Wilma Mankiller led an interesting life and this book is a great start to learn about her. She battled for not only Native American women but all women who were oppressed. ( )

It took me quite a while to finish this book, I'd pick it up and read a few pages at a time; it's dense with information so I had to digest it slowly, but also, it just failed to hold my attention for long periods because it read like a book report. This book is packed with facts about Mankiller's life, especially her origins and childhood, then begins to trail off on personal matters after reaching her marriage to focus more on her interest in activism and community development. It then fails to deliver on the details of her governing as the first modern female chief of the Cherokee nation. This book relies so heavily on quotes and citations from other books that I found myself considering reading one of those cited. While I absolutely appreciate all the information given in this book and the obvious care and attention the author gave to getting the facts correct, the book report vibe left much to be desired from the delivery.
Thanks to the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program and the author for a copy in exchange for my honest review. ( )

This book provided a great deal of insight into Wilma Mankiller's life before, during, and after her time as Chief of the Cherokee Nation. It's overall well written, but there were lots of lengthy quotes from other people besides the subject of the book. That felt a bit odd. Also, there were sections where information was repeated and could've been omitted. ( )

As a decedent of the Cherokees and a woman, I loved this book! It was enlightening, inspiring, and also heartbreaking. I would recommend this book to anyone and have already given it as a gift twice!

<i>Disclaimer: I received a copy from a LibraryThing giveaway.</i>

This is a difficult review to write, because while I enjoyed learning more about Wilma Mankiller, I'm not sure this book is worth reading. Why? I'm certain that the book would've been better if it didn't rely so heavily on long quotes from other sources. It seems like a strange choice for the author to have made - why would he not want to use his own authorial voice? As it is, it leaves me wondering why read <i>this</i> book and not just pick up a copy of Mankiller's own autobiography?

This book provides a lot of information about Mankiller's origins and early life, roughly up until she became chief. It gives good insight into how she became interested in politics, social justice, and Native sovereignty issues. I didn't know that she had spent her teenage years in California, so I enjoyed learning about how that exposed her to Native movements in the Bay Area.

There's a lot less detail about what she actually did in her role as chief, so I feel that the "How One Woman United the Cherokee Nation" part of the subtitle is a bit misleading. Don't get me wrong - there's no question that she was a strong, capable leader. The book just doesn't go into a lot of detail about how she governed, at least not compared to the length of the other sections of the book.

Coming into this, I basically only knew that there had been a female Cherokee chief named Wilma Mankiller, but nothing about her. I learned a lot from this book, even if I found the author's choices - and therefore the narrative flow - a bit awkward.