The News of the World

Paulette Jiles’s The News of the World is a delightful, compact novel, of the Old West, without being about the Old West. It’s 1870, and itinerant Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd – valiant soldier of the wars of 1812 and Mexico – has been left penniless by the War Between the States, his small printing business gone, his wife dead, his grown daughters far away in Georgia. And so Captain Kidd does what any man of robust health and a passion for the printed word and road would do: he takes to the road, reading the news to crowds large and small in the dusty towns and backwaters of North Texas.

It’s in one of these towns that he is charged with the return of a young girl, a former Kiowa captive, to her extended family in San Antonio. Reluctant at first, Captain Kidd grows increasingly fond of 10-year-old Johanna as their journey progresses. In her, he sees echoes of his own daughters, now grown, and hope for the future of his beloved state. Other than a few passages about the behavior of former Indian captives that reminded me intensely of Philipp Meyers’s The Son, what I liked most about The News of the World was the utter originality – and then learning from the author’s note that Captain Kidd was, in fact, based on just such a gentleman.

All told, The News of the World is a wonderful read, and one that I can heartily recommend to all comers, particularly, of course, those for a penchant for historical fiction. Four stars.

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

I can’t recall when I first read about the Mitfords. (Evelyn Waugh? In the Garden of Beasts?) And although their name was highly familiar, and some aspects of their story somewhat familiar (one of them was a Hitler groupie, if not quite his girlfriend), I couldn’t have accurately stated so much as their names or that there were, in fact, six of them. I did have a sense that the sisters were famous for being famous, and when I laid eyes on the lengthy tome at the library for the first time, I had second thoughts. I can only say that I am very happy that I shushed them and read The Sisters.

As the title suggests, The Sisters is a biography of the six Mitford sisters (Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah) whose politics, antics, and scandalous behavior rendered them household names in 1930s Britain. There was Diana, who married one of the richest men in Britain, the heir to the Guinness fortune, only to run off with Sir Oswald Mosley (yes, the fascist) when her children were toddlers. Unity was the Hitler groupie who had so convinced herself of the impossibility of war that she simply shot herself at the outbreak, while Jessica ran off to Spain with a black-sheep cousin in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. Nancy and Jessica would late become bestselling authors; Deborah became a Duchess who, together with her husband, restored one of England’s most important country houses. (It's no wonder that The Washington Post wrote in Deborah’s obituary – she died in 2014 at 94 – that the Mitfords’ real life squabbles and drama made Downton Abbey look “uneventful.”)

Although in some ways, this is just another romp through the bad behavior of the English Upper Class (see Daughter of Empire or White Mischief for other examples of this genre), Mary Lovell has crafted this biography so that the British Empire, first strong and then rather crumbling, shines through. In that way, this is a book about Old England and England-in-Transition as much as about the Mitford family. The trauma of the King’s abdication is there, as well as the pain and confusion of the years immediately after World War I and then again during the Blitz. For these reasons alone, The Sisters is worth reading, and anyone with an interest in British history will surely enjoy it.

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

So much potential. So disappointing.

The premise of Jim Fergus’s One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd is fascinating: President Grant has acquiesced to a Cheyenne chief’s request for 1000 white women brides to come West, marry Cheyenne braves, and teach the Indians how to assimilate into white culture. The request was actually made; Grant, of course, did not acquiesce, but Fergus envisions how it might have gone down, if he had.
 

So, Grant agrees to send the volunteers – a hodge podge of fallen women, war orphans (this being 1875), former mental patients, and the like – to the Cheyennes. Among them is our protagonist, May Dodd, daughter of a wealthy Chicago family who incarcerated her for promiscuity.  May is only too eager for any means out of the institution and remarkably seems to be friend all of the other women, from the former Southern belle to the escaped slave and the identical twin Irish prostitutes. Together they must create a life for themselves with a nomadic people in a harsh land – and with the U.S. Army in pursuit.

Again, the premise is fascinating. The execution, however, was marred by Fergus’s over-reliance on stereotypes – caricatures, really – to depict virtually every single character. It was as though he made a game of fitting as many circa-1875 stereotypes into a single book. The former slave escaped via the Underground Railroad, but not before she had been branded by a cruel master. The Southern belle saw her plantation burned as is reduced to a racist, drawling, laudanum-sipping stupor. The Irish twins run ever scam known to man and invent a few along the way. Ugh.

Perhaps my disgust with One Thousand White Women is a bit overblown, coming fast on the heels of Astoria, which describes both real Indians, and real frontier hardship. (Look up Marie Dorian and then dare to complain about pretty much anything.) I won’t go so far as to call it completely awful, but I can’t recommend it, either.

Astoria: Astor and Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Tale of Ambition and Survival on the Early American Frontier

I’ve actually been to Astoria, Oregon. Years ago, I was slated to cruise Mexico, when an outbreak of swine flu sent the ship north instead of south (Hello, Seattle; Good bye, Cabo). I remember it was a pretty town, highly picturesque, but don’t believe we learned much of its history in the roughly six hours we were there. In reading Peter Stark’s Astoria, I set out to rectify that, and what I learned was fascinating. 

