman] commits his own
world--and his optimist’s attitude--to the page."
Denver
Post, Glenn Griffin
"Hillerman reveals the real
author...a great yarn."
The New
York Times Book Review
"A splendid and disarming remembrance
of things past."
Chicago
Tribune
"Man of mysteries seldom
disappoints."
Fort Worth
Star-Telegram, John Sandford
"Seldom Disappointed is no
disappointment...an amazing reporter’s eye at work."
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