Season on the brink: Compelling, yet frustrating true story
Writer/journalist Larry Colton went to the Crow Indian reservation in southern Montana to write a magazine story on high-school basketball and discovered something else altogether: the life-and-death struggle of a native American culture struggling to survive in a world of poverty, alcolholism, racism and shattered family values.
The story is familiar to anyone who has spent time on the reservation or peeked behind the curtain of today's native Indian society beyond that presented by Hollywood or weekend tourist pow-wows.
Colton's first-person account revolves around a 17-year-old girl basketball player who stars on the court, but off it skips school, smokes pot and has unprotected sex with a 20-something loser who couldn't care less about her -- or anything else, for that matter.
Sharon LaForge is a reluctant anti-hero, who takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride split between periods of pulling for her to succeed and hating her for wasting every opportunity that miraculously manages to come her way.
Every time the reader wants to give up, turn their back and walk away from Sharon as a lost cause, she does something to pull them back on her side -- all of this transpiring, ironically enough, within the shadows of the monument marking Custer's Last Stand at the Little Big Horn.
This book won the Frankfurt eBook Award for Best Nonfiction Book and the Alex Award in 2001 and earned praise from the New York Times Book Review, Library Journal, Parade magazine, and Keith Olbermann, among others.
You can't go wrong here. Strongly recommended.
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