Customer Reviews

Rivers Must Run

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A positively delightful story and one with considerable `food for thought.' While the principal confrontations are between loggers and dam builders, Dr. Kending gives us valid insight into the co-mingling of other groups--a bright young boy faces, and eventually joins, the adult world; non-Catholics share common problems and experiences with their Catholic neighbors, white families glimpse the culture of Ojibwa people and vice versa; townspeople meet their country dwelling friends; unlettered and formal school educated learn mutual respect; first generation immigrants assimilate into the new world--to name some examples. People of various ages and backgrounds will find things in Rivers Must Run to relate to. If you had the opportunity to roam the woods someplace in your own youth you can thrill to Ahmeek's summer experiences and even city youngsters will delight in this young boy's adventures complete with having real American Indian playmates. If you're old enough to remember back `before electricity' or `before motorcars' or when vast regions were not served by railroads you can relate to this tale which covers the advent of such life-changing technologies. There's even something for the scientist in each of us with veiled but authentic references to such things as sound Doppler, the difference between the speed of light and that of sound and the three-phase nature of alternating current power. To quote myself, "a positively delightful story which leads me to plead, "C'mon Paul Kending, when are we going to get another like Rivers Must Run?"

Readers of this book are drawn to a poetically rich narrative of a young boy's personal friendships and emotional maturation. Surreptitiously, a valuable history lesson is being absorbed about a culturally profound period in Wisconsin's past. River's Must Run brilliantly straddles the divide between a documentary and prose.

Dana Gretz, English Instructor Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College