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 in World War II, 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 twenty-four languages around the world. In ...
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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 in World War II, 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 twenty-four languages around the world. In this wry and whimsical memoir, Hillerman offers frequent backward glances at where he found ideas for the plots of his books and the characters who inhabit them. For example, there's the way flushing a solitary heron from a sandbar caused him to convert Joe Leaphorn from husband to widower. 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. We get a good-natured trip through hard times in college, a colorful infantry career, and, afterward, work as truck driver, chain dragger, journalist, professor, and "doer of undignified deeds" for two university presidents. All this is colored by his love affair (now in its fifty-fourth year) with Marie, which involved raising six children, most of them adopted.
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Add this copy of Seldom Disappointed to cart. $4.96, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Austell, GA, UNITED STATES, published 2001 by Harper Large Print.
Add this copy of Seldom Disappointed to cart. $4.96, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2001 by Harper.
Add this copy of Seldom Disappointed to cart. $99.98, new condition, Sold by GridFreed rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from North Las Vegas, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2001 by Harper.
One has to admire the tenacity of this man, having been born and raised in Indian land running barefoot with his little friends, then rise to the level of one of the most well-known and beloved writers in western America. There is a ring of truth in this book.....he has lived every moment of it....and has the art to tell it well.
