What's the saddest story you have read?

[Aseity]

This book is the saddest I have ever read:

Information about BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE by Dee Brown

Synopsis

"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the 19th century. When it was first published in 1971, both reviewers and the reading public responded first with shock, then a deep sense of shame, calling it "shattering" (Washington Post), and "heartbreaking" (The NewYork Times). It went on to sell over a million copies in hardcover and four million copies in paperback, and was translated into 15 languages around the world.

Readers' Comments

Duty reading for all good U.S. citizens. "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" reveals the intelligence and courage of the great American indian chiefs and exposes the arrant deceit that was used to conquer them. Strongly recommended for the healing awareness that it brings to light and the lessons it teaches. It will touch your heart and mind in ways that transform one forever into a compassionate and tolerant human being.

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This book should be required reading and testing for U.S high school graduates. Certainly the extermination and displacement of the existing inhabitants of America was and continues to be the most significant event in the formation of the United States of America. If one does not know about these events one should not be allowed to graduate from high school to walk and prosper upon lands stained by brutal genocide.

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Every member of Congress and every politician who is tempted to criticize Amerindian Nations for such things as gambling or fishing rights should read this book. This powerful and comprehensive narrative is only the beginning of what was done in the name of Christian Manifest Destiny and war profiteering. The book reads like a fast paced novel hard to put down. The eloquence of this writer brings to crystal clarity the shame of much of our past and what reparations we owe the American Indian tribes. Unfortunately the mentality that made possible this boundless and barbaric manifestation of greed is repeated today in many of our policies toward Indians, other minorities, the poor, immigrants, the homeless, women and children.

Humanity does not seem to learn from its lessons. That's why this book, which contains dramatic stories enough to create a hundred great motion pictures, should be read by everyone so we may remember.
http://www.uneco.org/Bury_My_Heart.html

"I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard.

A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream ... the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead." Black Elk

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The Wounded Knee Massacre

December 29, 1890

An Introduction

by Lorie Liggett

The Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 (which was originally referred to by the United States army as the Battle of Wounded Knee -- a descriptive moniker that remains highly contested by the Native American community) is known as the event that ended the last of the Indian wars in America. As the year came to a close, the Seventh Cavalry of the United States Army brought an horrific end to the century-long U.S. government-Indian armed conflicts.

On the bone-chilling morning of December 29, devotees of the newly created Ghost Dance religion made a lengthy trek to the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota to seek protection from military apprehension. Members of the Miniconjou Sioux (Lakota) tribe led by Chief Big Foot and the Hunkpapa Sioux (Lakota) followers of the recently slain charismatic leader, Sitting Bull, attempted to escape arrest by fleeing south through the rugged terrain of the Badlands. There, on the snowy banks of Wounded Knee Creek (Cankpe Opi Wakpala), nearly 300 Lakota men, women, and children -- old and young -- were massacred in a highly charged, violent encounter with U.S. soldiers. The memory of that day still evokes passionate emotional and politicized responses from present-day Native Americans and their supporters. The Wounded Knee Massacre, according to scholars, symbolizes not only a culmination of a clash of cultures and the failure of governmental Indian policies, but also the end of the American frontier. Although it did bring an end to the Ghost Dance religion, it did not, however, represent the demise of the Lakota culture, which still thrives today.
http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/acs/1890s/woundedknee/WKIntro.html

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West > Customer Review #1:
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Amazing!

I am a huge fan of history but really am not a fan of reading. There are are only three books I have ever finished in my entire life, and this is one of them. Usually I get bored and toss them out, or they are just bad books all together. This book is amazing. I wanted a book about the history of the native americans and after reading reviews I felt this would be the best choice. Boy was I right! Much to the amazement of people around me, I couldnt put it down. It gives informative and sometimes heart wrenching accounts of the systematic extermination of the once great Native american nations. It really has taken me aback, I always knew we screwed the Native americans but I never realized it was this bad.
If you are a fan of history this is an absolute must read, and coming from one whom doesnt read a lot, that is saying something.

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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West > Customer Review #2:
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Read it to know.

If youre looking for a narrative of the struggles between the various native tribes of North America and european settlers, there probably isnt a better place to go.
I read this book on my way to Wounded Knee this summer. There was so much I didnt know about the expansion of the United States (and much I still dont know, Im sure) that my mouth gaped with horror throughout every chapter. The account of how the very laid back friendly tribes of California were mowed down by settlers without a second thought was particularly chilling. As the book itself says, no one remembers these tribes of California because they didnt put up a fight. They were simply swept aside.

Reading this book also filled gaps in the stories I had heard: Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, The Trail of Tears, the Lakota Uprising, Little Big Horn and of course Wounded Knee. All of these and other stories you probably havent heard before are put together in chronological order. It is a very comprehensive and readable book, but it does tell of an unreconcilable tragedy.

When I finished this book, one day before arriving at Wounded Knee, I was overcome with the feeling that europeans can never make up for what they did to the people who were here before them. What happened is forever unreconcilable. But self-flagellation and reproach will not undo anything, nor help either side as they currently stand. What most european descendants can do is read this book to know what happened, and then visit Wounded Knee to see where it all ended and observe. Only then will one be on the road to understanding, as inevitably incomplete as that understanding must be and remain.

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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West > Customer Review #3:
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It makes me angry.......

