Sundance the Robert Sundance Story

This powerful and disturbing book demonstrates that one man can change the system. Robert Sundance (1927-93), a Lakota from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, was introduced to alcohol at an early age. After spending nearly twenty-five years on skid rows across the American West, Sundance decided to reform the system that incarcerated homeless street alcoholics. His efforts led to radical reform of the treatment of public inebriates and helped create the process of alcoholic rehabilitation.

"A kind of Lower Depths set on the Northern Plains."—Thomas McGuane

"Describes his harrowing odyssey through bars, whorehouses, alleys and jails all over the West. . . . Sundance pulls no punches. He tells of the wino's life—its casual violence, its ceaseless wandering, the terrors of delirium tremens—in blunt, convincing terms. . . . No saint, he showed that even an ordinary person can enlist his flaws in the service of an astonishing empowerment."—Los Angeles Times