From Publishers Weekly
Having spent a summer on a Navajo reservation and having lived among Yup'ik Eskimos in Alaska for two years, Martin has written a searching exploration of Native American ways of being and seeing. The Navajo, reports this former Rutgers history professor, "see man and woman intertwined, yin and yang, between them accomplishing the purposes of the earth, housing the powerful events of the landscape and firmament surrounding them." Traditional Eskimos don't talk about "nature," "conservation" or "environment," he surmises, "because they are nature; they are coterminous with the mind, the spirit, the being of it all. This is being a real person." Yet Native cultures, in his assessment, have been grievously fragmented. The Eskimos, for example, a people who once synthesized the cosmos through their music and dance, their clothing, homes and tools, even their names, have been psychologically devastated by the impact of Western civilization, with its "severed intellect" detached from nature. From Winnebago Trickster tales, Martin teases out lessons on the need for equilibrium and modesty. Blending insights from N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko and Loren Eiseley, and quoting liberally from early European explorers' journals, he plumbs the perceptual divide that he has found between natives and non-natives. He intriguingly speculates that the outlook of quantum physics, while starkly different from our controlled, materialist reality, is in some ways congruent with the Native American relativistic and sentient cosmos. These deeply personal essays represent an engaging departure from Martin's more academic books on Native America. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
A former professor of history at Rutgers University, Martin spent a summer on a Navajo reservation and lived for two years with Yupik Eskimos in southwestern Alaska. Here he looks at Native Americans, their myths, and the philosophical challenge of their way of thinking, wrestling with ontological and ideological ways of interpreting the Native American world. Martin discusses the Native American belief that no true accidents can occur, a belief that springs from the conviction that there are no true bondaries. He also addresses the despiritualization of present-day Native Americans. Adopting an Emersonian approach to history, he tries to take a deeper view of the expansion of the human narrative in both space and time. In one of the books best chapters, Einsteins Beaver, Martin writes that Paleolithic mythology, being the language of native philosophy, understands the universe very differently than the Newtonian mechanical model does. A fresh viewpoint on Native American landscape and legend. Recommended for public and academic libraries.Vicki L. Toy Smith, Univ. of Nevada, RenoCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Into a marketplace crowded with trance-'n'-tell books that purport to reveal the spiritual secrets of Native America comes a quiet, powerful, authoritative voice. Martin has lived and worked in Navajo land as well as in the Alaskan bush. Throughout, he acknowledges his own privileged distance from the world he describes without trying to define. Instead of joining the growing Wannabe tribe, he ponders what, other than skin color and language, distinguishes Indian and non-Indian Americans. This isn't a matter of romanticized noble savages, deeply in tune with nature, and nonnatives corrupted by civilization. He surmises that the difference is one of orientation toward time. Non-Indians are in a kind of Newtonian time and a clockwork historical universe; Indian time is more like that of a nondualistic, quantum world. Historian Martin wages a lover's quarrel with his discipline in ravishingly unacademic prose. He urges us to move beyond logic, to find a new means of discourse that embraces both the historical and the mythic perspectives. This is a subtle, complex, and important work. Patricia Monaghan


Colin G. Calloway, Natural History
Like [Martin's] earlier books, The Way of the Human Being presents stimulating ideas. . . . In a sometimes elegant and gentle book, the author shares the embarrassments, mistakes, and myopia of his personal journey through an elusive world, as well as his discoveries along the way.


Library Journal
A fresh viewpoint on Native American landscape and legend.


Men's Journal
Martin has listened to indigenous peoples ... without falling into western habits of dismissive interpretation. He is especially insightful on the inadequacies of the western demand for 'measurement' and 'facts' when reality, in native eyes, is riddled with spirituality and story.


Book Description
How is the thinking of Native Americans different from Western ways of thinking? Drawing on his own experiences living with Navajo Indians and with the Yup`ik tribe in Alaska, Calvin Luther Martin offers deep insights into the stories and the mythic, circular thinking of these people. He shows how Native Americans understand the world and the way true human beings should conduct themselves in it.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From Native Americans, Europeans learned about corn and beans, toboggans and canoes, and finding their way around an unfamiliar landscape. Yet the Europeans learned what they wished to learn - not necessarily what the natives actually meant by their stories and their lives - says Calvin Luther Martin in this unique and powerfully insightful book. Drawing on his own experiences with native people and on their stories, Martin brings us to a new conceptual landscape - the mythworld that seems unfamiliar and strange to those accustomed to western ways of thinking. He shows how native people understand the world and how human beings can and should conduct themselves within it. Taking up the profound philosophical challenge of the Native American "way of the human being," Martin leads us to rethink our entire sense of what is real and how we know the real.

FROM THE CRITICS

Colin G. Calloway - Natural History

Like [Martin's] earlier books, The Way of the Human Being presents stimulating ideas. . . . In a sometimes elegant and gentle book, the author shares the embarrassments, mistakes, and myopia of his personal journey through an elusive world, as well as his discoveries along the way.

Sheryl Cotleur - Bookselling This Week

What an astonishing book! . . . Beautifully written, this is the most poignant and provocative book I've read in years.

Library Journal