when I saw it's non-authenticity, I returned it for full credit. Fr. Powell has been duped!

Powell, a Catholic priest, has an agenda unrelated to the great mythic story of Sweet Medicine (Motseyoef in the Tsistsistas [Cheyenne] language; untranslatable in English), in which he has tried to blend the ancient indigenous spirituality of the proto-Algonquians with Christianity. Beginning only around 1830 with Suhtaio and Tsistsitas conflicts with the Pawnees and other Native Nations of the upper -trans-Missouri Basin, he doesn't even talk about Sweet Medicine, barely mentioning him and then going on to a standard replay of American history. It is a uninspired recitation of questionable information used to justify the missionaries converting the Indians to a better God and Civilization.

Father Peter J. Powell (who, contrary to the misinformation passed in another reader's review, is an Episcopalian priest) is the premium scholar of Cheyenne culture and religion. A Sun Dance priest himself, adopted by the Cheyenne, Father Powell renders the beautiful story of Sweet Medicine in evocative prose. After reading his work, I was privileged to meet Father Powell on a sad, but touching occasion, when he presided over the funeral of the great Cheyenne educator Bill Tall Bull in Lame Deer, Montana several years ago. Father Powell is held in great reverence by the Northern Cheyenne people, and on that day was sought out after the service by countless members of the tribe with greetings, hugs, and thanks. I can recommend SWEET MEDICINE without reservation to anyone with interest in Plains Indian culture.

Oki Niskaanii's (hello friends),

Please do yourself a favor and do NOT buy a book that has ANYTHING to do with the "Long Lance" guy. He's NOT a member of the Blackfeet Tribe and in fact, is not even indian. How do I know? Because I AM Blackfeet.

A few years back I was talking with some relations and I brought up this "chief's" name and they started laughing, "He's a white man from the 'wannabi" (sic) tribe who's never even set foot on our land!" Needless to say, when I came across this book, I thought Amazon readers should know "...the rest of the story".

I can't believe how many books are written by non-indians about my tribe that contain so much erroneous info. If you really want to learn about our tribe, buy Percy Bullchild's book "The sun came down". I heard there's a new book with his stories called "American Indian Genesis". Percy traveled all over our reservation and reserves (in Alberta) and collected stories from our elders for these compilations. For day-to-day living (back in the buffalo-hunting days), pick up Walter McClintock's book "The Old North Trail". This white man lived with our tribe during the waning days of the 19th century. Any questions?

This story is fascinating history as long as you ignore the racist ("black" passing for Indian) remarks of the author. Long Lance (born Sylvester Long) was born in North Carolina of Indian, white and black ancestry. If his ancestry had been Indian and white only, Smith would praise him to the skies for seeking out his Indian heritage. Smith, however, insists throughout the book that Long was only good enough for his small amount of black ancestry. Long Lance launched a career as a journalist and gained fame as a provocative writer and eloquent speaker for the cause of the North American Indian.

The recipes require exotic and hard to locate ingredients. There is an ingredient list in the back of the book to order items but they are costly, no substitutes are listed. We have a half of Buffalo in our freezer and having had this book for over 12 months have yet to use a recipe from it. It is not a very useful cookbook.

found myself bored and had to make several attempts to finish the book. The plot was feasible but the sentence structure wouldn't make it pass a 10 grade english teacher. The descriptive language and narrative style was weak.

Stressing a contingent and interconnected historical process while clogged with Marxist rhetoric and apologetic to judicial decree; the mechanistic study: 'DESEGREGATION IN BOSTON AND BUFFALO: The Influence of Local Leaders' (c. 1998) by political science professor Steven J. L. Taylor, ostensibly compared the leadership of two disassociate events - court ordered forced busing in Boston and Buffalo.

Bafflingly admitting that "Between Boston and Buffalo there are differences in geographic location, economic structure, size, and neighborhood identification" (p. 9) then insisted that in order to form the basis of a study "There must be some geographical propinquity between the two locales" (p. 201), the author ignored the 500 mile distance between Boston and Buffalo yet continued with his logical inconcatenance. Professor Taylor further expounded that "Few American cities could have been different from one another as Boston of 1974 was from Boston of one century earlier" (p. 13) without explaining how Boston and Buffalo could correspond under such circumstances.

Methodologically, as well as internally, inconsistent; DESEGREGATION IN BOSTON AND BUFFALO, contained over 104 books and 45 magazine & journal articles in its bibliography, but Professor Taylor saw fit to cite less than 35 throughout his text. Of the tens of thousands of anti-forced busing protesters in 1974 Boston, this researcher interviewed the statistically insignificant amount of three (3), relying instead on anecdotal information, and dogmatic assertions supported by non-sequiturs to bolster his thesis.

One of the dozens of examples of contradictions scattered throughout DESEGREGATION IN BOSTON AND BUFFALO was the author's claim that "One would also be hard pressed to label Judge W. Garrity as a stranger to Boston" strangely followed by the observation that "Garrity was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, just 45 miles east of Boston." Federal Judge Arthur Garrity was born in Worcester, went to college in Cambridge, and settled in Wellesley - the man was never from Boston, and this little factoid seems to have escaped Professor Taylor's selective research.

Omission of relevant data also marred this work as Professor Taylor ignored the 240 Afro-American families living in South Boston in the summer of 1974 (and some were enthusiastic rock throwers at buses!); as well as the small colony of Mic Mac Indians from the Canadian Maritimes; coupled with the fact that the Irish American was a vocal minority in South Boston, outnumbered since 1950 by the Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Polish, and Albanians (whom the racists would label as 'white') fleeing communist persecution from the former Soviet Union. Today, South Boston High School is 95% Afro-American & hispanic in a 90% caucasian neighborhood; South Boston High had been declared officially 'dysfunctional' by the Massachusetts Board of Education; Boston's population has dropped from 620,000 to 580,000 due to white flight; and what was once an adequate school system has been reduced to a wasteland directly thanks to an insipid court order - which costs Boston taxpayers $25 million a year to implement!

Further weak in his research and vague in his conclusions regarding court-ordered forced busing, Professor Taylor surmised that "One of the major lessons is the futility of trying to seek the reversal of a decision when the violations are blatant" (p. 215) in obvious oblivion to the judge's own advice that "The only routes available are a judicial appeal or a constitutional amendment." [Boston Evening Globe Oct. 10, 1974 p. 1] which was what Boston's elected representatives where attempting in the first place!

In his devotion to determinism, the author implied a 'causal necessity' by stating on page 167 that "Historical factors motivated Boston's leaders to behave in the manner they did when faced with the desegregation order" but neglected to explain exactly what those mysterious "Historical Factors" were! Rather than treating intelligent residents as implements in an abstraction called history, Professor Taylor would have been more scholarly if he attempted to explain Boston's politicians behavior due to the recognition of the Federal Judge's egregious violation of the Separation of Powers Act with the busing decree, and of elected officials operating within their training under the tenets of the democratic process.

Tendentiously written, illogical, unsupported by evidence, and useless as a scholarly text, DESEGREGATION IN BOSTON AND BUFFALO presented a slanted story which was well below the standards of research for someone in the author's occupation. With his aspiration that "This thesis has implications beyond academia, it is also relevant for practioners in public policy" (p. 215) Professor Taylor revealed his study to be a mere political pamphlet written by an ideologue.

Self serving autobiography. Good insight as to what made up Bob Smith before and after Howdy Doody. Portrays a good, kind and religous person.

Details about the Howdy Doody show are skimpy and sometimes misleading. When finished reading, you know you wanted more.

Of the three books available on Howdy, this is a good (yet distant) third.