Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony

Lee Miller's title pretty much says it all. Miller sets out to understand how an entire colony could have disappeared, the questions that his intrigued generations of historians, archaeologists, and others.

Does she solve the mystery? I actually have no idea. I tried so hard to finish this book. I am deeply interested in history and have dragged my husband hither-and-yon to dozens of sites of questionable (or major) historical significance. So it wasn't for a lack of interest in the topics. Mostly it was the italics. Miller tells her readers early that she will be using italics to denote any material that is pulled verbatim from an original source. Unfortunately, it meant many of her sentences read something like this. I simply found it too distracting.

Perhaps the more serious charge, though, is that she's written the book in a way that, to me, felt forced. She has tried to heighten the suspense, the drama, the mystery, when a more traditional approach would have been more effective.

Final verdict: Did not finish.

Reliance, Illinois

Mary Volmer's Reliance, Illinois is a mostly forgettable novel. Thirteen-year-old Madelyn Branch (defining feature: a massive port wine stain covering half of her body), moves to Reliance with her mother, Rebecca, who for reasons of establishing a marriageable reputation, is transformed into Madelyn's elder sister. (I should add here that the novel is set in 1874.) Madelyn is permitted, just, to reside with the new Mr. and Mrs. Dryfus, but wounded by her mother's lies, Madelyn soon accepts a position with the mysterious Miss Rose, whose forays into women's suffrage are fodder for scandal.

I didn't care much about the characters or most of the plot. I found the storyline baffling at times - I never did fully understand the scandal around the mayoral election - and it felt like the story often flitted between characters and events without much continuity. Samuel Clemens made a guest appearance - the single memorable event in the book, which I'll get to in a moment - but then disappears as quickly and unexpectedly as he arrived. I've rarely disagreed more with the book jacket quote, in this case: "Reliance, Illinois has it all - mystery, politics, war, love, death, and art." The mystery and the politics both felt contrived, and the war was long over. All-in-all, it was pretty meh.

Except.

Except for the one memorable event, when Samuel Clemens expounded on voting rights, thusly: "Give men of education, merit, and property - give such men five, maybe ten votes to every one of your ignorant Joes. As of now, Joe can be made to vote for any cause by anyone who can persuade him through fear or profit to make his mark on the line, even if that cause does damage to him and his family."

Amen, brother.

Never have true - or scarier - words been spoken, further proof, if we needed it, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

According to the author's notes, Clemens views on voting rights came from a variety of sources, including The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Whether he spoke these exact words, or Volmer crafted them, I cannot say, but, Mr. Clemens, I feel your pain.

Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West

What better reading material for a trip to Asia than a collection of short stories about the craziness of life in Asia (and particularly in China)? Peter Hessler's Strange Stones is just that. Although many of the stories are a decade old, they still resonate today, particularly those that have anything to do with driving and traffic.

I mean, of course a large tourist park is bisected by a single-late road and of course a van parks on the road - at the curve, no less - and then the tourist trolley barrels through and hits the van, blocking the road and subsequently sending the legions of scooters on the grass (there is no sidewalk in this tourist park) and the pedestrians can but pray they don't end up in the (highly polluted) drink as they are wedged into a narrower and narrower strip between the scooters and the reservoir. I'm sorry, I digress; that's my life in Indonesia this week, not Hessler's in China. As another aside, perhaps it was because I was reading Strange Stones that I had to keep reminding myself many times that I was not in China.

The long and the short is that this is fine travel writing. I was slightly partial to the one story set in Japan, a follow-up with Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice, and also anything involving traffic, if only because it makes me feel better about my own experiences like the one above. A couple of the stories explore life in Colorado, Hessler's home after a decade-plus in China, and are well written but seem just a teensy bit out of place.

Hessler's writing style reminds me a bit of Paul Theroux, but funnier. Many of the stories were laugh out loud funny and all of them were a pleasure to read. Travelers, in particular, will enjoy Hessler's work, but I have no qualms at all recommending Strange Stones to any and everyone.

The Pastures of Beyond: An Old Cowboy Looks Back at the Old West

Dayton O. Hyde was a Yooper who set off on a freight train west to avoid his mother's wrath (yes, you read that correctly), and never looked back. The Pastures of Beyond is his memoir of an adolescence and young adulthood spent on a sprawling Oregon cattle ranch.

Initially out of his element, but with an unquenchable desire to become a real cowboy, Hyde learned to break colts, rope steer, and even to fight bull. His life on the ranch spanned the years immediately before and after World War II, with the requisite service in Europe, where Hyde landed on Norman beaches just after D-Day. Hyde writes of knowing many of the last true cowboys and Indians, and the first of the true rodeo stars. There can be no question that his life has been a colorful one, or that the West he knew exists no more.

The Pastures of Beyond is an excellent corollary to books about an earlier West, most notably To Hell on a Fast Horse and The Colonel and Little Missie. It's also a fun memoir that has many of the qualities the best memoir writes, James Herriot, Edmund Love, and the Gilbreth siblings among them.

Four stars.