Customer Reviews

Tony Hillerman's Indian Country Map & Guide, second edition

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Too bad for me, this came out after I'd read most of Hillerman's mystery books. Lucky you if you haven't read most of the mysteries yet.

You can't use any old map as a companion for the Hillerman series, because most maps use criteria that don't fit sparsely populated areas or Navajo culture. Typical maps of the entire reservation portray it as mostly empty space.

The legendary AAA map that Leaphorn uses in the mysteries is excellent, but more detail than you need if you just want to follow along with the books. It also doesn't include fictitious features like "Short Mountain". (The "Guide to Indian Country" is free for AAA members. Not all offices carry it; I got mine from the Phoenix office.)

A reviewer of the first edition complained that this isn't a real map because it concentrates on places in the Hillerman series. But if you're just reading the series, that's exactly what you want: a specialized companion to the books.

This is a very attractive, quite interesting, annotated map locating many of the spots in Arizona, New Mexico, southern Colorado and southeastern Utah mentioned in Hillerman's Navajo novels. Along with marking these locations, it also offers some useful and interesting bits of pertinent information about them, though I think the design would have allowed for even more historical, cultural and geographic information relevant to the Hillerman books to be included. I suspect the Hillerman readers who probably would find it most useful are those who know at least a little bit about the area and are neither totally ignorant of the distances and geography involved nor are already intimately familiar with the region. (I've probably made about a dozen casual visits to the region, and I still found it fairly interesting.) One glaring lapse is the lack of even a simple grid system on the map to help you locate some of the spots marked by terribly similar-looking icons. And I frankly think that, even at the discounted Amazon price, this map is about $2-$4 more expensive than it really should be.

Tony Hillerman's stories take place over a wide-spread area. This map helps the reader locate important points in his various novels and see their visual relationship to each other.

This map is a great asset to any serious reader of Hillerman.

If you enjoy having as many details as possible when you read Tony H's wonderful Leaphorn/Chee sagas, this map will help you have a much better sense of the stories. I now keep it with whichever book I am reading, so I may recall where the various settings are in relation to one another. WORTH THE SMALL EXPENSE!

The map is great for showing where the action takes place in each of Hillerman's books. My only complaint is that the map is made out of plain paper, and after being folded and unfolded a few times, I think it's going to begin to tear.