This is a gem of a book. While there are many things to like about it, I am most enamoured of the richness of detail in its naturalistic description. Arguedas, with his Indian upbringing, has a perceptiveness toward nature not often found in modern, Western society. The translation conveys this beautifully, though I've heard that the original Spanish is even more vivid in its descriptions. The characterization is multi-layered: there's even someone highly reminiscent of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov"...

Non-western thoughts, beliefs and fears still permeate 20th.century Peru, a cultural heritage of the Inca empire. Arguedas, although white, learned Quechua as an infant, forced by circumstances to spend long periods with Peruvians of indian extraction, an experience which he would forever remember with deep tenderness and affection, and which would transmit surviving elements of Inca thought as well. The problem Arguedas faced as a writer was how to express a non-western state of mind in Spanish, a western language. In "Deep Rivers", he sometimes shifts the structures of sentences, or uses diminutives, to mimic Quechua. Stones can talk, and rivers sing. Big black flies are attracted to persons who are about to die. For Inca thought, the reflections from a pool of blood relate to the reflections from rapids in a stormy river. In "Deep Rivers" Arguedas shares with us the deep undercurrents and contradictions which flow beneath the surface of modern-day Peru. Conflicting cultures related through cruelty and despotism. Deep rivers flow in every culture. Not the superficial, visible elements of a culture, but those intimate fears, obsessions, and dreams which lie at the core of its members.

JOse Maria Arguedas depicts two different worlds That can't bridge the difference that exists between them. He describes the conqueror's descendents who feel and think as their ancestors who believe that native Peruvians (Quechuas) are animals, who do not know any better, and therefore should be used and treated as animals i.e. kill and use Quechuas whenever they think is appropriate. The novel is a description of the mentality of the conqueror's descendants and their brutality towards the Peruvian natives (Quechuas),which is exploitation, Killing, no sense of value or least of all respect towards the Peruvian natives.

This book made me laugh (I loved the author's "mental notes") and it made me cry (little Christian's teeth marks)! It opened my eyes to realize that God's grace and mercy are gifts worth sharing with all of my friends and acquaintances, and gifts not to be taken for granted. This book shows how God is with us in every rise and every fall in our lives, and how He is beside us even when we don't realize it. Thank you Sheila for a great book! (please note: I read it straight through...I just couldn't put it down!)

My wife recommended that I read this book, stating that she thought every one should. I was hesitant at first, but after laughing and then crying my way through it, I believe she's right. Everyone should. I was deeply touched and reminded again of the importance of all the relationships around me, not just the one's that make me feel good. Of the need to look below the surface to find the true person. Thanks to God for using Eleanor and Sheila to remind me of what is really important in life - others.

I recently had the honor of meeting the 80 year-old Hone at a poetry reading in Christchurch (New Zealand). To me, a New Zealander, Hone Tuwhare I regard as a living prophet. Open any New Zealand book of verse and Hone will fill a good twenty pages. It is impossible for me to say how important this man is to our country. His poetry is mystical, political, romantic - he captures the landscape and its people like no-one else ever has. You don't have to be a New Zealander to enjoy these either - they will be, I assure you, the most beautiful, energetic, natural, informed poems you will ever have the pleasure of reading. and in no way am I going to be able to put across the sheer wisdom that is "Deep river talk" with a list of adjectives. Its like cummings got lost in wilderness with Thomas Wolfe and built a monastery and they all came out drinking and laughing and singing Maori spirituals. Hell - just read it for yourself.

A "must" for therapists and pastoral care providers alike, Navigating the Deep River challenges institutionalized, constrained, individualistic models of care. Professor Smith encourages us to explore the systemic dimensions of the therapeutic task and to consider seriously broad strategies for transformation. He reminds us of the hopefulness embedded in an African American spirituality rooted in the traditions and legacies of black history, a spirituality that holds great power to sustain and offer hope but which often is trivialized or ignored by the therapeutic community. While not naive about the church's ability to alienate and oppress, a strong ecclesiology undergirds the author's thinking.

Through a three dimensional model of agency, reflexivity, and depth of meaning the author forms new understandings of interventions and their potentialities. Questions formulated for both therapist and client guide the process. The volume is punctuated w! ith vignettes from Dr. Smith's life, compelling case studies from his practice, biblical study that instructs and inspires, ancient and contemporary words of prophets. These narratives and insights are couched in the metaphor of the river, a rich cultural and theological symbol in African American communities past and present. The nature of the metaphor allows for plural and intriguing, sometimes paradoxical, meanings to emerge. The water represents the raging and oft oppressive American mainstream. At the same time, water symbolizes a holy agent of transformation and hope. The hope evidenced in this volume is not facile; it is deeply rooted in the personal and painful realities of discrimination and invisibility to which this book gives witness.

