Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World

I am, of course, a sucker for all things Japanese. Even so, Amy Stanley's Stranger in the Shogun's City, the biographical account of a thrice-divorced, provincial Japanese woman who leaves her snowbound village for the big city of Edo, is a particular treat. 

By all odds, Tsuneno should have remained unknown, her life and times, loves and losses relegated to the dustbin of history, the years only deepening her anonymity. She was born in 1801, the oldest daughter of a Buddhist priest in the small village of Ishigami, destined to live a life like that of all the women before her: sweeping floors, tending the brazier, comforting the parishioners of a small temple, and above all, raising a large and numerous family. This was the lot of women in Japan - and around the world, let's face it - in 1801 (and while we're facing the music, we need to acknowledge that in much of the world, it still is today). 

Tsuneno never could reconcile herself to such a life though, cycling through husbands the way other women of her era may have cycled through kimonos. Unlikely though her story is, it is surely not singular. Perhaps most unique is the level of literacy Tsuneno attained. As the daughter of a priest, and thus in preparation for being able to provide support and assistance to a future husband in the running of another temple, such literacy was deemed critical; the letters she would later exchange with her increasingly exasperated family are the fruit of that education.

Stanley is a professor of history; that she stumbled upon Tsuneno's story is a great good fortune. As she notes early, there was nothing particularly noteworthy about the collection of correspondence assembled and maintained first by Tsuneno's father, Emon, and then her oldest brother, Giyu.The tax bills, the loan statements, the memoranda from samurai and planting records were no different than those of any other temple family. What set them apart were the letters. Letters to, from, and about Tsuneno. Ultimately, the entire archive, "rather than telling the orderly story of a family, would begin to tell a different story: hers." 

And what a story! Married off at 12 for the first time, by her mid-30s, Tsuneno had been married and divorced three times, all to men of her father's choosing. Desperate not to be married off yet again, she made a decision - the first independent and consequential decision of her life - to run off to Edo, even then one of the largest cities on earth. As Stanley writes, using Tsuneno's own penetrating, heartbreaking words, "When I wasn't brave, I got caught up in unpleasantness no matter what I did." (An echo from the past reminding all of us today of what happens when we aren't brave: reader, take note.) In Edo she marries again, her fourth husband, but the first of her choosing. Their life - her life - would not be easy, but for the first time, it would be her own.

Tsuneno is endearing; it is one of her letters (available online through the Niigata public archive) that first captured Stanley's imagination, and with which Stanley hooked me in her prologue: To mother, from Tsuneno (confidential). I'm writing with spring greetings. I went to Kanda Minagawa-cho in Edo -- quite unexpectedly -- and I ended up in so much trouble! A confidential letter from daughter to mother detailing so much trouble? Indeed. It is Stanley, though, who brings Tsuneno - and Edo - alive.

Oh Edo! Stanley's descriptions of the Shogun's city with its bannermen and maidservants, the vendors and carpenters, Nihonbashi and Shinjuku and the kabuki theaters! The fire towers, the noodle stalls, the slap of sandals and the cicadas, the temples and their festivals and sea of umbrellas to fend off the summer rains. All of this jumps from the page; it is the Edo-Tokyo museum come to life, and if Stanley's descriptions don't make you want to march backwards in time and experience Edo for yourself, well you just never quite loved Tokyo as much as I did. 

And then Stanley does the most remarkable thing. This book, which I believed wholeheartedly to be a biography of one of the masses, and an ode to Edo before Perry's ships heralded irrevocable change, becomes instead a treatise on the role of women. In hindsight, Stanley has sprinkled the clues  throughout, as when she writes bluntly, "the only goal was to move toward a life that held some hope of change, where she wouldn't be buried alive under a dying old man, in a lonely little village." That sentence took my breath away. When I think of how suffocating life in 21st century America can sometimes be, well, I'll leave it at that.

