Shaman is a novel traveling from Europe to the wide-open prairie
of Illinois of nineteenth-century America. It is here, Dr. Rob Cole comes
to escape persecution, and to pursue his medical career. On the prairie,
Dr. Cole faces unspeakable violence against friends and family. Racial
violence inflicted against Native Americans and those on the battlefields
of the Civil War.
I chose this book due to the view of racial identity many experienced during the nineteenth-century in our country. During a time when our country was in great term-oil. Noah Gordon was able to depict the feelings people on each side of the Civil War held, and how the war divided a family, but at the same time brought the family closer together. The book was also able to capture many of the struggles people went through to fight for what they thought was just in a society that proclaimed only thoses of a white Anglo-Saxon background as superior to all other racial or ethnic groups. Gordon was able to illustrate situations commonly experienced during nineteenth-century America by the Native Americans, who where pushed onto reservations in a hostile environment no longer what they knew as home.
Five Questions:
1. What inspired you, as the author, to write a book touching sensitive
issues that were considered taboo in our country until later in the 20th
century?
2. Did any of the situations involving any form of racism come from
experiences people around you went through?
3. After reading the novel, what new perspectives do you hold as the
reader pertaining to how our country treated those historically thought
to be inferior to the great white Anglo-Saxon population?
4. Are you the reader able to identify what stage each character is
at in the racial identity development model?
5. Was your goal in writing this book to be a racial eye-opener concerning
views held in our country during the nineteenth century?
Elizabeth Dowrie