Broken: A Love Story

At a dusty corral on the Wind River Indian Reservation, she met Stanford Addison, a Northern Arapaho who seemed to transform everything around him. He gentled horses rather than breaking them by force. It was said that he could heal people of everything from cancer to bipolar disorder. He did all this from a wheelchair; he had been a quadriplegic for more than twenty more >>

At a dusty corral on the Wind River Indian Reservation, she met Stanford Addison, a Northern Arapaho who seemed to transform everything around him. He gentled horses rather than breaking them by force. It was said that he could heal people of everything from cancer to bipolar disorder. He did all this from a wheelchair; he had been a quadriplegic for more than twenty years.

Intrigued, Lisa sat at Stanford's kitchen table and watched. She saw neighbors from the reservation and visitors from as far away as Holland bump up the dirt road to his battered modular home, seeking guidance and healing for what had broken in their lives. She followed him into the sweat lodge -- a framework of willow limbs covered with quilts -- where he used prayer and heat to shrink tumors and soothe agitated souls. Standing on his sun-blasted porch, pit bulls padding past her, she felt the vibration from thundering bands of Arabian horses that Stanford's young nephews brought to the ring to train.

And she listened to his story. Stanford spent his teenage years busting broncs, seducing girls, and dealing drugs. At twenty, he left the house for another night of partying. By morning, a violent accident had robbed him of his physical prowess and left in its place unwelcome spiritual powers -- an exchange so shocking that Stanford spent several years trying to kill himself. But eventually he surrendered to his new life and mysterious gifts.

Over the years Lisa was a frequent visitor to Stanford's place, the reservation and its people worked on her, exposing and healing the places where she, too, was broken.

Brokenentwines her story with Stanford's, exploring powerful spirits, material poverty, spiritual wealth, friendship, violence, confusion, death, and above all else,"a love that comes before and after and above and below romantic love."?Jones writes beautifully about the natural world, knows how to bring the people she encounters alive on the page and tells a gutsy, moving story about a significant passage in her own life.?

ýýýýý--The Washington Post

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This is a heartfelt journey into the fears and yearnings of a woman and the unexpected first she receives from an indigenous culture, profoundly marginalized. A beatify of a tale set in the hard glare of a windswept Wyoming plain.?

--Susan Richards, author ofChosen By a HorseandForever

The wind started as I neared the border. It punched through the open car window. I licked my lips and watched Colorado's piney foothills flatten out into yellow undulations of Wyoming prairie, free of every visible life-form except sagebrush, a pair of crows cruising the air currents, and scattered antelope. Although they evolved here, antelope have always struck me as exotic, with their clean white markings and thimble hooves, their preference for rocks over vegetation, wind over shelter,Wyoming over Colorado.

I was nervous. Smithsonian magazine was sending me to the Wind River Indian Reservation to write a profile of Stanford Addison, a quadriplegic Northern Arapaho reputed to be able to talk rank beginners through the process of breaking horses. I had approached the magazine's editors with the story idea, but now that I had the assignment, I wasn't sure I could pull it off. I was terrified of horses, and worse, in seventeen years of working as a journalist in the rural West -- seventeen years spent winning the trust of police chiefs and geneticists and forest rangers and heroin addicts -- I had never won the trust or friendship of a single Native << less