Publisher's Synopsis
Redrock wilderness. Isolation. Faith. Politics. Desperation. In the shadow of Utah's remote and sacred Bears Ears buttes unfolds a contemporary drama of conflict both internal and external.Nearing the end of his final term, President Barack Obama established a new national monument in a remote section of the Colorado Plateau known for centuries to five tribes of Native American peoples as 'the Bears Ears.' Considered one of the most archeologically rich and culturally significant landscapes in the world, many felt it was long overdue for federal protection. Less than one year later, incoming President Donald Trump gutted the Monument in both size and management priority, creating what many have called ground-zero in a veritable war zone over environmental values, and perhaps the single greatest affront to public land policy in modern American history.Against this backdrop, what begins as a story about one man's search for his young son lost in the labyrinthine redrock canyons of southern Utah soon evolves into an intimate study of pride and prejudice, pitting its central characters against time, the elements, and themselves in a moving tale exploring themes of heritage (Mormon and Navajo), community, alienation, personal religious faith, and personal worth. Moving, evocative literary fiction about place, and about one's place within it, Takes His Music with Him is ultimately a story about honor, devotion, and change.After young Truman Eisenberg is left an orphan in post-World War II Germany, he immigrates alone to America, where he eventually falls in love with Debora Lauer, the Austrian-American daughter of his "sponsors." Truman and Debora soon convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and move to join the community of "the Saints" in the West; specifically, the redrock desert town of Blanding, Utah. For more than 30 years they rejoice in the landscape but feel socially marginalized amidst the provincial paradigms of that small, rural community. But their greatest wound is the inability to have a child... until the day Truman discovers a two-month-old infant swaddled ceremoniously and left to die in the high branches of a tree. After great effort and a long wait, Truman and Debora are allowed to adopt that orphaned child, a Navajo boy they name Henry; a boy they love very much. But Henry lives mostly inside his own head, all too aware of his unfortunate beginnings, awash in the fear that he is of no present worth to anyone, but determined to find out if that is true or to die trying. Shortly after his 13th birthday he leaves Truman and Debora a note and departs on foot for a Vision Quest somewhere deep in the slot canyons east of the sacred Bears Ears buttes, the sacred Ná honidzo of his blood ancestors whom he never knew. At 69 years old, riding a horse one-third that age, Truman goes after him.This is the story of that rescue.
