Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

The journey

Part of the America 1850 reading journey

How it got on the shelf

Last year I finally succumbed to one of the Folio Society introductory offers and chose this as one of my obligatory books. As my free gift for subscribing I requested the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary which looked quite neat in the advert. On arrival the actual size came as a surprise but it does double as a useful coffee table. Getting back to the featured book, it is a lovely hardback edition with numerous photographs including one inset on the front cover.

The Review

The book tells the heart-rending story of the final five decades of Native American Indian resistance to the inexorable pressure of the white man. Dee Brown gives a voice to the Sioux, the Cheyenne and the Apache, and offers their version of late 19^th century American history – looking east at an invading, or at least invasive, horde intent on exploiting their ancestral lands.

This is not how the west was won but how the victory was enforced. Trickery, bribery and cheating were the weapons of choice; dispossession, destitution and demise were the result, punctuated with acts of defiance ruthlessly put down.

Meticulously researched and related without hyperbole, Brown’s possibly selective but undeniably truthful account of events makes for uncomfortable but compulsive reading.

11.22.63 – Stephen King

Most people with a bus pass can tell you what they were doing or where they were on the 22^nd November 1963, when US president John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. For those of later generations, it was the equivalent to the day Diana died or the twin towers went down. For the record I was sat at home, too young to attend my sister’s school’s speech night, which had been interrupted by the news.

In the book Jake Epping is given the opportunity to step back through a “rabbit hole” in time to a particular day in September 1958. The discoverer of the portal, Al Templeton, shares his plan to use it to go back and prevent the Kennedy assassination, which he is now unable to complete due to terminal cancer. He wants Jake to take his place and fulfil the mission.

Naturally dubious, aware of all the pitfalls of time travel, Jake undertakes some cautious experiments that seem to show that his small interventions can change the future, discernible when he returns to the present, but not always for the better. Al convinces him of the potential benefits for world peace, racial equality and global well-being of Kennedy’s survival and, having nothing better to do in 2011, Jake agrees to spend five years living in the “land of ago”.

Cue late fifties and early sixties nostalgia, lovingly portrayed by one of the best storytellers around - a reminder of life without mobile phones, computers, terrorism or the internet. Jake has time to get comfortable and start a new life, but all the time the clock is ticking down to the fateful date for which he must prepare and before which he is supposed act, brutally out of character. And then what – stay or return?

Time travel is tricky and wisely King does not attempt an explanation, just sets out and sticks to his parameters. On those terms the concept works and provides a good vehicle for the various storylines. He writes well, that is a given, but at 850 pages the nostalgia is a little overdone (about 200 pages) and the heroics a little excessive (I can see Tom Cruise wanting the part). In the end only the burning desire to find out how it all ends, both for Jake and for the world, got me through to the frantic climax.

Hand Me Down World – Lloyd Jones

This is the story of a woman’s search for her child, taken by the father who used her as an unwitting surrogate mother. It is told through the sequential accounts of those she interacts with en route; some encounters are fleeting, almost inconsequential, others are more substantial and influential.

Geographically she travels from North Africa, through Italy, to Berlin. Emotionally it is harder to chart her progress, as the statements by the third parties reveal more about them than her, and lead to a range of tangential mini-stories which become more relevant as we reach Berlin. It is an interesting approach, but eventually, thankfully, we get her first-hand account to fill the gaps and weave together the other testimonies.

The book is also about the kindness of (some) strangers, how the same events are recollected differently by those involved, and the city of Berlin.

The New Zealand author created the work while on a writer’s residency in the German capital, and he depicts well how it feels to be a stranger in unfamiliar surroundings. The same author’s “Mr Pip” had a similar element of cultural dislocation.

Both books were a good read, well written and taking the reader a little off the beaten track.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher – Kate Summerscale

The events of the shocking 1860 Road Hill House murder and the efforts to solve the crime form the backbone of the book. It was a classic country house mystery where the murderer seemingly had to be one of the household – family, visitor or staff.

Mr Whicher from the relatively newly formed detective service at Scotland Yard is eventually put on the case, and has to probe apart the genteel and respectable family façade to discover who had the means, motive and opportunity. To do so required breaking down the traditional police deference to the moneyed classes.

As the story unfolds Summerscale broadens her canvas to include the development of the detective service - in which Whicher was prominent, almost achieving celebrity status – and detective fiction. Art imitated life as bluff working class, but intelligent and articulate, policemen began to appear in popular fiction, for example Inspector Bucket in Bleak House and Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone.

The book weaves together these themes nicely with the discourses on detectives and detective fiction long enough to be informative but short enough not to detract from the main narrative. The contextual social history is similarly well integrated.

The prose is measured as befits the book’s documentary nature, but pace and interest is maintained throughout the 300+ pages, as the reader is teased with new revelations over a 70 year period. Even beyond then titbits of information emerge that embellish the extraordinary story further.

Overall an unusual and fascinating adjunct to the detective fiction genre.