So while she could have written an engaging biography of Tsuneno and a marvelous history of Edo, Stanley goes one step further. This book becomes a record of the contributions of the countless Tsunenos. This remarkable passage appears in the closing pages:

"...if women like her hadn't come in from the countryside, Edo wouldn't have grown. If they hadn't washed floors, sold charcoal, kept the books, done laundry, and served food, its economy could not have functioned. And if they hadn't bought theater tickets, hairpins, bolts of cloth, and bowls of noodles, the shogun's great city wouldn't have been a city at all. It would have been a dusty military outpost full of men, one of a thousand, not worth all the effort. Tsuneno's legacy was the great city of Edo: her ambition, her life's work...she might have said that the experience of Edo changed her. But she also shaped the city" (p. 236, 237).

That paragraph is a testament to work and lives of women on down through time, their contributions so seldom recorded in the way that the fates captured Tsuneno's. Stranger in the Shogun's City is a phenomenal work of Japanese history, but it is an equally important work on women's history.

 

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Caroline Fraser's meticulously researched Prairie Fires took me back to the reading of my youth, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. The project is immense, as Fraser takes on not only the life of Wilder, but her family history, that of her husband, and then their daughter, but also covers such sweeping territory as the Indian Wars, the New Deal, and the suffrage movement - essentially the entire landscape of Wilder's life.

The most engaging parts of the book are those that deal with Wilder herself, and particularly the ways in which her life, though the basis for the Little House books, actually differed from it. (I was most intrigued by the ways in which she chose to polish and preserve her parents for posterity.) Fraser fills in many blanks, and also allows readers to follow Wilder out of the prairies and into the Ozarks, where she spent the better part of six decades. (By the end of her life, Wilder had been a southerner much longer than she'd been a pioneer!)

More than anything, Prairie Fires brought home succinctly just how recent pioneer days were in the grand scheme of time. I found myself returning time and again to the fact that original pioneers/settlers were still alive when my parents were learning to walk. Granted, those still living had been riding in the wagon and not driving it, but all the same.

Fraser also presents food for thought with her examination of the psyche of Wilder and many like her: forced to depend on government "handouts" they resented the government all the more for it. Such perspectives bear consideration in today's time as much as they did in times past.

Prairie Fires starts rather slowly, and Fraser's work is sometimes a bit too deep in the weeds, particularly regarding the wanderings and politics of Wilder's only daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, but on the whole this is a worthy read for fans of Wilder who are interested in discovering the woman behind the myth.

Four stars.

Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Changed America

I first learned of the connection between Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick in The Johnstown Flood (synopsis: dam on artificial lake for the pleasure of the likes of Carnegie and Frick fails and the ensuing flood kills thousands, but no one is held accountable). Meet You in Hell mentions the flood only in passing, but focuses much of its attention on a disaster of another sort, the Homestead strike of 1896, which was crushed by Frick.

In building to the climax, author Les Standiford details the complex rivalry and partnership between the two men. Frick was a coke magnet, coke being one of the key ingredients in the making of steel. In a bid to control coke supplies, and in conjunction with a much broader deal, Carnegie turned over the day-to-day management of his companies to Frick, who devised the strategy that crushed the unions. In the midst of ensuing bad press, Carnegie essentially disavowed any knowledge of Frick's plans setting the stage for a bitter feud that would last until their dying days. (The title is taken from Frick's response to Carnegie's near-deathbed request to meet. His response was that he'd meet him in hell, where they were both going, in Frick's estimation.) Certainly the decadence of the gilded age is on display here.

I previously enjoyed Standiford's Last Train to Paradise about another titan of industry and found Meet You in Hell to be a similar work. I hadn't heard of the Homestead strike, but couldn't help but think of the similarities between the battles between the steel workers and Frick and those between the miners and mine owners depicted in The Devil is Here in These Hills. 

Four stars.

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War That Changed American History

"From the halls of Montezuma | To the shores of Tripoli | We will fight our country's battles..."

I have previously given exactly zero consideration to the meaning behind the famous lyrics of the Marine song. Encountering Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War That Changed American History in an airport bookstore recently, I was intrigued and bit. Well, sort of: I put myself on the waitlist at the library and then bided my time while a dozen people ahead of made their way through Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger's book.

