Florida Man (And Woman) History, Part 4

     I am always on the lookout for books about Florida and its history in order to learn more about my new home state.  Here are my reviews of the three latest reads.

    The State You're in: Florida Men, Women, and Other Wildlife is the latest book by native Floridian and journalist, Craig Pittman, the author of Cat Tale  and Oh, Florida! ,among others. Pittman has collected fifty-one of the articles he's written over his thirty year career writing for the Tampa Bay Times and other publications. He is particularly interested in Florida's history and environmental issues, but he has a knack for finding the absurd, the unusual, and the humorous in Florida and turning it into witty, interesting insights into the culture of his home state. He covers a wide range of topics, from professional mermaids to python and bear hunts to the Florida scams of "Colonel" Tom Parker, Elvis Presley's infamous manager. There are heroes and villains in the stories and lots of people, who may seem ordinary on the surface but are extraordinary underneath. Not all of his stories are for laughs, his stories about crime and criminals are as equally moving as his lighter stories are funny. But wait, there's more: one of my favorite pieces is one of the shortest, Pittman's musing on the deep, dark secret hidden by Mike and Carol Brady on The Brady Bunch.  (No, not that one) Pittman's wit and wordplay stand out, and he is a gifted observer of the human condition. The book is a quick read, and you'll be entertained and intrigued on every page. (Read Craig's 7 Questions with us here https://chattingwiththehistocrats.blogspot.com/2021/05/7-questions-with-florida-author-craig.html )

    The Seminole Wars: America's Longest Indian Conflict by John and Mary Lou Missall is the book I've been looking for  since moving to Florida. It's a relatively brief, but thorough, history of the three Seminole Wars fought between 1817 and 1858. A lot of Americans don't realize that the Seminole Wars had a huge impact on America's history in the 19th century.  Because of time and curriculum constraints, I never really spent much time on the Seminole Wars when I taught, and that's a shame. The whole American story unfolded in the Florida territory, then state. White pioneer settlers moved into dangerous, often inhospitable territory, displacing and threatening that territories native inhabitants.  Florida also was a hotspot for the debate over slaver because, for decades, enslaved African-Americans fled south from Georgia and the Carolinas into Florida, well before the more famous Underground Railroad took escaped slaves north. The U.S. army fought three wars with the Seminoles, both to protect the white pioneers and to retrieve the runaway slaves and return the "property" to their masters. Not only were the Seminole Wars the longest Indian conflict in U.S. history, but they also represented America's first defeat; the Seminoles never signed an official peace treaty with the government. The government simply gave up, making the Seminole the only "unconquered" Indian tribe. The Missalls' book is a thorough and quite readable history of the not only the wars, but also the bigger picture - that is, how the wars reflected and affected the country's issues and struggles as a whole. The Missals have also written several historical fiction novels, set during the wars, that I am tempted to read.

        Florida by Lauren Groff has been out for a couple of years, and it garnered a lot of attention, including becoming a National Book Award Finalist, and I'd picked it up a few times before finally reading it. A couple of caveats before I continue:  I mostly read nonfiction (history) and a little historical fiction; and I rarely read short stories. Since high school, in fact, I have probably only read a handful of short story collections. Florida is a collection of stories about Florida, even though they are not all set in Florida. And I just couldn't like it, even though I finished it. I enjoyed Groff's writing style, full of vivid imagery, but that wasn't enough.  I found the characters whiny, uninteresting, and unlikable. Worse , the stories have no point. They just peter out, with no climax, no conflict, no resolution. I'm wondering if that's just part of modern fiction. Any one of the dozens of short stories I read in high school literature classes is leagues better than these. I can't understand the lavish praise heaped on this book, and I can't recommend it. 

Books About Books

     You know you're a reader if you read books about books, but, surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be a subgenre name for this sub- or sub-subgenre, at least that I could find.  Does bibliophilia work? I don't know, but there are a lot of books that fit.

    The most recent book that fits here is Americanon, by Jess McHugh, published in June 2021. In Americanon, McHugh looks at thirteen nonfiction books that  had huge impacts on America and Americans. These books sold hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies, and many of them are still published in updated versions decades or centuries after their first publication.  With each book, she goes into detail about their origin, their authors and their impact.  She includes books like The Old Farmers Almanac, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, McGuffey's Readers, Noah Webster's Dictionary and spellers, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Emily Post's Etiquette.  These books all are self-help books, meant to make better Americans of their readers. In fact, they are very nationalistic. For example, Webster's Dictionary and spellers and McGuffey's Readers  were created in order to standardize the language and education of Americans of different regions with different cultural backgrounds, creating a new American culture and imparting moral lessons along the way. These books had a massive impact on America; updated versions are still published. In fact, I was surprised to learn that some homeschoolers still use McGuffey's Readers. I learned a lot from this book, and it was very entertaining.

