O, PIoneers!

     Real history often is, by definition, pioneer history. I mean, we don't usually remember runners-up or second place finishers. For whatever reason, the American spirit seems to be linked to the pioneer spirit. These books tell the stories of pioneers.

    Everybody of a certain age knows the name Daniel Boone from their childhood; he's one of the American pioneers who has been mythologized. Even before his death, his name was known far and wide, and stories were told of him as a trailblazer, literally leading the first white settlers into what is now Kentucky, and Indian fighter. He's been the subject of plays, books, and tv shows. Authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin's recently published Blood and Treasure endeavors to tell the full story of the man behind the legend.  It's a page-turner for sure; Boone's life may have been even more thrilling than portrayed in popular culture. I learned a lot about Boone, and I learned even more about the Native Americans of that region and the politics within their tribes and amongst the tribes, very complicated from the beginning but when you throw in the French, British, and Americans, everything becomes even more complicated. And Daniel Boone was in the middle of all of this. I recommend this book. 

    Unlike Daniel Boone, most Americans have probably never heard of Eliza Lucas, the woman credited with making indigo a viable cash crop on South Carolina plantations in the 18th century. The Indigo Girl  is a work of historical fiction that is based on a lot of historical research, including Lucas' own letters. In 1739, Lucas' father leaves his family in search of military glory for himself, leaving 16-year old Eliza in charge of running three South Carolina plantations. While her mother works hard to get her married to a man who will save the family fortune, Lucas has no desire to marry. She throws herself headfirst into the problems of the plantation, and she decides to grow indigo (used for making indigo dye), a valuable cash crop that had not been successfully grown in the colonies. After many setbacks and several years, she succeeds, and indigo becomes a valuable cash crop on the South Carolina and Georgia coast. ( A lot of people don't realize that cotton didn't become a hugely successful cash crop until after 1800 and the invention of the cotton gin. Rice, indigo, and tobacco were the most important southern crops.)

    Eugene Bullard was the son of a formerly enslaved man and an indigenous Creek woman born into a life of sharecropping in southwest Georgia in 1895. Very few avenues were open to him, and most of his contemporaries found themselves trapped in the endless cycle of sharecropping life in Jim Crow Georgia. Bullard would ever be satisfied in that life, however. He left home at age 11, eventually making his way to Europe where he became a boxer and a stage performer. Settling in Paris, he continued as a boxer and worked in various nightclubs. Then World War I broke out, and Bullard enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. One thing led to another, and he soon found himself in pilot training, and he became the first black American military pilot in history, but he flew for the French army, not the American. After the war, he resumed the Parisian nightclub life, managing clubs at the height of the jazz age.  It's a great story.

    Most recently, I've finished Murder at the Mission. It's the story of the first white American missionaries in the Oregon territory, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman. The Whitmans built a mission and lived among the Cayuse Indians for a few years before they were killed. Their killing became a martyrdom in American history, particularly in the history of the Pacific Northwest. Murder  is an excellent account of the Whitmans' lives and deaths, but that's not really the author's main purpose. The book's subject is really the power of myth-making in American history, the story of how the Whitmans' lives and deaths were manipulated by others in order to further their own personal and professional lives and fortunes. It's an excellent study of how history can be be manufactured and manipulated, with the effects lasting for generations.

The Unfinished

     I think many, if not most, readers feel the same way: not finishing a book is a failure. At least, I have always felt that way, but maybe I'm wrong. I've just recently discovered that there's a rule about quitting. the "rule of 50", stated by author and librarian Nancy Pearl, a contributed on NPR's Morning Edition. "If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit."

    Maybe I should give it a try. There have been some books in the last year that I have not finished, after reading much more than the rule says, including some highly acclaimed books published recently. And who knows? Maybe they include books that other readers would thoroughly enjoy. Me, not so much, and I have dozens of other books to get to. 

    

    The first one really hurts: Administrations of Lunacy, the history of Georgia's state mental institution, Central State Hospital, built in Milledgeville in the mid 1800s, a part of the asylum movement inspired by crusading reformer Dorothea Dix. I'm a native Georgian, and I lived and taught in Milledgeville for several years, and I find the institution's history fascinating, but I can't finish this book. It's thorough and well researched, but it's become too clinical, pun intended, almost like going through a box of records in an archive. 

    How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a first novel for C. Pam Zhang, and it won a long list of accolades. It's set during the California gold rush and focuses on the story of two Chinese sisters who are orphaned and embark on a journey to make a place for themselves.  This book started dragging for me early on, one calamity after another. The breaking point came when it was revealed that every single hardship and calamity suffered by the girls and their parents would have been prevented if the older sister hadn't done one incredibly stupid thing. Everything was her fault.