This book first of all has fantastic details and has the closest depictions of the Indian Wars during this time period. Ive read some of the other reviews and was disappointed to see certain comments made about how one-sided or biased this book was. It was from the Native Americans point of views but much of it was all too true. Sure it wasnt right that the Indians attacked settlements but then again, was it right for white settlers to come in and take over land that was already inhabited to begin with? They believed in Manifest Destiny and that they had the right to supposed "free land" and that because primitives just lived on it and because they didnt farm it, they really had no rights to it. A good "modern example" would be this, how would you like it if the government was to move you from your home in which you had settled in and you liked the area, but then they kept moving you from house to house until you were put in an area that had nothing. Especially, in a centralized location where your food supply was taken away and instead the government had purposely given you a rotten supply of food. Tepees back then were like the RVs of today. They were not permanent homes for the Indians, but they started using them because they were always getting pushed further out to the West out of their villages all over the U.S. When flight was no longer an option, sadly, the only thing left for the Natives was fight... I realize this book in some ways seem controversial but Ill put it as my college History teacher had mentioned, this book is the closest thing to the real deal.
http://www.historyamericas.com/Bury_My_Heart_at_Wounded_Knee_An_Indian_History_of_the_American_West_0805066691.html

[Smokering]

I like sad books, so I've got some choice here...

Probably the most viscerally gut-wrenchingly sad book I've read is Lois Lowry's 'A Summer to Die'. It's about a teenage misfit whose family spends an idyllic summer away--only it's so her beautiful sister, who is dying of cancer, can have some peace in her last months. I don't know how others would respond to the book--my mother didn't find it sad, but my sisters did, so I suspect we responded to it similarly because of the sister element. For me, at the time of reading a teenage misfit with a beautiful older sister (who hasn't died of cancer, for the record), it was especially poignant. The story is beautifully written; the plot I described is only part of the book, which talks around the subject of death by describing the younger sister's friendships with a few people in their new town, notably an old man and a young couple who are going to have a baby. It is a children's book, but it hasn't become tacky or cliched to me over the years; I still have exactly the same reaction reading it today.

On a slightly less visceral, but more intellectual level, CS Lewis' 'A Grief Observed' is hard to beat. If you haven't read it, it's his diary following the death of his wife Joy from cancer. Lewis didn't let his grief fuzzy his thinking or cloud his mind, so the prose in which he describes his reaction is jarringly precise and incisive. It's very Lewis, very analytical, and at the same time heartbreaking because it's genuine. I can't recommend the book highly enough; I've dealt with grief and reading the book, I kept thinking 'Yes; he's right'. He hits the nail on the head in the way only Lewis can; but nobody reading it could accuse him of intellectual detachment. I've never read anything so clinical, and at the same time so revealingly human.

[sylas]

Bringing matters down to sheer pointless black sadness; Leaving Las Vagas, by John O'Brien.

The story concerns an alcoholic who has lost everything and decides to commit suicide by drinking himself to death. He meets a prostitute, and they have a brief bitter sweet relationship before his death, which went pretty much as planned.

The novel was apparently inspired in part by the author's own severe alcoholism. It was also made into a film in 1995; but O'Brien himself committed suicide shortly before preproduction started. This was probably not a reaction to the film. It was the end of a long process of self-destruction.. His father describes the book as a long suicide note.

The sad hopelessness of the story is made only worse by the autobiographical parallels.

Sylas

[Solly]

Martin Gilbert, Holocaust. It's a detailed and harrowing account of the Shoah under Hitler. I don't think I have read a worse (not literarily) book, because the badness and sadness is unremitting. At least in Gulag Archipelago and such like, there was there attempt at preserving human dignity, whereas the Shoah was a determined eradication of it. Other genocides have perhaps been as bad, but have they been on such a scale, and so well documented?

On a fictional level, Tolkien's story of Tuor in the Children of Hurin is quite sad and dismal in its tragedy, even for him.

[Storico]

Katherine Patterson's Bridge to Terabithia is the saddest (and just about the best) children's story I've read. It follows a young girl and boy who become friends. Both of them are misfits and outcasts in different ways, not ever really fitting in. The two of them create a fantasy world in the middle of the forest they call Terabithia. The little girl, on her way to their special place one day, falls into the river and smashes her head on a rock, dying. The way the young boy has to deal with the death of his friend is truly something. I read it for the first time when I was 8 years old, and I've re-read it countless times since. (Just for the record, Disney's putting out a film that's apparently NOTHING like the book, so I don't plan on seeing it.)

Anthony Rapp's Without You: Life, Love and Loss is another incredibly sad, poignant book. He's one of the actors in the original Broadway cast of Rent, and in the book he talks about losing his mother after her long fight with cancer, about the cast losing the writer of Rent, Jon Larson, and about a good number of other subjects... but wow... I absolutely bawled reading it. It's an amazing book.

The Diary of Anne Frank also gets me every time, just because I know what happened to her and her family, and because when you read it, you get to know the little girl writing that diary -- and you want so badly for her to be able to grow up.

There are definitely others, but those 3 stand out in my mind today.

[tasman]

The saddest story I have ever seen filmed is aJapanese animated film! It's named Grave of the Fireflies.

It's based on the partially-autobiographical book of the same title by Akiyuki NOSAKA, whose little sister died of malnutrition shortly after the end of World War II.

The film is magnificently animated, and its because of the good reviews of the animation that I watched it. But the story was so beautifully told and so touching that it is what made me a fan.

The author and his little sister were left orphaned when his mother was burned and died shortly after the fire-bombing of their village.

He struggled and tried to save both of them. The little girl is so trusting and uncomplaining, and much of the film is devoted to their typical childlike behavior in the midst of terrible suffering.

[Rusty T]

I almost cried when Dumbledore died. . .

I'm sure there is a more profound work I could mention, but that was the one that popped in my mind.

rusty