Customer Reviews

Oblivion's Altar:: A Novel of Courage

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I own and have read all of DMW's books. They just keep getting better--or else I just appreciate them more the more I read them. To me the author has the gift of empathy. Whether he sees the world through the eyes of an oil field worker imported from India, a Mexican at war with Texas, an Indian chief, the President of the United States or anyone of the other main or supporting characters who people his tales, I always get the feeling that it is the character speaking and not the author through the character. Big difference. Normally, as I read I go behind the character and see the author busily typing away replete with his/her biases. Not so with the books of David Marion Wilkinson. I get to see several sides of an issue, and I can honestly say that even the meanest character that he dreams up has a human side which does not allow me to dismiss him/her out of hand. In Oblivion's Altar, I see and understand President Jackson's position as well as that of the several chiefs who attempt to get the U.S. government to abide by law--peacefully and with war. It was so unavoidably sad--and just plain unavoidable--what happened to the Cherokee and the other tribes of Native Americans. When you read any of DMW's stories you get [taken] into the complexities of the human spirit and you rejoice, pity, get angry at and grieve with every character at some point or other. It's great to know the author is a young man with several great books in him--and I plan to read every one.

This is historical fiction at its best, educating while entertaining. "Oblivion's Altar" is set in the early to mid 1800's and focuses on the great Cherokee chieftain whose anglocized name as Ridge. Like many Native American of his time he straddled the worlds and cultures of his ancestors and the burgeoning white world. It was inevitably a no-win situation but the courage and wisdom of Ridge (symbolic of many other Natives) are inspirational.
Wilkinson's accomplishments are the blending of historical research with his own fertile imagination.
Historical events are thus rendered in an excellent narrative rather than as dry scholarship. Characters are fused with realism, rather than seeming contrivances.
History is often the story of how ordinary people deal with extraordinary circumstances. "Oblivion's Altar" is an excellent example of this.

These historical figures will haunt your memory for weeks after you have finished this book. David Wilkinson's abilities to craft a "soul" from words is unsurpassed by todays authors. In Oblivion's Altar, he tells a compelling story of the Cherokee people which will have even the toughest skinned reader hooked by the end of their first hour of reading. Once you've read this book, you will look at all History with a more critical and decerning eye. The virtues and vices of human nature are excellently displayed, and their resulting conflict, as one nation is born and another begins to die.

The writer of historical fiction is confronted with an exceedingly difficult task. If he is to succeed, he must reach not only those with an interest in the history of which he writes, but those to whom plot and character development are everything and history an afterthought. David Wilkinson has succeeded on a grand scale with his book. This superbly crafted story of the great Cherokee Nation and the forces which drove its people from their lands in the southeast along the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma brings to life one of the more sordid and shameful episodes in American History. Much has been written of this tragedy, but we seldom see the faces of its victims. Wilkinson has brought them to life for us in a way that is both fascinating and unforgettable. Probably as impressive an account of the Native American struggle as anything written since "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee."

I have been a student of Native American history for over forty years, mainly the period from the middle to end of the nineteenth century.

David Wilkinsons book, which I have just finished reading, has made me expand my interests to cover a much wider period.

Although a novel, I found it full of interesting points which aroused my interest in the broader spectrum of the Native Americans and their history, and I can pay David no higher praise when I say that, in my opinion, he has done for the Cherokee Nation what Mari Sandoz did for the Cheyenne Nation in her book "Cheyenne Autumn", made our generation aware of the lies and deceit and the inhuman treatment of the Native Americans by the White Europeans using the excuse of civilising the west.

Thank you David for a most enjoyable read.

