Welcome to Litsy!

The first time journalist Jon Lurie meets Jose Perez, the smart, angry, fifteen-year-old Lakota-Puerto Rican draws blood. Five years later, both men are floundering. Lurie, now in his thirties, is newly divorced, depressed, and self-medicating. Jose is embedded in a haze of women and street feuds. Both lack a meaningful connection to their cultural roots: Lurie feels an absence of identity as the son of a Holocaust survivor who is reluctant to talk about her experience, and for Jose, communal history has been obliterated by centuries of oppression. Then Lurie hits upon a plan to save them. After years of admiring the journey described in Eric Arnold Sevareid s 1935 classic account, "Canoeing with the Cree," Lurie invites Jose to join him in retracing Sevareid s route and embarking on a mythic two thousand-mile paddle from Breckenridge, Minnesota, to the Hudson Bay. Faced with plagues of mosquitoes, extreme weather, suspicious law enforcement officers, tricky border crossings, and Jose s preference for Kanye West over the great outdoors, the journey becomes an odyssey of self-discovery. Acknowledging the erased native histories that Sevareid s prejudicial account could not perceive, and written in gritty, honest prose, "Canoeing with Jose" is a remarkable journey. "