    The other "books about books" titles that I list here are pretty self-explanatory, but I do want to talk about a couple of other titles. One is Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry. McMurtry was one of my favorite American novelists, known especially for westerns like Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo, and Comanche Moon, and he just passed away in March of 2021.  Books is about his personal journey as a reader and then as a writer. He writes about growing up in his "bookless" hometown of Archer City, Texas, and his transition from cowboy to reader to writer to "bookman," eventually opening several bookstores specializing in rare and collectable books. It's a very entertaining read.

    Finally, a great source of "books about books" is the Great Sources  catalog. Simply search for "books," and you'll find numerous lectures about books  that have had a great influence on world or American history. You can find courses on their website and on Audible. 

Pre-Columbian Reads

     While September 15 - October 15 is celebrated as "Hispanic Heritage Month," let's take a moment and look at some great books for those interested in the cultures found in the Latin America before Columbus claimed the Americas for Spain. 

    Jungle of Stone is the story of two intrepid adventurers in the 19th century, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood, who, in 1839, heard rumors of stone cities mired in the rainforests of Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. They decided to explore the area themselves. Their expedition transformed the way the world saw history. Before, very few academics believed that any kind of true "civilization" existed in the Americas before Spanish arrival, that the indigenous populations were savage, universally lacking in intelligence and sophistication. When Stephens and Catherwood published their "discoveries," all that began to change. It became clear that Mayan cities had existed and developed at the same time as the ancient Greeks and Romans, that Mayans were, in fact, quite sophisticated, and that Mayan cities had declined well before Spanish arrival. William Carlsen's book recounts all the hardships that the two men had to endure in their quest and brings their contributions into the light.

    The Lost City of Z is a real adventure story that rivals anything Hollywood could come up with; in fact, it was made into a Hollywood movie a few years ago. Grann tells the story of British adventurer, Percy Fawcett, and his visit for what he called the "City of Z." While Fawcett hoped and believed that "Z" could have been the inspiration for the legendary golden city of El Dorado that Spanish conquistadors sought in vain.  However, when he set out on an expedition to discover "Z" in 1925, none of his colleagues believed that he would find anything; they were universally under the impression that there had never been a city or large population center in the Amazon jungle, that there was no way the Amazon Indians had the ability or resources to build a city. Fawcett, and his son, unfortunately disappeared without a trace. Several expeditions attempted to trace their footsteps over the next decade, but nothing was found to fully explain what happened. 

    Brazilian Adventure is one of the old books in my collection, published in 1933, and I picked it up somewhere years before Grann even started his research. It happens to be the story of one of those expeditions that went out in search of Fawcett.  It's quite a read itself, in fact still in print and available on Amazon and in other places.

    Maybe the most amazing part of the Fawcett - Z story is that 75 or so years later, archaeologists began using 21st century tools and technology to discover evidence that there were actually cities in the Amazon, and that the indigenous population of the region was, in fact, quite large in the past,

    Douglas Preston, a journalist and best-selling author of fiction and nonfiction, had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in 2012to accompany an expedition into the jungles of Honduras in search of  the ruins of a city called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God.  His book is a stunning eyewitness accounts of one of the greatest archaeological discoveries made in the Americas, because the expedition did, n fact, discover the ruins of what was once a large city.

    The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes tells the story of a Brazilian expedition that sets out to learn about the "Arrow People," an Amazonian tribe that had never had contact with the outside world. Yes, even in the 21st century, there are some uncontacted groups. Of course, as the outside world encroaches deeper and deeper into their world, these groups may be in danger of extinction, or at least exploitation. Wallace tells the story of the dangers facing the expedition, but he also reveals the real conflict within the ranks of the "experts": do they risk contact and the dangers that may bring to the Arrow People? It is an interesting read.

    The Fifth Sun is very new book, published in 2020, and it brings a whole new perspective to the history of the Aztecs, one based solely on the texts written by the Aztecs themselves.  I haven't read this yet, but it has gotten some very positive reviews and has found its way on my to-be-read list.