It was almost surreal reading this exceptional story of courage, frustration, dispair, hope and struggle. Although the events depicted in the book occurred some 200 years ago, they could easily be translated to recent times. I have met and seen the Kah-nung-da-tla-geb's of modern times. Proud people who are struggling to teach their children the old ways, yet realizing, as difficult it is to accept, that assimilation is a necessity to survive, to succeed. The Cherokee "exceeded all the Americans' expectations" in this regard and learned to use the "civilized ways" to their advantage, and it wasn't enough. In my little community, many have become educated, successful and assimilated, and, like long ago, it isn't enough. We are still considered "a thorn in their heel". This is a must read book for anyone who has struggled and dispaired, and who has loved family, heritage and country. I am not a "reader" but, like his previous book, NOT BETWEEN BROTHERS, I couldn't put it down. To David Marion Wilkinson, thanks - with respect and admiration.

David Marion Wilkinson wrote there a fine and fascinating novel on the policy of the US vis-à-vis the Cherokee people and fate. As soon as the Cherokee were confronted to the presence of the whites they realized that their living circumstances had changed. To face the upsurging wave of arriving whites, they had to make choices. They chose integration at first and decided to invest in the education of their children, the development their agriculture on the white pattern, the wide openong of their clans to whites through marriages producing an important proportion of mixed-bloods who will imprint a strong change in their society. So they invented an alphabet for their language and started a printed newspaper, that still exists. They also translated the Bible into Cherokee and adopted a constitution modelled on that of the US, which more or less imposed a regression in the role of women in their society. They tried to build a nation that was integratable in US society because organized on similar lines, though retaining their language, their culture, many of their traditions (including their religion based on a single god, the Great Provider) and their defiant spirit. But there came a time when the choice imposed by the whites was between two evils : to move west on the basis of a more or less negotiated treaty or to wait for the coming of US soldiers and other militia to be dislodged from their land. The choice was between an attachment to the people and their survival or to the country, the territory, the land of their ancestors. Some leaders did not understand that the second choice was just unrealistic in front of white decisions and will. Some understood the dead-end in which they were and negociated their departure. This led to the peaceful and rather orderly departure of some, behind Chief Ridge and later on to the painful and cruel forced departure of the others with bayonets in their backs on the Trail of Tears. The novel explores the deep motivations of the leaders of each faction and their contradictions. The depicting of such complex convictions and feelings is done in such details that the book becomes a saga or even an epic of Cherokee survival in the wake of their Trail of Tears. The book also tries to bring to light the personality and rich heritage of Chief Ridge, a man who has been completely evacuated from Cherokee memory. It is thus a call for his rehabilitation nearly two centuries later, some kind of reunification of Cherokee purpose in present-day American society.

But the best side of the book is the deep inspiration the author found in an extremely careful exploration of Cherokee culture, Cherokee mythology and Cherokee history. His rendering of the Trail of Tears in one of the final chapters is a marvelous evocation of the suffering and yet of the hope of the Cherokee, of the cruelty of the whites and yet of their christian compassion, of the danger of complete extinction of the Cherokee on this trail and yet the fantastic will to survive and to thrive after the ordeal. Never do we have the impression to be in a history book, but always in a human, humane and deeply felt account of events always captured from the point of view of their various actors, including Sharp Knife better known as President Andrew Jackson. And that is the best and worst part of this story : the whites did not try to annihilate the Cherokee essentially out of hatred for the Red Indians, but out of the will to avoid a civil war coming from a possible secession of southern states. And this attempt, which was successful by isolating South Carolina who refused the federal power of Congress, did not avoid the Civil War that was to come thirty years later. The Cherokee were sacrificed for no avail, at the best some respite or delay. That's what appears as most striking about the whites : they are most of the time governed by short term interests and do not see the wider and longer picture. In other words, their desire to impose their civilization, a desire that is always dominant in their way of looking at the world, is here ever present and this is a beautiful lesson in modern politics, because some Americans, often in powerful positions and offices, are still thinking and acting along that line, that we must definitely consider as imperialistic. The novel is thus more modern than we may think at first sight.