Here's the story: in the early nineteenth century (and for some time before that), pirates owned the seas around the Barbary Coast - essentially North Africa. Many of the European powers paid hefty annual "tributes" to encourage the pirates - who operated openly under the flags of their countries and whose bounty became part of the national treasury - to seek alternate targets. The U.S. was young, poor, and also temperamentally opposed to following suit. Thus, U.S. ships were regularly boarded, plundered, and the sailors enslaved, frequently for years and years. Only those who converted to Islam escaped slavery, religious difference being one of the pirates' justifications for their actions. (That old history-repeating-itself bit again.)

Ultimately, after years of failed diplomacy and debate within the U.S., Thomas Jefferson resolved to make war on the pirates, and the Barbary powers that backed them. Perhaps not surprisingly for a country that had no navy and whose only previous experience with war was during the Revolution (and, some might argue, against the Native tribes), it didn't go well at first. The earliest U.S. "navy" was undermanned, outmatched, and frequently poorly led. As time passed and Jefferson's and Congress's resolve grew, better men were appointed, better strategies developed, and better ships built. The end result was a full and complete victory over the pirates (no "shores of Tripoli" lyrics otherwise, right?) such that the European powers sought to imitate the Americans for the first time.

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates is a fantastic read. Kilmeade and Yaeger take a little known moment in American history and flesh it out, giving it color and context, and also providing the reader with a greater history of U.S. involvement and intervention in other countries. (Part of our plan was to depose one leader and replace him with his "friendly" brother, a pattern we still seem fond of some two centuries later.) History buffs rejoice, this is another great one!

Five stars.

Tai-Pan

I have a new favorite author. After some twenty years, James Clavell has displaced Margaret Mitchell atop my personal pantheon of authors. Last fall I fell in love with Shogun; my concerns as to whether Tai-Pan could live up to such lofty expectations were unfounded.

The Tai Pan is Dirk Straun, a Scottish trader who has risen to become the most powerful trader in Hong Kong, which in the midst of the Opium Wars is on the verge of the becoming a prosperous and beloved jewel among British colonies. To reach the apex of trade society, Tai Pan has had to fight not only other European and American traders to build The Noble House - sometimes in the literal sense of the word - but he's engaged in his fair share of politicking and intrigue with both the Chinese and the British. On the eve of unparalleled success, his future plans are sullied when he learns that his wife and most of his children have succumbed to one of the many epidemics that swept England in the early nineteenth century. Now he must recalibrate and bring his young son, Culum, into the fold earlier than he anticipated while ensuring the future of all of Hong Kong.

Like Shogun, James Clavell does an absolutely remarkable job of creating authentic characters in original settings. His description of the trade routes and wars, the history of the opening of China, and the early days of the settlement of Hong Kong are lovely to read. I also loved the juxtaposition of Straun's English and Chinese families and the dialects that practically call out from the pages. Clavell's characters are complex, multifaceted beings, and the experience of reading Tai Pan is enriched by the conflicting emotions each of the characters is able to generate in the reader. If it's true that the Russian sub-plot was slightly far-fetched, it's also true that it's the only questionable or ham-handed aspect of the book.

Five stars.

Claude and Camille

I hesitated before reading Stephanie Cowell's Claude and Camille because the genre of Impressionist painter historical fiction had disappointed me thus far (see Luncheon of the Boating Party or The Painted Girls). I needn't have worried; a bit like Monet himself, Claude and Camille is in a class by itself when it comes to this genre.

As any enterprising reader might guess from the title, Claude and Camille is the story of the see-sawing, ultimately tragic relationship between Claude Monet and his first wife, Camille Doncieux. As Wikipedia will tell you in a matter of seconds, she died at 32 of cancer, so no spoilers to say there's no happily ever after here. What Cowell does well, she does very well indeed, and that is to improvise. As she notes in the afterward, the historical record contains very little about Camille, and so Cowell was able to invent a story, populated by real people, artists mainly, and events, but largely of her own invention. What she has created is lovely.

One of the strong suits is the way Cowell incorporates painting, as a noun but especially as a verb, into the work. Because she is not overly constrained by facts, she is free to get into Monet's head in a way that other works of this genre haven't done. As a result, Monet's paintings are sprinkled throughout, while the act of paining, as important and life-giving to Monet as breathing, dominates. Too, I was struck by the way in which she situated Monet in the spaces where he created so many masterpieces, and that his lily pads were not the centerpiece. The church, the haystacks, London in the fog: I could picture Monet's paintings through Cowell's carefully chosen words, which were frequently no more than allusions.