    The Office of Historical Corrections.   I was deceived. Or maybe I just should have read the reviews and blurbs more closely. The title and what I read about the book implied that the short stories contained within had some connection or new insights into history or connection to history. Wrong. It's really just a collection of stories about incredibly sad and unlikable women with miserable lives and relationships. Maybe it got better; I only made it through 3 stories.

    I like Taylor Brown. I really do. I really enjoyed The River of Kings, although it did take me a while.  However, I started Gods of Howl Mountain and never finished it. Then, I saw the buzz for Pride of Eden and thought I'd give it a try. Once again, I was plunged into misery. It's the story of a man running an animal refuge in coastal Georgia. My problem with the book is that every single human and animal in the book is so physically and psychologically damaged. Every page seems to be a different trauma.

    Finally, Ghost Dancer, a Howard Moon Deer mystery, book 1, the story of a Native American detective solving murders in the west. But wait, does that sound familiar. Yeah, after reading all of Tony Hillerman's Leaphorn mystery series, Ghost Dancer was a very pale attempted imitation.

 

World War II

     As we approach the 76th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II, I thought it was time to recommend a few books published recently that you might be interested in.

    Countdown 1945 by Chris Wallace and Mitch Weiss tells the story of the Manhattan Project, specifically the 116 days between the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the bombing of Hiroshima. Readers learn about the scientists involved in the project and the men who flew the Enola Gay  to Hiroshima, but they also learn about the women who worked at the top secret Oak Ridge facility and people on the ground in Hiroshima who survived the blast. At 320 pages, it is a relatively quick read, and it's a page-turner.

    The Volunteer  is one of those books that I love - a true story that I had never heard before. It also proves that truth is stranger than fiction, and it's begging to be made into a film. The Volunteer was Witold Pilecki, a Polish reserve army officer who joined the Polish resistance when Germany and the USSR invaded Poland. After Poland's surrender, he went underground. When stories of the deportations of thousands of people to the labor camp of Auschwitz - before it was transformed into a death camp, it was decided to try to sneak an informant into the camp, one who could smuggle out accurate and detailed descriptions of what went on there. The idea was to get the information to the Allied leaders in order to goad them into action on Poland's behalf. Unbelievably, Pilecki volunteered to be that informant. He allowed himself to be swept up in one of the Nazi mass arrests, and he was sent to Auschwitz as a prisoner. On his first day, he witnessed the murders of at least a dozen men, and this only intensified his determination. Within weeks, he had assembled an underground of a thousand prisoners, including some kapos, the prisoners who were given positions of authority over their fellow prisoners. He did as much as he could to gather information, including the numbers and names of the murdered, and he successfully smuggled that information out of the camp. He did his job, more than his job, but the people above him did nothing with it. Eventually, Pilecki escaped the camp, only to find his homeland under the control of the Soviets and the Polish communists. In the last chapters, the reader learns why Pilecki's story was unknown for decades.

    Ensnared in the Wolf's Lair is a Young Adult book, for readers aged 10 and up. It begins with a summary of Hitler's rise to power, and then goes into the Valkyrie plot against him in 1944. A group of German military officers entered into a conspiracy with several German resistance groups to assassinate Hitler and negotiate a surrender with the Western Allies. After several failed assassination attempts, officer Claus von Stauffenberg was charged with planting a bomb in a meeting room, during a meeting with Hitler and other top officials. The plan failed when someone innocently moved the briefcase containing the bomb, and the effects of the blast were dampened by the heavy table the bomb was under. Hitler survived, and the plot unraveled. Stauffenberg was executed along with several others. However Nazi retribution didn't stop there. Over the following weeks, 7,000 people were arrested, and nearly 5,000 were executed. Sippenhaft (blood guilt) laws were invoked; this meant that family members of those arrested shared the guilt of their relatives. This book is about what happened to the children of the conspirators and accused conspirators. (Ann Bausum, the author was a subject of 7 Questions recently https://chattingwiththehistocrats.blogspot.com/2021/04/7-questions-with-author-of-ensnared-in.html )

    I've already written a lot about Erik Larson's The Splendid and the Vile, but I have to include it here. I think it's Larson's best work. It is the story of England's "darkest hour," 1940-1941, the year that Winston Churchill ascended to the office of Prime Minister, and the year that saw the UK  teetering on the edge of surrender to Germany, the time of constant devastating bombing by the Luftwaffe and the miraculous evacuation of hundreds of thousands of trapped British troops from Dunkirk. It's a must-read for those interested in WWII or Winston Churchill.