Everyone who is interested in America and the American project for the world, and the US have a project for the world, has to read this book to get new and invigorating insight in the subject.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Perpignan, France

Oblivion's Altar is an amazing true tale of the Cherokee's struggle for land, their strength and their courage. it is a history you have not read before. The men and women depicted come alive and you feel their pride and their exasperation dealing with courts and government. The perspective of the book is not one-sided nor judgmental. It is an excellent read for anyone -- history buffs, readers interested in native american culture or ordinary avid readers like myself. It is a book you won't put down.

"There is a legend among the Ani-yunwi-ya, the People of Kituhwa, as ancient as the
Blue Mountains, as the People themselves. In a lengthy (time-wise) story (it covers
the period of time from 1776 to 1839), Oblivions Altar is the story of a great
Cherokee chieftain named Kah-nung-da-tla-geh, the Man Who Walks the
Mountaintops, or Ridge. He is a leader of his tribe who has vision far beyond his
own geographic limitations; he is a man who has determined, through his wisdom,

experience, and personal makeup, that his people can be delivered into new
freedoms, that they can co-exist with the white man, if given half a chance. It is the
perfidy of man that seems destined to prevent his vision, his dreams.

Thus, it comes
as no surprise when treaties, agreements, and integrity fail to win the day.
Of course, try as hard as they may, justifying the complete subjugation of the native
Americans does not come across convincingly by any degree. The arguments

presented by both historians and politicians always ring hollow, now decades and
decades later. Greed, jealousy, hatred, yes, even religious convictions fueled this
hegemonious movement and America is not the better or more proud for it. David Marion Wilkinsons book cedes that this is a given, at least by any intelligent reader.

It is the understanding of the nature of the beast that he seems to dwell upon.
Wilkinsons protagonists draw more than sympathy, of course. With painstaking
detail, a thorough presentation, and depth of the entire picture of this
not-so-glorious picture in Americas past, the author makes a case that is difficult to
refute (most dont try to refute it today, of course). But Wilkinsons novel is not a
soap box oratory on the evils of Manifest Destiny, or even the evils of the white man.
This would be too obvious and he transcends the glaring obvious and instead
presents a remarkable story, a genuine story of an American tragic hero and as a
tragic hero, Ridge has his tragic flaw. Is it naiveté? A foolhardy trust of his fellow
human beings that brings bout his own demise, as Shakespeare might say?
Regardless, Kah-nung-da-tla-geh, the Man Who Walks the Mountaintops, comes
across not so much as the martyr for his cause, but as a genuine, sensitive human
being, a man with broad shoulders and even broader horizons.
The Trail of Tears and the other degrading examples of justice serve as a
convincing backdrop to the entire picture.

But when Ridge sings his own epitaph:
(Worry not for the Man Who Walks the Mountaintops, my friends. For I am old,
my children are grown, and I am truly weary of the cares of this world. My
ancestors are waiting for me. I will know what its like to be loved by my people
again. Im not afraid to die.), we are convinced of his own immortality, and more
importantly the essence of his immortality.

Wilkinsons style of writing is easy-paced, but the depth and understanding in this
pace is remarkable and add to the quality of his prose. Certainly, he seems to
possess more than a passing knowledge of the landscape and atmosphere he creates.
This author comes across as knowing what he writes about and does so in a
convincing manner. His characters do seem to be more than words on a page (a
good example is his portrayal of President Jackson) and it is this illuminating
characterization that runs parallel with the story line in a fashion that makes the
reader want the book to continue on forever, almost.

Oblivions Altar is a well-written, well-documented novel that belongs on the top
shelf of American stories. Mr. Wilkinson, himself the winner of the Spur Award for
Best novel of the West, has clearly spent time and energy is creating a voice, not
only for the Cherokee, but for all Americans. This is no ordinarily western
novel--it rings with a true theme of Americana, in its purest sense. It is a book that
is not easily put down, nor forgotten.

This book is one of the most exciting novels I have ever read. The action scenes in the book are as good as in a movie. Mr. Wilkinson has out done himself with this spectacular novel. Both the research and in-depth storyline are stunning. I hope that he produces another book like this because i will be the first one to buyit!