Pemberley Remembered www.searchingforpemberley.weebly.com: October 2008

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Book Reviews

To the Ends of the Earth, The Last Journey of Lewis & Clark
http://www.frances-hunter.com/
In September 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, leaders of the Corps of Discovery, arrived in St. Louis after a grueling expedition that had lasted for more than two years. Hailed as heroes even before the true extent of their accomplishments was known, they were feted and honored by an eager nation forever pressing on its Western borders. To the Ends of the Earth, The Last Journey of Lewis & Clark begins in St. Louis three years after the celebrations had ended with Will Clark serving as Superintendent of Indian Affairs and Meriwether Lewis as the appointed Governor of the Louisiana Territory. But the intervening years have not been kind to Lewis. He is fending off people to whom he is indebted and, more importantly, rebutting criticism from his superiors in Washington that he has misused government funds, and the rumors are washed down with a liberal amount of whiskey and a healthy dose of laudanum.

Sensing his vulnerability, Lewis is approached by James Wilkinson, who had been caught up in the Aaron Burr conspiracy a few years earlier, and who is now an agent of Spain. He attempts to involve Lewis in another conspiracy which will put him, as well as William Clark, at the head of an empire carved out of the Louisiana Territory. Not only does Lewis not bite, but he heads off to Washington to defend his honor and to warn the government of Wilkinson’s actions. Because Lewis believes that Wilkinson has hired men to kill him in New Orleans, he heads to the Federal City by way of the primitive Natchez Trace on horseback with a belligerent freed slave and the priceless records from the Expedition.

No one can say exactly what happened on the Natchez Trace, but what is known is that Meriwether Lewis, the hero of the Corps of Discovery, died alone in a room rented from a Mrs. Grinder. Most historians believe that Lewis committed suicide. Because so few details are known, the author is free to create a story of conspiracy, pursuit, brutality, betrayal, and murder.

In most reviews, there is usually a “but” somewhere in the review: “It was a good book, but . . .” There are no “buts” with this book. The characters of Lewis, Clark, Wilkinson, and York, Clark’s slave, are richly detailed and wholly believable. You can sense what it was like to travel the Natchez Trace with its seedy inns, runaway slave communities, and robbers. Everything necessary to recreate the early part of the 19th Century in the Louisiana Territory is covered: climate, politics, environment, living conditions, and the evils of slavery, but all is woven into the compelling story of Meriwether Lewis, a man who had become a drunk, drug-addicted, persecuted wreck of a man, and his friend, William Clark, who could do nothing to save him.

On their journey to the Pacific, the Lewis and Clark Expedition vastly expanded our understanding of the diversity of the North American continent. Mountains and rivers were mapped, flora and fauna were recorded, details and sketches of the indigenous tribes encountered on the trip were brought back to Washington and greatly added to the collective knowledge of the United States. It is one of the great events of American history. But for Meriwether Lewis, it all ended in a rustic cabin on a territorial road in Tennessee, and To the Ends of the Earth is his story.

Confederate War Bonnet by Jack Shakely
http://www.theconfederatewarbonnet.com/
Jack Gaston, the son of a white mother and a Creek Indian, is as comfortable in the white world of Harvard University and St. Louis as he is in his father's print shop in the Creek Nation, but his heart is Creek. While attending Harvard, Jack learns that he has been elected to the House of Warriors. The honor comes in the third year of the Civil War when the Northern Creeks are fighting for the Union and the Southern Creeks, Jack's people, are fighting for the Confederacy. As Jack makes his way home, he tells his friend Jim Tom that, "When two elephants fight, regardless of which wins, the grass loses." Jack serves as an officer in the Confederate Army before being seriously wounded. Back in the Creek Nation, Jack and Jim Tom print a news sheet which contains the usual wartime propaganda. Because there is actually very little good news to report, Jack fills the empty space with the exploits of a Creek/Confederate warrior in the story of "The Confederate War Bonnet" which is modeled after the dime novels of the time. "The Confederate War Bonnet" is read by both armies, and the imaginary hero becomes so real in the eyes of the Union soldiers that he ends up with a price on his head. This book explains why so many Indians chose to fight with the Confederates. Twenty years earlier, Federal soldiers had forcibly removed the Five Civilized Tribes from their homes in the South. Thousands died on the Trail of Tears while walking to their new home in Oklahoma. So it is not that the Creeks are fighting “for” the Confederacy but “against” the Federals.

Throughout the novel, we learn about Jack Gaston who maintained his dignity while fighting for a lost cause, provided for his people who were on the verge of starvation, and wrote letters to leaders in Washington asking that the Creeks be recognized as a sovereign nation. This last service landed him in a Federal prison on Governor's Island in New York. Jack Shakely, who is of Creek descent, has no axe to grind, and his portrayal of Jack Gaston shows that. The story is a positive one told with grace and humor, but it also strikes the right chord when the hardships of war descend upon the Creek Nation. This book is an important re-creation of events which occurred in a theater of war that few people know or care about. But they should care because this is where the grass lost.

High Spirits by Dianne Salerni
http://www.highspiritsbook.com/
High Spirits is the story of Maggie and Kate Fox from Hydesville, New York, early members of the Spiritualist movement. Their first foray into the realm of Spiritualism was accidental—a prank played upon an annoying relation. However, the contrivance was so successful “that they extended the prank to include parents and their neighbors until deception became their way of life.” The two young sisters, barely in their teens and guided by their business savvy older sister, succeeded in convincing people that they were able to communicate with spirits who had passed to the other side by rapping noises created by the cracking sounds of their knees, ankles, and toes.