How can therapists be trained so that they are encouraged to help shatter and humanize oppressive social structures, to stem the rising tides of despair? Are our therapeutic practices far too limited for our multi-cultura! l contexts? Are we prone in our practice to underestimate ! the debilitating and continuing effects of racist attitude and practice? Are we aware of our own? Navigating the Deep River is an enlightening and unsettling read; it invites us to ask these questions and to travel through uncharted waters for answers.

DEEP RIVER is about much more than a Missouri bottom-land farm, although that farm and the author's family who worked it are central. Hamilton delves back in time to the days of Indian tribes and of slavery, and along the way spins some great stories about Frank and Jesse James, Blind Boone (a virtuouso pianist), and other colorful characters. He gives a memorable account of growing up in rural Missouri and of his school days. I found the book absorbing, and relished the author's shrewd insights and morsels of wisdom. It's the nearest thing to Thoreau's WALDEN I've seen in a long time, and it too deserves to last. Not incidentally, Hamilton, for many years the editor of THE IOWA REVIEW, writes like a dream.

I can't recall ever reading a memoir similar to David Hamilton's Deep River. I don't know if that's because I've just haven't read the whole range of this kind of literature or because his book is unique. What I do know is that I enjoyed it, that I found myself reading it again, that it is beautifully written and that it is still kicking around inside of me.

The book is not organized around any immediately recognizable principles. Yes, all right, there are sections where Hamilton leads us to believe that he is now going to concentrate on the issue of slavery in western Missouri, or on the movement of pioneers through western Missouri, or the Civil War as it affected western Missouri, as well as, of course, on his memories of growing up on a farm next to the Missouri River. But the problem is, or perhaps I should say, the delight for the reader is, that all these various themes keep slipping into one another, folding in and folding out, forming a kind of fabric. The reader starts with one thread and then is diverted to another, and then another, until he meets the first thread again, now somehow changed.

Contradictions abound. Hamilton's careful scholarship is hedged with cautions than none of these "facts" may be supported by careful scholarship. He floods us with handed-down stories of the region, but asks us the question: How is he to compose a readable book except by choosing the most readable stories -- whether they are true or not? His detailed, graphic and beautifully written accounts of how he learned to hammer a nail, dig a fence post hole or which objects his uncle carried in the back of his pick-up truck, are set against a sweeping historical and pre-historical panorama that takes us back past the Missouri Indians to possible evidence that this land was inhabited by humans 35,000 years ago.

And on and on. Although I have read nothing else of Hamilton's (he is a professor of English literature at The University of Iowa and the editor of THE IOWA REVIEW), I suggest that this book can most successfully be approached as poetry writ large, and in reading it, above and beyond its engaging parts, we are being offered Hamilton's very personal take on the nature of reality.

A very interesting book. Thoughtful and fun. Amazing sentence structure - I do not remember reading anything quite like it - it was rather refreshing. I note that the author is a Prof. of English at U of Iowa - I do wish I had had someone like him teaching fourty years ago. Hope we see more of his work.

I had to read this for my Asian history class. It's a quick read, something that can be easily read in two hours. It's also fairly understandable. Endo's depiction of each character on their journey to India is amazing. Mitsuko, the self-abosorbed, divorced, cynical woman and her friend Otsu, a Catholic priest who is more pantheistic than he is Catholic, Numado, a meloncholy man who writes children's books and can talk to animals, Isobe, a widower trying to make sense of his life and his wife's death, Kiguchi , a sickly war vet in which everything around him reminds him of combat, and the Sanjos, the yuppie, naive couple going to India on their honeymoon.

There is great significance in each of the characters. Ostu being a Christ figure, the Sanjos representing the "Westernized" Japanese who are almost ignorant of the Indian culture and religion. Although I cannot agree with some of the worldviews discussed in the novel, it's a great book and the most symbolistic book I have read in years.

It is no accident that Ostu gave God the name of "Onion." An onion has several layers to it. Ostu believed that the God of Christianity was also the God of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, etc. This is where I give this book 4 stars instead of 5. The God of the Old and New Testaments cannot be the same as the ones of Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.

During a tour in India, five very different Japanese characters meet near the holy Ganges river: a man who grieves the death of a wife he had neglected; a woman bitten by her own cynicism and growing sense of inner void; a Japanese man who disaffection for the Christian life he adopted leads him to seek spiritual renewal elsewhere; and a former Japanese solider still haunted by the memories of atrocities in war-time Japanese-occupied Burma. Shusaku Endo masterfully builds up these full bodied characters through deft brushstrokes of key passages in their lives. Individual chapters show the inner turmoil and personal changes which lead these characters to their encounter (or re-encounter) in India, including a young Japanese who becomes disatisfied with the Christian life to which he had converted in his early youth and later followed in France; a widower in quest of the soul of her husband; and others.