Readers who love the arts, and especially Impressionism, will be smitten. Those who are iffy on the subject may well like Claude and Camille well enough, but I'm a little more hesitant to recommend it to that crowd.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a weird book. It's not a bad book, per se, but it does require that the reader suspend rational thought a bit and simply embrace the story.

So: Jacob de Zoet signs on with the Dutch East India Company to earn his fortune and, he hopes, the hand of his beloved Anna back in the Netherlands. He arrives in the strange world that is Dejima in 1799 for what he anticipates will be a relatively short stint; through the corrupt dealings of the highest ranking officers, Jacob ends up more or less marooned on the tiny island that is the foreign trading post adjacent to Nagasaki (they are in fact connected by a closely-guarded and tightly-controlled land bridge).

On Dejima, Jacob's path will intersect with any number of characters, both Dutch and Japanese, from the wily cook and gruff doctor, to interpreters who may also be spies and the mysterious, badly disfigured midwife who captures Jacob's imagination almost immediately. Ultimately, he uncovers a dangerous secret implicating one of the most powerful - and dangerous - men in Nagasaki.

As I said, not bad, just improbable. Like, really, really improbable. (But perhaps no more improbable than the ship-wrecked Blackthorne/Anjin-san becoming a daimyo. Nevertheless, there was just too much here that was too improbable for me to really love this book. From the scene that allows Jacob (who is a sympathetic character, by the way, and one who's easy to like) to earn the trust of the magistrate to the secret shrine to the final resolution...well, bizarre might just be the best word for it.

Three-and-a-half stars.

Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back

Janice Nimura's Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back is the non-fiction account of three girls who were chosen by the Japanese government to travel to the United States in 1871 to study for 10 years. They were then to return to Japan, bringing their new cultural knowledge back to a rapidly-westernizing Japan.The girls, Ume, Shige, and Sutematsu, ranged in age from 6-11 when they were plucked from the bosom of their (recently defeated) samurai families, placed aboard a ship, and sent to America for 10 (and in the cases of Ume and Sutematsu, extended to 11) years.

The women's families, generally suffering the privations of having been on the losing side of the conflict between the shogun and the emperor, were only too glad of a tangible way to demonstrate their support for the new, government, and also to have one less mouth to feed. So it is that the girls (originally five in number but reduced to three by the premature, health-related return of two girls after less than a year) travel across the sea and then, perhaps even more remarkably to them, by train across the U.S., passing through the still-wild West, en route to the East Coast.

Shige and Sutematsu are placed in host families in Connecticut, while Ume becomes the beloved only daughter of an older, wealthy Georgetown couple. There they stay, Ume for 11 years until she graduate from high school, and Shige and Sutematsu until they enroll at Vassar and become the first Japanese women to earn a college degree, ever. And then they return to a home they hardly remember and where, until recently, it was a literal crime to leave - for whatever reason, including storm-induced shipwreck - and attempt to return.

In their absence, the feudal land of their youth had disappeared, replaced by a rapidly modernizing society still uncertain of how it felt about the changes - and the west. Into this environment, the three women must re-assimilate; none of them can read or write Japanese any longer, and Ume can no longer speak it. The oldest of them, Sutematsu, is twenty-two. Choosing wildly differing paths, the young women set out to do their duty and fulfill their debt to the government, slowly, quietly changing the Japanese view of education, and perhaps even women's place in society, definitively.

Nimura's work spans the Meiji era, from its bloody dawn, depicted in the early chapters (where life appears exactly as depicted in the hundreds-of-years-earlier Shogun), to its end on the eve of World War I. Briefly, Nimura reaches into the 1920s and the end of the women's lives. In covering the birth of modern Japan, Nimura focuses on many of the events that set the stage for World War II (I could not help but feel a bit of relief that all died before the build up to the war) - events which are central to the opening of James Bradley's Flyboys, which follows naturally for anyone interested in Japan's progression from pro-West to ambivalent-about-the-West to anti-West. It's certainly no stretch to see Ume, Shige, and Sutematsu as the forbears to Harry Fukuhara and his family.

