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Seldom Disappointed Review

Life according to Hillerman

By Carol J. Burr

Fall 2002

For more than 30 years, novelist Tony Hillerman has followed one best-selling mystery with another, taking his devoted following into the intriguing, mystifying and starkly beautiful world of the Navajo, establishing his protagonists Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee as two of the best-known contemporary detectives of the genre. With his autobiography, Seldom Disappointed, Hillerman steps out from behind Leaphorn and Chee to reveal a character every bit as fascinating as his fictional creations-himself.

Hillerman looks at his own life with startling clarity and warmth, turning his keen insight and wry, self-deprecating humor on a life lived with modest expectations colored by an optimism destined to carry him through life's many challenges. Growing up in tiny, Depression-fraught Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, he never realized he was poor until he left for college, able to afford only one semester before following his brother into the Army, a teenage infantryman coming of age in the mud and madness of World War II.

Recovering from serious war wounds, he returned with the veterans to the University of Oklahoma, where he chose journalism, then became a reporter, United Press bureau chief and journalism department chair at the University of New Mexico. At OU he met and later married the girl of his dreams, Marie, with whom he had one child and adopted five more. His enormous success as a writer, while greatly satisfying, seems still to surprise him.

Unlike Hillerman's carefully plotted mysteries, readers know from the beginning how this book ends; the treat is in the storytelling. Hillerman fans probably grabbed hardcover copies off the bookshelves last year. Publication of the paperback edition in October 2002 is destined to broaden the readership. For anyone who ever grew up in small-town Oklahoma, lived through a war or attended OU, this memoir should be required reading. For everyone else, to miss what the New York Times Book Review called a "splendid and disarming remembrance of things past," would be a downright shame.

Seldom Disappointed
by Tony Hillerman

Perennial, an imprint of
HarperCollins Publishers
Hardcover $26.00
Paperback $13.95

Also available on audio:
12 Hours / 8 cassettes
Unabridged / Read by the Autheror $39.95