Aim for the Mayor

America's last conflict with its first people raged from Wounded Knee, South Dakota, to Gallup, New Mexico, in the spring of 1973. Death, a police shoot-out, and political intrigue drive the true story of the abduction of a small-town mayor by two young members of the American Indian Movement, then calling itself AIM, as they marched him at gunpoint through downtown Gallup. The siege and taking of eleven hostages in Wounded Knee overshadowed, at least nationally, the now largely...
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America's last conflict with its first people raged from Wounded Knee, South Dakota, to Gallup, New Mexico, in the spring of 1973. Death, a police shoot-out, and political intrigue drive the true story of the abduction of a small-town mayor by two young members of the American Indian Movement, then calling itself AIM, as they marched him at gunpoint through downtown Gallup. The siege and taking of eleven hostages in Wounded Knee overshadowed, at least nationally, the now largely forgotten story of Larry Casuse, activist, and Frank Garcia, idealist. But as the fictional characters in this novel learn, both stories started with the takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969. Casuse and Garcia became unwilling, if not reluctant, adversaries in the emerging Red Power movement of the 1960s and '70s. Casuse, emboldened by his warrior brothers behind the barricades at Wounded Knee, tried to mimic their bravado. AIM vowed to hold Wounded Knee against the might of the U.S. government. Casuse hoped for nothing less than to bring Gallup to its knees. It took seventy-one days to break AIM's takeover of Wounded Knee, but just a few hours for one man to die and another to lose his way in Gallup. Amid this true story are fictional characters, themselves distant images, who weave history, politics, love, and self-realization into a tapestry of both the past and the future. Wounded Knee's drumbeats echoed in Gallup, the self-proclaimed Indian Capital of the World.


BOOK REVIEW

Compelling fictionalized account of the possible links between two historical events in the tortuous relations between Native Americans and the Federal government in the politically charged early 1970s. Meticulously researched, this fluid narrative chronicles the true-life tale of two young Navajo men, who on March 1, 1973, abducted the mayor of Gallup, N.M., and held him hostage for hours in a local sporting-goods store. A brief gun battle ensued, leaving one of the activists dead, Mayor Frankie Garcia wounded and a legacy of confusion in its wake. Stuart, a lawyer and prolific author on ethics and the law (Miranda: The Story of America's Right to Remain Silent, 2004), delves deeply into the motives behind the abduction/attempted murder and the ramifications of this seemingly futile act. To do so, the author uses fictional protagonist Clay Ramsey an idealistic, if somewhat disillusioned journalist seeking to connect the Gallup incident with another act of protest. Two days before Gallup, members of a so-called Red Power activist group, the American Indian Movement, had taken 11 hostages at Wounded Knee, S.D. The siege lasted 71 days. In retrospect, years later, Ramsey is convinced the Casuse the martyred Navajo activist at Gallup was inspired by AIM's bold move in South Dakota. Drawing on both published accounts and his primary research into the Gallup incident, Stuart leads his protagonist, and readers, through a dark maze of the possible and the probable, seeking what he calls the "emotional truth" of what happened that day, and more importantly why it happened. By the end, Ramsey finds the answers to a few of his own more personal questions too. Though the fictional aspects of Stuart's tale perhaps will seem too tidy for straight history buffs, for a general audience they might greatly enhance an already almost-unbelievable story of good intentions gone terribly wrong. Not Zane Grey, but then not Dan Brown either.

--Kirkus Discoveries