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.

Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever

Geoff Williams's Washed Away is an in-depth look at the massive floods that decimated the U.S., in particular the middle part of the country, in early 1913. Williams works through the days chronologically, and often the hours within each day. This style took a little getting used to; it had the advantage of being incredibly orderly and organized, but the disadvantage was that I found it easy to lose track of the various characters - this one in Dayton, that one in Indianapolis, another in Pennsylvania, and so on - since they cropped up sporadically, especially in the early chapters.

On the whole, this is a fascinating look at an event that once dominated the national conscience, but has long since receded from even the most detailed history books. (See The Devil Is Here in These Hills or Ashes Under Water for other examples of famous-now-forgotten events.) I have to say, though, that I felt the title oversold the story: at least as Williams has written it, the "changed it forever" piece is not obvious. He does spend a couple of pages at the end on water engineering, but I actually would have liked to learn more about those changes than some of the hour-by-hour accounts. (And now I'm being nit-picky, but Williams did not spend nearly enough time delving into the flooding outside of the Midwest, such as along the Mississippi, as the "most widespread natural disaster" - or the pages of photos of flooded Memphis - would imply.)

Ultimately, I was interested to learn about this flood, particularly having read about the Johnstown flood somewhat recently. Williams does highlight those unlucky, lucky few who are known to have survived both, which can hardly be matched for bad luck.

Best for history buffs. Three stars. 

East of the Sun

Viva Holloway lived in India as a girl, before she was orphaned by a terrible car accident - or so she tells anyone who dares to ask about her circumstances. Now 28 and independent, she longs to return to the land of her youth, taking on the job of chaperoning three young people on the Kaisar-I-Hind to cover her passage.

Nineteen-year-old Rose is bound for India and a new husband, leaving behind her home and her parents, who are too ill to travel. Her best friend, Tor, is weighing anchor with her, hoping that she too might next see England as a married woman. And 16-year-old Guy has just been expelled from his English boarding school and most return to his unhappy parents, whom he hasn't seen in several years. Viva's job is to shepherd them through the crossing; her path continues to cross theirs in India in circumstances that are perhaps best described as bizarre.

I am of two minds about Julia Gregson's East of the Sun. On the one hand, it's beautifully written and I loved the setting (pre-independence India, which, of course, means present day India and Pakistan). I've neither read anything set there, nor traveled there myself, and the book's rich imagery is a wonderful way to dive into the country. On the other hand, I hated most of the characters (and frankly, a good bit of the plot) with an energy I don't typically feel when reading. More than that, I was bothered by the fact that I couldn't figure out if Gregson wanted me to dislike her characters. Unlike The Hurricane Sisters, for example, in which I felt that I understood why the author made her characters so irritating, here, I never could figure out if the irritation I felt was intentional or if it was just me.

So: to continue reading about the fascinating time and place? Or to heck with the whole lot of them?

I did finish, but it's all credit to the place and not the people.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

I absolutely adored everything about this little gem of a book. Originally published in 1938, I'd never heard of it, and probably still wouldn't have, were it not displayed on a "librarian's choice" shelf in my local library recently.

In a nutshell, Miss Pettigrew is an aging, ineffectual governess down to her last chance when she rings the bell of the lithe nightclub singer Delysia LaFosse, she of the fine figure and decidedly loose morals (at least by Miss Pettigrew's standards). Without asking what her business is, Miss LaFosse puts Miss Pettigrew to work, but in the most unconventional way. A revolving cast of characters works its way in and out of Miss LaFosse's day - and Miss Pettigrew's life, causing the latter to wonder if she's really lived at all.

Winifred Watson's work is unlike any book I've read before, and I struggle to compare it to anything else. The illustrations are the icing on the cake. Love, love, love.