Looking at a few quotes extracted from a dialogue between two Japanese characters in the novel will give you a sense of the encounters and re-encounters between individuals and the cross-cultural encounters, all of which are a strong feature of the play. In this dialogue which takes place in Paris, a Japanese woman talks to Otsu, one of the main characters who became a Christian early in his life in Japan.

The woman declares: "...It makes my teeth stand on edge just to think of you as a Japanese believing in this European Christianity nonsense." Otsu replies: "I've been here three years. For three years I have lived here and I have tired of the way people think. The ways of thinking that they've kneaded with their own hands and fashioend to meet the workings of their hearts..they're ponderous to an Asian like me. I can't blend in with them. And so everyday is hell for me..."

The reader of this novel who is not Japanese will gain some interesting insights into how Japanese might react to these different cultural settings, as characters move from Japan to France to the United States, and finally meet in India. Endo delivers a very personal sense of cross-cultural encounters, recognizable to those of us who have gone through similar journeys in different parts of the world.

Since I have only read Japanese novels in translation into either English or French, I cannot fairly judge Endo's style against other Japanese writers who are also well known to foreign readers, like Mishima and Kawabata. But while Endo may not share the grace and delicacy of these writers, his novels, including this one, are very human, and bring us very close to the inner lives of his characters.

If you want to better understand how Japanese come to view the rest of the world, or more generally how different cultures can collide, Endo's novels and his characters are a good place to start, or to continue, your journey.

Reading this novel by Shusaku Endo was a great experience, a spiritual experience to be precise. It is like a pilgrimage to the holy river Ganges which Christians should consider pagan and unchristian. Besides, the filth, pollution and the unhygienic surroundings are all there. But there is a surrounding aura of love, peace and regeneration. Ganges, the Mother of India despite all filth, is a mother with plenitude and gentleness. This novel is the story of a group of Japanese tourists to India. The various characters are brought to light in the background of the teeming life and activity around Ganges in the city of Varanasi. Each character has a past that is heavy on the person. The river Ganges called 'the river of humanity' and 'the river of love' has a great depth of meaning for each one of them. It is indeed a deep river from which they all gain consolation, liberation and a new birth. The characters like Isobe, Kiguchi, Numanda, Mitsuko and Otsu vary in their backgrounds and interests. Most of them do not have much in common except for Mitsuko and Otsu. Each of them has a story and their lives do not cross much. The plot of the novel in this respect is most unusual. All of them converge on the banks of river Ganges in pursuit of rejuvenation.

India, where the ancient civilization flowered on the banks of the great river Indus, serves as the backdrop for the novel. Most of the events take place in Varanasi, on the banks of the river Ganges in the months of October-November 1984. The dark forests, the natural environment, the peaceful temples with their gods and godesses, the lively idols of Kali and Chamunda, the crowded city of Varanasi, the various river ghats of Ganges with all the droppings of dogs and cows and the filth, the cremation ground with the smell of burning flesh, the river itself with milky tea-colored water, and the dusty isolated villages with communal wells become very lively to the reader. The band of scrawny children crying out for Bakshish, the snake charmer with the cobra and the mongoose, the sadhoos and godmen giving blessings to the devotees, the wedding procession of the rich couple in the holy city are fit to create strong impressions in the mind. The political background of the time, such as the assassination of Indira Gandhi the prime minister and the subsequent riots in New Delhi, the funeral and the immersion of her ashes in the river Yamuna are clearly brought out. Endo has a deep knowledge of India, its people and their ways of thinking.

Shusaku Endo is known as the Graham Greene of the East. But, though his novels can be considered Catholic, they are controversial. His deep knowledge of Christianity in the West and in the East makes it easy for him to write very powerfully. His earlier novels dealt with problems of faith and God, of sin and betrayal, of martyrdom and apostacy in Japan. The present novel seems to focus mainly on the depth of the spirituality of the East which the western mind fails to comprehend. The pictures he paints of the gods and goddesses and the river are often disgusting and disturbing. It is these that offer consolation to the seminarian who is disappointed with the western Christianity, to the non believer like Mitsuko and to a host of others tormented by their own personal problems.

The author, an excellent historian (check out his other books) couldn't seem to make up his mind whether this was to be a coffee table book filled with pictures (which are first rate) or a serious history of an epic, if largely unremembered, event that had significant impact on our society. As a result, this book doesn't quite make it as either. Still, it is interesting and provocative. It just but pales in comparison to Rising Tide, a magnificent work.