Word: frazier
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...Great Plains (1989) Ian Frazier transformed himself from a supremely hip New Yorker humorist into a serious but never somber chronicler of the American heartland. In On the Rez (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 311 pages; $25) Frazier entertainingly continues this investigation, although his interest is now concentrated on a specific patch of the wide-open spaces, the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota, home of the Oglala Sioux. Why this place and these people? While researching Great Plains, Frazier met and became friends with Le War Lance, a Sioux man with colorful if not always credible stories...
...that, Frazier admits, was not the only reason he made all those arduous treks. "I am a middle-aged non-Indian who wears his hair in a thinning ponytail copied originally from the traditional-style long hair of the leaders of the American Indian Movement of the 1970s because I thought it looked cool." Lance's brother teasingly calls Frazier a "wannabe" Indian, and the author doesn't protest much. "Walking on Pine Ridge, I feel as if I am in actual America, the original version that was here before and will still be here after we're gone...
...concentrate," says junior Ashley Prinzi. "When you're bored in class, everything comes back, because this is where it happened." Yet most are learning, however slowly, to move on. Last month a student in Carol Samson's English class was so struck by something she read in the Charles Frazier novel Cold Mountain that she stayed after class to show the passage to Samson. "Your grief hasn't changed a thing," it reads. "All you can choose to do is go on or not." Frank Peterson says he now gives his biology students more in-class assignments...
Four years later, Frazier is well again. He has worked for two years on an elite longshoreman's crew that cleans up oil spills, and served for a year as president of his union local. He commutes to work from a new apartment, where he lives with his wife and four-year-old daughter. Frazier owes his stunning turnaround to medication that has brought his mental illness under control, but also to an underutilized treatment known as psychosocial rehabilitation. This approach aims to remedy what many see as a great failing of America's treatment of the mentally ill--once...
...scars cover her body, medication has controlled her mental illness and she has become a part-time "life coach" at the Village. She rents her own apartment and hopes to become a writer. "I've found that it's not necessary to have a crappy life," she says. Bobby Frazier and a lot of other consumers would agree...