Astoria was John Jacob Astor’s dream: a man ahead of his time, Astor recognized the importance of the Pacific and especially of international trade, particularly of the transpacific variety. Astoria was to be his base, the geographic location by which the world’s richest man would become even richer. From the start, though, the venture was beset by trouble, and no small amount of tragedy. The Overland Party, which intended to cross the continent Lewis and Clark style, met with countless delays before being forced to split up and make their way as best they could.

Those who went by boat, and in the pre-Panama Canal days, the Tonquin had to round the tip of South America to sail from New York to the Pacific Northwest, fared little better. (Except for the stop in Hawaii in its royal heyday. That I wanted to read more of, no question.) And once they made it, those who did, found themselves face-to-face with the tribes who had hunted, fished, trapped, and for all intents and purposes, owned this land for time immemorial. To say their encounters did not often go well is to understate things.  

Once the U.S.declared war on the British, things got really interesting, for not only did the British trading companies have their eye on this same piece of land, but many of Astor’s partners and agents were, themselves, British subjects. For those wondering how it all ends, here's a hint: the title of the book refers to a "lost Pacific empire."

All of this Stark recounts succinctly and with an engaging style that kept me turning the pages and plowing through the text. Compared to the “Wild West,” which was peopled with the likes of Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday, the opening and history of the Northwest was tame. Likely for the same reason, its history is often overlooked, an omission Stark works to correct with Astoria. Anyone with an interest in American history should enjoy reading his work very much.

Four stars.

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

I don't believe I've ever previously uttered the words, "Gee, I think that book would actually be better as a movie." In the case of Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures, though, that really is my sentiment. It's not - and I want to say this unequivocally - that this is in any way a bad book. Far from it. It is true, though, that Shetterly devotes nearly as much time to the differential equations, physics, and aerodynamics research as she does to her main characters. That's a shame only in that Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson, in particular, are fascinating individuals about whom I hungered to learn even more.

Let me back up for a minute. Hidden Figures is the story of the female mathematicians, and especially and more specifically the black female mathematicians, whose contributions and calculations were pivotal in the early days of NASA (and its predecessor, NACA), but were largely unrecorded. In this way, it is not unlike The Girls of Atomic City, which records the history of the "girls" whose work on the a-bomb was so crucial, and yet generally unknown. What makes Hidden Figures is more fascinating, and its protagonists that much more amazing, is that these were black women working on some of the country's most pressing issues - and doing it from an office in the Jim Crow South.

To a woman, they are outrageously smart, strong willed, gender-busting, race-busting, pioneers and - dare I say - heroines. They certainly would not use those descriptors themselves, but reading of what they overcame, endured, and accomplished, the adjectives seem apt. Shetterly brings these women to life. Although her writing can alternate between mighty dry (here's looking at you, differential equations) and wonderfully vivid ("sounding shockingly calm for a man who just minutes before was preparing himself to die in a flying funeral pyre"), this is a highly readable and utterly fascinating story. Going back to my initial comment that I'm sure this story is even better as a movie is an assumption (I haven't seen the movie) that on screen the focus is more on the "girls" and less on formulas.

Three-and-a-half stars.

Easter Island

Admittedly, I read this book for one reason and one reason only: I was on my way to Easter Island. I say this by way of acknowledging that from the beginning I was less interested in the story than I was in the setting. That said, I have an open mind and I was willing to be swayed.

Jennifer Vanderbes's Easter Island is the story of Elsa Beazley and Greer Farraday. In 1913, Elsa sails from England with her new, much older, and generally unloved husband and mentally diminished younger sister. They are headed to Easter Island to make a study of the flora and fauna, Charles Darwin-style. Elsa is not my favorite character - or so I thought, until I met Greer. Greer is a palynologist, or one who studies pollen. Sixty years after Elsa, Greer, too, sails to Easter Island to conduct research, and as an escape from grief over her recently-deceased husband. Naturally, Vanderbes creates an intersecting narrative such that women's histories become intertwined on this speck of an island, which still in Greer's day is largely unchanged from the era of Elsa. (Side note: Most of the roads on Easter Island were not paved until the late 90s. The 1990s. This part of the story is no stretch.)

I have complained about the intertwined narratives schtick in the past (Sandcastle Girls springs to mind, for example), so it would be unfair of me to lament that here, knowing my reading preferences and having selected Easter Island anyway. What I will complain about, though, is the characters. It's been a long, long time since I've encountered two more unsympathetic characters. What I can't say is exactly why I felt that way. Elsa, being from another era, is harder to judge, but I still couldn't help but feel that she was, for lack of a better term, a total sour sop. And Greer, well she just struck me as naive, weak, and, for lack of a better term, pathetic.

So what did I like? I am a nerd, and I enjoyed learned about the field of palynology. Also, the setting did not disappoint. Vanderbes does a fine job of weaving the essence of Easter Island - language, culture, geography, history, weather patterns, and people - into her novel. In that sense, it more than delivered for my purposes. And that, I suppose, is the crux of it: read this if you're interested in reading about Easter Island, and particularly the natural geography of Easter Island, in novel form. (In the acknowledgements, Vanderbes references David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo, which automatically earned her bonus points in my world.) You will learn a bit of history, more of the culture, and plenty of the spirit of the place.

The bottom line: ignore the stories and read it as travel writing. Easier said than done, perhaps, but that is my advice.