Four stars.

Luncheon of the Boating Party

I blame Shogun. 

Luncheon of the Boating Party isn't bad, it just pales in comparison to Shogun, which leaves Susan Vreeland's work seeming a bit washed out. I'm getting ahead of myself, though. Luncheon of the Boating Party is the story of Renoir's painting by the same name, created in 1881, just as France was recovering its composure from the Franco-Prussian war, which would of course set the stage for World War I, but that's another story. Vreeland has taken pains to recreate the circumstances under which Renoir's masterpiece was painted, carefully considering the zeitgeist, as well as the individual models. The models ranged from upper-crust Charles Ephussi to Angele, a sometimes-streetwalker in Montmartre, to say nothing of Aline, who will many years hence become Madame Renoir, and Alphonsine, for whom Renoir's affection is apparent, until she is upstaged by Aline. As the French might say: ouf!

Vreeland has chosen to narrate her work in the voices of Renoir and seven of the models. Although this style can work well, in this case the story felt choppy, leaving gaps here and there. The effect was heightened by the fact that, while the perspective changed, the narrative voice seldom did, such that all of the characters seemed to act and feel alike. Both the characters and the era seemed to me to receive short shrift, although here I am especially cognizant of the fact that, consciously or otherwise, I am comparing them to Shogun, which is more than a little unjust. A more legitimate complaint, I'm certain, is the occasional usage of French, which frequently feels clumsy, interspersed as it is with English in a single phrase, for example the word "two" appearing in English, but the rest in French. I found this both confusing and distracting.

In the sense that Vreeland has imagined the thoughts and feelings of the models as well as Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party reminds me of A Piece of the World. In writing the latter, Christina Baker Kline has the advantage or imaging only one model, not the dozen-plus Vreeland faced; perhaps for this reason, Kline was able to create a depth of character that is lacking in Luncheon of the Boating Party.

So what's the final verdict? Those who love Renoir, or perhaps even Impressionism more generally, will enjoy learning more about the backstory of one his iconic works. It is certainly many measure above The Painted Girls, which belongs to the same genre of creating the backstory for a painting (in this case, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen). I preferred Luncheon of the Boating Party so much that I couldn't help but be that much more cognizant of my own present shortcomings here, in comparing Luncheon with the completed dissimilar Shogun. Alas.

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.

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.

Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait

Karen Holliday Tanner's Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait has been on my reading list for years now (literally almost six years!), ever since I read the fantastic fictionalized account of his life and times, Doc, much of the background for which the author, Mary Doria Russell, credits Tanner's book.

For better or for worse, Russell has made excellent use of the most interesting bits, such that even six years after reading Doc, Tanner's work felt extraneous. (Which, yes, I recognize is completely backwards, given that hers is the original source material, but there you have it.) The most interesting parts of A Family Portrait are, perhaps not surprisingly, the early bits that really focus on the family portrait. Once Tanner places Doc out west, there's little new; far more in-depth writing exists on Doc's years out west, from his relationship to the Earp brothers to, most notably, the shootout at the O.K. Corral.

As noted in the forward, Tanner "brings fresh insight into the history and culture of the antebellum South, the cataclysm of the War Between the States, and the catastrophe of the Reconstruction period." That is, in writing about Holliday, and particularly the Holliday family, and especially the pre-"War Between the States" Holliday family, Tanner's language is certainly that of an apologist or, as the forward also notes, "Tanner's empathy for her biological subject tends to extend to Doc Holliday's friends and close associates." Certainly, as a Yankee with twenty-first century sensibilities, Tanner's portrayal of Reconstruction goes a bit far, and the extent to which she portrays the family's slaves as happy as loving their masters has a whiff of I-think-thou-doth-protest-too-much, but on the whole, this is still an interesting and highly readable book - particularly the early chapters that deal with Doc's childhood and adolescence.

The American Heiress

Perhaps I might have liked The American Heiress better if the protagonist - the American heiress who weds an English duke and with her considerable fortune revives his estate - were not named Cora. To say nothing of one of Cora's few friends and kindhearted characters being named Sybil. Downton Abbey much?

