The Way To Rainy Mountain [Paperback]

N. Scott Momaday (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press, NM (1985)
• ASIN: B000KALBDA
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,084,595 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A timeless journey, March 3, 2002

By 

Diane Schirf - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Way to Rainy Mountain (Paperback)

The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday; illustrated by Al Momaday. Highly recommended.

Rainy Mountain, a "single knoll [that] rises out of the plain in Oklahoma," is an old landmark for the Kiowa people. It is a land of bitter cold, searing heat, summer drought, and "great green and yellow grasshoppers." It is a land of loneliness, where the Kiowa were drawn after a long journey from the northwest through many types of lands.

The Way to Rainy Mountain is about the journey-in myth, in drawings by Momaday's father Al, in reminiscences, and in historical snippets. All reveal aspects of Kiowa culture, life, philosophy, outlook, spirituality, and sense of self-the beauty and the desolation, how the introduction of the horse revolutionized Kiowa life, the story of Tai-me, and the richness of the word and the past. It is a literal journey as well; Momaday, in Yellowstone, writes, "The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see, and they were bent and blind in the wilderness."

This is a small gem of a book, beautifully written, illustrated, and designed. It has moments of insight, beauty, and sadness, as the ending of the Sun Dance, telling as the sun is at the heart of the Kiowa's soul-a soul that survives in every word and drawing of The Way to Rainy Mountain.

Diane L. Schirf, 3 March 2002.

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A mythic voyage into the Kiowa spirit, July 2, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: The Way to Rainy Mountain (Paperback)

THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN is a fscinating account of the Kiowa spirit's core through the poet N Scott Momaday's three voices: the collective tribal story-telling voice, the historic voice (based on historical documentation), and the poet's own experiential voice (Momaday retraced the migratory route of his ancestors from Montana to Oklahoma). These three voices work on the reader's imagination to produce a fourth voice on the stage of the reader's mind. THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN depicts an epic journey of the Kiowa people through space (Montana southward) and time (mythological to modern). The ancient Kiowa's psyche fuses with primal nature be it with dog persons, antelope beings, or the mythological (but very real) creature called Taime.Once in Oklahoma the Kiowa mastered the horse and became among the best of hunters on the Great Plains. Brave in spirit, sharing in heart, they became a proud people. But European civilization closed in and all but crushed them by killing off the buffalo, killing herds of horses and turning hunters into farmers. Yet the Kiowa people held their vital contact with the land in today's hectic world: "Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe," writes Momaday. "He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it." Momaday helps the reader do just that--gain an appreciation for the multi-dimensional land of North America

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unique, January 5, 2001

By 

Edward Bosnar - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Way to Rainy Mountain (Paperback)

This book is deceptively short: it can be read in about an hour, but you find yourself going back and reading its various passages and thinking about them long afterwards. Momaday tells a story of the Kiowa Indians by tying in three aspects: folklore, actual historical events and his own family history. The book's format underscores this, with the first, folkloric item printed on one page, and the historical and personal reflections in separate paragraphs on the facing page, all set in different fonts. Not meant to be a comprehensive account of the Kiowas, it is rather an attempt to express the author's own feelings and his own view of his heritage. In this he largely succeeds, as he writes poetry in a simple yet powerful prose form. The only shortcoming for me were the illustrations (done by Momaday's father), which seemed to add little to the overall narrative. Otherwise, "The Way to Rainy Moutain" is a very unique and worthwhile book.