The following review was posted on GoodReads on June 27.

I love Tony Hillerman’s Navajo police procedurals. A few years ago, I got to travel through Navajo country (Dinetah), which was amazing because for fans of Hillerman it’s like getting to visit Middle Earth. At the Navajo Cultural Center gift shop, they displayed many of Hillerman’s books, and this memoir. I picked it up, but it took me several years to get around to reading it.

Once I did, it went fast because this is a page-turner. Hillerman’s writing is understated and vivid (he started his writing career as a journalist).

It turns out that Hillerman is closer to the age of my grandparents. He grew up in the Dust Bowl during the Depression, fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Quite a lot of the book is devoted to his memories of France during WWII. He was then injured (legs, and eyes), spent some time in the hospital, and was sent home with crutches and an eye patch. He discovered that “Military Intelligence is usually neither.” He doesn’t dwell on it, but he had PTSD before that was a word. Nightmares, unable to keep his breakfast down. He recounts, in the 1950s, seeing a grisly car accident that made the police officer on the scene vomit, but Hillerman stood there unaffected.

Hillerman and his wife also adopted a number of children, and raised a big, happy family.

All of this is related with almost no self-pity, and it’s often very funny.

This book contained less about the Navajo than I expected. I guess Hillerman has poured his learning about them into his novels rather than into his memoir. But by the time the book reached his later years, when the Navajo became a big theme, I was not disappointed about this because the book itself had already been such an entertaining ride.

There is an appendix which lists a number of Hillerman’s books and sketches out the process that led to each one. They presented different kinds of problems that will be reassuringly familiar to other authors.

All in all, Tony Hillerman is a total mensch, a good egg, and it’s been an honor to get to know him.