Cora Cash is the richest girl in America, with the most overbearing mother. Her mother has decided that Cora needs a title, and takes her husband-shopping in England. Cora is particularly distressed, as she would have preferred to marry her dear friend Teddy, who deems her fortune too great a burden and sends her packing. Cora falls into the lap, almost literally, of an impoverished duke, with his own sorry history. They marry, and naturally misunderstand one another utterly.

I've said this about other books in the past, and it sounds a little tired, but this isn't a bad book. It's not badly written, the characters aren't overly tedious or annoying. It's just not the book for me. Interestingly, author Daisy Goodwin's name was seemed familiar to me, and I searched my blog where I discovered that a few years ago, I read another of her books, The Fortune Hunter. Re-reading my post, it seems as if I felt the same way about that one.

Final verdict: utterly forgettable, but also completely harmless.

At the Edge of the Orchard

The Goodenough parents, James and Sadie, are singularly ill-suited to one another, which has tragic consequences for a family trying to scratch out a life in frontier Ohio. As the family tears itself apart, their youngest son, Robert, heads West, always West, further and further West, taking nothing with him but his father's unbounded, possibly irrational, love for trees. After working his way West through countless of the usual ways (stable boy? check. ranch hand? check. gold miner? check.), Robert becomes a tree agent, collecting and shipping specimens to England's landed elite, while drifting in and out of the life of Molly, a camp cook and sometimes prostitute fleeing her own Eastern horrors.

Too much historical fiction uses war as its backdrop, as a prop to move the story along. Often these are very good books: I Shall Be Near You (American Civil War), The Summer Before the War (World War I), or All the Light We Cannot See (World War II). All are excellent books, and yet at the end of the day, the war looms as large or larger than any character any of these authors could have created. One of the glorious things about Tracy Chevalier's At the Edge of the Orchard is that it stands alone, separate of larger events. The setting, in fact, is primarily the middle of nowhere, both in time (1830s-1850s) and place (Black Swamp, Ohio). The California gold rush makes an appearance, but its the characters in Orchard, as well as Chevalier's original and compelling plot, that drive this book forward.

Not only are the characters and plot praise-worthy, so is the prose. This is a novel told from - and written in - four highly distinct perspectives. Chevalier has taken care to give each character a unique voice, one that is perfectly suited to the temperament she has created throughout the novel. In short, At the Edge of the Orchard is a story whose core is revealed slowly, the layers gradually unpeeling, like an onion: pungent, rich, and raw. 

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.

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West

I would love to report that I've sent 2016 out with a bang, but unfortunately, the last book on my list this year is one I couldn't quite finish. I've read just more than one-third and determined I've learned more than enough about Lewis and Clark. I will say this: Stephen Ambrose is nothing, if not thorough, (re)recording everything from the daily highs to the miles the expedition made on any given day. (I occasionally felt I was reliving an adolescent family vacation during which we drove no small part of the Lewis and Clark, but that is a story for another day.)

Also, Lewis and Clark make the pioneers look like they had it easy. I cannot help but be continually amazed at the litany of tasks an individual used to accomplish in a given day or week or month or year. Lewis was not yet in his third decade when Jefferson tasked him with opening the West; the fact that he saved a party from Indians when he was only 10 seems only natural.

Ambrose resolutely makes the case that the Lewis and Clark expedition was possibly the most important undertaking in U.S. history, and certainly that the repercussions and reverberations shaped the country into what it is today. Undaunted Courage is well-researched and well-written. It is a good book. It is also a long book, written for an audience with a greater interest in the nitty-gritty of Lewis and Clark's days. If this is you, by all means, read it. If this doesn't describe you, I predict it would make for a long, hard slog. Which is perhaps appropriate, given the subject matter.

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

Reading a book like this fills me with awe for the feats of engineering and and, frankly, back-breaking labor, that occurred regularly and as a matter of course for much of this country's history. Such mammoth undertakings are the stuff of David McCullough - from the Panama Canal, which, yes, I know, is not in this country, but was very much constructed at the will of it; to bridges and dams; to the Wright brothers' first flying machines. (Side note: it's no wonder McCullough is the master here - his latest book was published this past spring; Great Bridge in 1972.) There is no one better at bringing the greatest examples of innovation, invention, and engineering down to size than McCullough. 

