Professor Joe Starita’s latest book ‘A Warrior of the People’ available for preorder

Thursday, June 30, 2016 - 9:30pm

University of Nebraska–Lincoln College of Journalism & Mass Communications professor Joe Starita’s latest book, “A Warrior of the People,” is now available for preorder and will be released November 2016.

“A Warrior of the People” tells the story of Susan La Flesche, the first Native American doctor in United States history. La Flesche became a doctor 31 years before women could vote and 35 years before Native Americans could become U.S. citizens.

It is the biography of a Native American woman who fought ethnic, racial and gender prejudice in order to dedicate her life to using a unique bicultural identity to improve the lives of her people.

“This is a story about finding the universal in the specific,” Starita said. “It is a story about an Indian girl born in a buffalo hide tipi in the waning weeks of the Civil War who – through sheer will, determination and an inextinguishable love for her people – managed to get into the only female medical school in the world and graduated as the valedictorian in her class. Along the way, it is a story that tells us a great deal about Native history, American history and, ultimately, about who we are as a people. In the end, it is a story about the triumph of the human spirit.”

This is Starita’s third book. He’s also the author of “The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge – A Lakota Odyssey,” which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and “‘I am Man’: Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice,” which was a One Book-One Lincoln winner for 2011 and One Book-One Nebraska winner for 2012.

Starita has received several awards for his work with the Native American community, including the Leo Reano Award, a national civil rights award from the National Education Association, and the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution History Award Medal.

Before joining the journalism faculty in 2000, Starita spent 13 years at the Miami Herald and served as the paper’s New York bureau chief from 1983-1987. He also spent four years on the Herald’s Investigations Team, where he specialized in stories exposing unethical doctors and lawyers. One of those stories, an article examining how impoverished and illiterate Haitians were being used to extort insurance companies into settling bogus auto claims, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in local reporting.

“A Warrior of the People” is now available for preorder at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, iBooks, AbeBooks.com and IndieBound.org

Joe Starita