Tom Corbett – författare

The distinguished American Indian photographer Lee Marmon has documented over sixty years of Laguna history: its people, customs, and cultural changes. Here more than one hundred of Marmon’s photos showcase his talents while highlighting the cohesive, adaptive, and independent character of the Laguna people.

Along with Marmon’s own oral history of the tribe and his family photos dating back to 1872, Tom Corbett presents archival images and historical research, making this the most complete published history of any southwestern pueblo. Marmon and Corbett also interviewed noted tribal elders and oral historians regarding customs, religious practices, and events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The resulting narrative provides a fascinating story of survival through severe natural and man-made adversities, including droughts, plagues, marauding tribes, and cultural invasion. Through it all, Laguna has preserved its culture and retained sovereign powers over the pueblo and its territory.

This book takes us back in time, to those days when an idealistic band of youthful Americans journeyed halfway around the world in response to President John F. Kennedy''s clarion call to ''... ask what you can do for your country.'' We eagerly signed up to serve in a new program called the Peace Corps, an initiative first spawned in those exhilarating days of Camelot when fervor and innocence trumped experience and common sense. While each of us knew our decision to volunteer for service overseas might prove challenging, we had no idea what was in store for us. As these reflections suggest, our service both pushed us as individuals and altered our subsequent lives as a collective. In these pages, I try to capture some of these transformative experiences as well as intimate possible consequences.

Oblique Journeys

This novel takes us deep into the scars left by a war that tore the United States apart in the 1960s and early 1970s, a conflict that left an indelible mark on the youth who came of age in that turbulent era. While a work of fiction, the narrative touches upon the real emotions and struggles that many young people endured as they fought to make sense out of competing claims upon their loyalty and to satisfy the dictates of their torn consciences. This was a time when easy answers were not available, where each young man and woman who cared about this country had to arrive at their own interpretation of events and choose which path in life to follow. Each had to decide the contours of their individual characters and for which principles they would stand. In the end, each had to articulate their own moral compass. As explored in this work, choices can have deep and enduring consequences.

Oblique Journeys is the story of one young man who came of age in the turbulent 1960s as he journeyed from exile and isolation to reconnect and embrace, if possible, with a life he long thought lost. Over the period of one week, Joshua Connelly seeks to come to terms with his estranged sister Rachel, with comrades long abandoned, with his authentic self, and with a past he tried to ignore but ultimately could not. In the end, it is a compelling story of the invisible and neglected victims of war.

Refractive Reflections can be read as a self-contained work. It also can be considered the fifth volume in the saga that covers the story of three families ... the Masoud, the Crawford, and the Connelly clans. Five books in all, Oblique Journeys, Palpable Passions, Ordinary Obsessions, Felicitous Fates, and now Refractive Reflections constitute an interrelated set of works that explore the complex evolution of these three distinct families and the rela- tional, political, and philosophical subthemes they embrace or reflect. While these works touch upon the stories of individuals and families, they also bring us deeper into a set of larger issues and challenges common to the human condition. In short, the entire series is multi-layered ... serious in substance, yet oft told with wit and well-paced drama.