That said, the primary weakness of The Great Bridge is, perhaps, McCullough's own strength: he has such a grasp of the engineering principles that he cannot help but include every last detail on how the caissons bore into the earth, how the cables were spun, how the planks were laid. Sometimes I felt I was reading an engineering text, rather than an historical account of the construction. I plead guilt to some serious skimming of these sections.

I was much more interested in the life and times of the Chief Engineer, Washington Roebling, the (exceedingly corrupt) political environments in Tammany Hall and the Grant administration, Henry Beecher's hypocrisy, the inimitable Emily Roebling, and the medical advances of the age...pretty much everything but the tensile strength of Bessamer vs. crucible steel. I had to chuckle when I read, "Collingwood spoke a little too long about the staggering quantities of brick, stone, steel, and iron that had gone into the bridge..." Like Collingwood's audience, I felt McCullough belabored these points a little too much.

Evidently I've lodged this complaint before as, in reviewing my previous McCullough posts, I noted my final verdict on the Paris book, "Overall, this was a good read, although it could be quite dense at time and, therefore, a bit of a slow go. French history or American art history buffs would enjoy it greatly, but others might find it just a bit on the dull side." Likewise, those with a strong interest in our nation's public works might go ga-ga for McCullough's detailed work, but other readers might find parts of it a slow go.

The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West

I would have been a terrible pioneer. I've had this reaction before, but the thought coursed through my mind time and again as I read Dee Brown's characterization of life in the Old West: work, work, work, Indian raids, work, dust storms, work, you get the idea. The list of tasks an average woman was expected to complete was daunting, from making soap and candles, to pureeing fruit and drying it as a paste to ward off scurvy in winter months, a pioneer was never idle. (In truth, this is not so different from other women's lot either, including many southern plantation mistresses.)

But first, before she could begin her life as a pioneer woman, she had to get there. And it is in telling this part of the story that Brown does her best work. The stories of the earliest pioneers are the strongest, particularly the Army brides bustling from primitive fort to primitive fort and the women making their way across the endless prairie - including one who made the crossing as part of the infamous Donner party.

Once the West is a bit more "settled," Brown spends less time on the individual women themselves and their hardships and lives, and more on suffrage (which originated out West), women's roles as entertainers (of both the professional and, uh, private variety), the fight for prohibition, and women as teachers. The difference between the two halves of the book is that, while I was interested in women's broader roles in the west, I was inspired by their personal stories.

Final verdict: I wanted to like this book a bit more than I ultimately did. The first few chapters, in which the pluck and spirit of the women pioneers nearly springs from the pages, is four-star material. The latter few chapters, which read like something out of a women's history book, are probably two-star material. And for those looking for further inspiration from women who had it so much harder than we did, look no further than They Fought Like Demons, which is the story of women who disguised themselves as men and fought in the Civil War. I bet they would have found soap making child's play after that.

The Tea Rose

I never skip ahead when I read. This is my cardinal rule of reading, which I have embraced from my earliest days as a reader. And yet, I could not help myself. I had to know, absolutely had to know, what became of Fiona and, by extension all of the characters in The Tea Rose.

The Tea Rose, set in Jack Ripper's East End, is nothing if not gripping. From the opening pages, which depict the murder of a Whitechapel prostitute by none other than Jack himself, to Fiona's final fight for her life, Jennifer Donnelly has packed her pages with action, suspense, and not a little violence.

Fiona Finnegan dreams of life away from this place, a life where she will be the proprietor of her own tea shop and the wife of her childhood sweetheart, Joe Bristow. To achieve this dream, they both will have to overcome the violence of the docks, especially when talk turns to unions, and of the streets themselves.

Donnelly's writing is a reminder of the hard scrabble life of Victorian England, and the grit and character necessary to rise above it. I loved Fiona - and Joe - as soon as I began reading. It did seem to me that Donnelly heaped hardship upon hardship on them, especially Fiona. At times, The Tea Rose teetered on the brink from implausible to impossible, and I wished Donnelly had settled for slightly more realistic plot twists.

All the same, I sped through this book, more than once flipping ahead to see how it all turned out. The first in a trilogy, I am looking forward to reading books two and three this summer.