The Spiritualist movement grew in the fertile ground of Upstate New York which was known as the “burned-over district” because so many revivals had been held there in the 1820s. This area was also home to Mormon Joseph Smith, William Miller of the Seventh Day Adventists, and the Utopian Oneida community. The girls, especially Kate, came to see their séances as a way of providing comfort to grieving relatives by reassuring them that their loved ones were at peace in the afterlife.

The story is focused on the middle sister, Maggie, who falls in love with the explorer, Elisha Kent Kane, who is aware that the Fox sisters’ claim to communicate with the dead is a hoax. Before leaving on a rescue mission to the Arctic, Kane extracts a pledge from Maggie that she must give up her rapping, dangling the promise of a wedding before her. She agrees and keeps her eyes on the horizon waiting for her explorer to return.

Dianne Salerni is masterful in recreating the environment that allowed Spiritualism to flourish. Her detailed portraits of the Fox sisters allow modern readers to understand how these young women were able to pull the wool over the eyes of so many, including author James Fenimore Cooper, editor Horace Greeley, and the tragic wife of President Franklin Pierce who had seen her only surviving child crushed in a train accident. Her understanding of the time in which the Fox sisters lived as well as in-depth knowledge of this slice of American history enables her to write this engrossing and compelling story. Beautifully written, with each chapter pulling you in to the lives of the Fox sisters, High Spirits reveals much, not only about mid-19th Century America, but our own century and the importance religion plays in today’s political debate.

The Pict by Jack Dixon
http://www.jdixon.net/id47.html
“The battle had been raging for almost an hour before the sun broke the eastern horizon. The new light of the rising sun flashed across Cruithne’s axe . . .”

Right out of the gate, the book begins with maces and battle axes flying as the Scythians, ancestors of the Picts, an ancient tribe of Scotland, fight the latest of many battles against the hordes pressing in on them from the eastern steppes of Eurasia. Guided by their warrior leader, Cruithne, the Scythians retreat to the west until they arrive at a northern sea where they must take to the water or submit. Thus begins the epic voyage that will eventually take the refugees to the far north of Caledonia.

For a thousand years, a loose confederation of tribes, each with its own leader, inhabited the Highlands, occasionally joining forces to defeat a common enemy. But their peaceful co-existence ended when the Romans, who had defeated the Britannic tribes to the south, began to march north toward Caledonia. After the massacre of an entire village of the Selgovaii by the Romans, the Pictish tribes once again come together to fight off the legions sent from Rome to conquer them. Calach, a young warrior who possesses the courage and spirit of Cruithne, is chosen as their leader. Outnumbered by the Romans by ten to one, Calach understands that it is only by waging guerilla warfare that the Romans can be defeated.

Other than one major battle, little is known of the Picts’ war against Rome except that these primitive people were able to stop the advance of the seasoned and battle-tested Roman legions. Jack Dixon creates a surreal landscape where the eerie sounds of a hundred pipes precede the Picts’ attacks on a Roman camp, and phantoms tattooed with demonic symbols emerge silently out of the night to kill their sleeping enemy. But the Romans didn’t expand their empire by lying down and playing dead, and Calach pays a personal price in a battle to finish off the Romans.

The momentum of the story builds with each chapter as the warriors arise from the mists of their hills and valleys to fight, retreat, regroup, and fight again in their determination to keep the Romans from making any further incursions into their ancient lands.

Over the centuries, the Picts ceased to exist as a separate people, and together with their Celtic neighbors, became the ancestors of today’s Scots. Because of the thin historical record and few artifacts yielded by archeological digs, Jack Dixon must spin a tale from his own understanding of the times, the landscape of the Highlands, and the other inhabitants of Scotland who did leave a record. In this he was successful. The sounds of the bodhran drums pulse throughout the book, leaving the reader wanting to know more about the warriors who fought against the might of the greatest empire on earth and prevailed.

Scarecrow in Gray by Barry Yelton
http://scarecrowsdreams.blogspot.com/2007/10/still-another-review-of-scarecrow-in.html
Francis Marion Yelton did not go off to war. The war reached into the distant mountains of North Carolina, carrying him away from his family and farm into the maelstrom of the last desperate months of the Civil War. The author, a descendant of Francis Yelton, a private in a Confederate regiment, has expanded on family lore to tell the story of a man who probably realized the war was lost even before he arrived in training camp. From the filth and tension of an Army camp to the terrors of Petersburg and the long hard road to Appomattox Courthouse, Barry Yelton recreates with measured prose the desperate battles of the closing months before the Confederate surrender in April 1865. In the midst of unspeakable horrors, he keeps his character tethered to a saner world by frequent references to the natural beauty around him: “The night it was a vast obsidian dome infused with sparkling points of light.” But his beautiful prose is not at the expense of detailed and horrific descriptions of the battlefield where brave but outnumbered Confederates await the next Yankee onslaught. “Then we heard it, the low roar of the blue ocean, coming out of the woods, then the pounding of thousands of horses’ hooves.” Scarecrow in Gray is reminiscent of Cold Mountain and The Black Flower and is a compelling tale of one man’s attempt to do his duty while preserving his humanity.

Pemberley Remembered www.searchingforpemberley.weebly.com

Thursday, October 2, 2008

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