Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

How America lost the west from 1865 to 1890.

Yes, lost it.  For the western United States could have been a very different country for today's Americans to admire and fall in love with, and the movies I and my father's generation grew up with would not have centered on the destruction of a native people, or the misinformation of their savagery.  After all, it was the Spanish conquistadors who taught Native Americans to scalp other humans. And it was the British of Canada who first paid their indian mercenaries for scalps of any age American in the Revolutionary War.

Dee Brown's book needs no applause from me.  He has earned every reviewers praise since first published in 1970. This is, however, not an action novel, though there is plenty of action, tragedy, some comedy and even humor in it.  And romance too.

This is a solid book of historical literature, told from the side of those who could not write such a book for themselves.  But their voices, where recorded in life, are accurately heard throughout and the book has been ardently praised by members of every tribe in America.

So I close with a quote of Black Elk, Oglala Sioux Shaman, who is speaking in old age from his own lodge which overlooked the Wounded Knee Creek a couple of miles below the site of the 1890 massacre. He went to the site two days after the killing, after a blizzard had frozen the 300 or so bodies of the total 350 mostly women and children encamped under the Seventh Cavalry's cannon and repeating rifles.

"...something else died in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream..."

-Ken

Shadow Country

Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER

Peter Matthiessen's great American epic-Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone-was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision.

Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.

Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson's wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation."

Peter Matthiessen's lyrical and illuminating work in the Watson narrative has been praised highly by such contemporaries as Saul Bellow, William Styron, and W. S. Merwin. Joseph Heller said "I read it in great gulps, up each night later than I wanted to be, in my hungry impatience to find out more and more."

-FantasticFiction.com

 

Matthiessen's novel is LONG....900 pages!  The book is written in three parts: 

 

Part one is the story of E.J. Watson as told by a number of his acquaintances.

 

Part two is the story of Watson told through the eyes of Watson's son Lucius.

 

Part three is Watson's story as told by himself.

 

Because of this fact of multiple tellings through different eyes, it sometimes becomes redundant.

 

I would rate this book with three stars***.

-Mona

So Big

So Big by Edna Ferber

Heartwarming and hard home life of Chicago area vegetable farmers at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Tough families softened sometimes by the unexpected  interruptions of their lives.  Into such a world comes such an interruption. A 19 year old starry eyed new teacher.  Recently orphaned by her beloved and sometimes up, sometimes down professional gambler father she believes anything and everything is possible.  Spoiler alert... she never stops believing it.

Chicago grows up around her farm as she learns to grow with it.  Not into monetary wealth, but into real wealth.  The wealth of beauty, honor, REAL living. Not the pretend world of Chicago's noveau riche.

I rarely pick up a book with as much human interest as this one.  Especially a novel with no direct historical connection.  But this is a Pulitzer winner, and it's about a part of the world I once new in a capitalistic way. However I can very much recommend this book to anyone seeking to discover examples of REAL living in the world of super capitalist Chicago before the word 'entrepreneur' became popular.

If you read a few pages and think it's too sappy, or simple Chick-Lit, please read further. Spoiler alert 2... I think you'll find it hard to put down after the school marm takes on every 'this is how we've always done it' farmer, including her young husband and ends up being the... but for that, you'll have to read it for yourself.

4 stars out of 5 from this lover of action and historical drama ain't bad. ****
-Ken