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.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

The journey

Part of the America 1850 reading journey

How it got on the shelf

Back in 2006 my daughter was doing her GCSE English and, knowing my predilection for second hand bookshops, asked me to look out for a cheap copy of Cold Mountain that she could annotate as part of her revision.  By the time I obliged, courtesy of a charity shop in, I think, Skipton, the need had passed as the exam had already taken place.  Not wanting to waste the 50p or so, the book went on the shelf awaiting its time.

This, in the meantime, has required me to studiously avoid the film.  To see the film before reading the book is heresy for me.  The infinite possibilities presented by the author disappear once the director imposes his or her viewpoint in the film’; subtleties are lost (as often are huge chunks of plot) and even worse new events and characters can creep in.  Don’t get me wrong, films of books can be very good films and I enjoy them, but I don’t let them spoil a good book.

The Review

This is the story of Ada and Inman, who met briefly, but memorably, in one of the Southern states just before Inman has to go and fight for the confederate cause in the American Civil War.  Wounded and disillusioned by the fighting Inman sets off home to Cold Mountain, where Ada’s simple but privileged existence is ceasing due to the death of her father and the impact of the civil war both on their smallholding and on the economy of the South.

We flip from Inman’s tortuous journey through the woods and mountains and rivers and more woods and more mountains, to Ada’s scratching and scraping and eking of a living from the ground (aided by the ever resourceful Ruby). People are met along the way, incidents occur, and the beauty of the Midwest scenery is lovingly portrayed.

There is a sense of a world changing, echoing the previous change as the Indians of Inman’s youth disappeared leaving only their mark in the mountain caves.  The slave economy of the South is unsustainable, but what will the Northern dominance bring in its place?

But the big question is will Inman ever get back to Cold Mountain and how will Ada receive him?

It’s a slow burner, but the dénouement is tense and the ending unsure even to the last page of the epilogue.

Set in Stone by Linda Newbery

Read as part N of the “Along the Library Shelf” reading journey

 

Chosen because

N is an under-represented initial on the fiction shelf and non-existent in the crime & thriller section - and I was banking on at least a Jo Nesbo! However this was one of the available few and had a tempting blurb, decent review quotes and a Costa Book Awards category winner sticker.

The Review

It is 1898 and Samuel Godwin, straight out of art college, thinks he has landed a plum job at the remote “Fourwinds” manor house as at tutor to the recently widowed owner’s two attractive young daughters. As this takes only a couple of hours a day this leaves plenty of time to study and paint the house and garden as well as ponder on the household set up.

This includes Charlotte Agnew, the girls’ governess / companion, who is barely older than her charges. She too is a fairly recent appointment but already has her feet well under the table.

Of course this idyll soon begins to show stress lines. Why are the girls a bit flakey? Why have only three of the four wind sculptures been completed? What happened to the sculptor and to the previous governess; and for that matter to the wife?

As befits the period, the respectable façade hides some unpalatable depths; skeletons emerge too numerous for a cupboard – at least a walk in wardrobe would be needed; and Samuel and Charlotte have to deal with revelation after revelation.

These two take turns to describe their involvement in events. Both adopt their best late Victorian, educated but deferential style, so some concentration is needed to keep track of who is currently in the story chair as the narrative zips along.

But that is just nit-picking - the characters, atmosphere and plotline are well developed with a light touch that makes this just a good, engrossing and enjoyable read.

Read another?

The author has written mainly for children and young adults, but The Shell House and Sisterland may be worth a look.

The Perfect Mile by Neal Bascomb

Read as part of the sport reading journey

This was written in 2004 but takes its subject matter from 50 years earlier when athletes were strictly amateur and the imperial mile was still the main event. Across three continents three runners vied to be first to run 1 mile inside 4 minutes. Englishman Roger Bannister, Australian John Landy and American Wes Santee each returned from the 1952 Helsinki Olympics disappointed, but as great athletes do, they responded by seeking a new challenge and training harder and smarter.

Bascomb gives some background on each athlete but mainly sticks to the sport – the training, the psychology and the races. Nominally they raced against the clock (like Coe and Ovett in the 80s they avoided direct competition) but always they had their two rivals in mind.

Pieced together from contemporaneous sources and more recent interviews with each protagonist and other eye witnesses, the book gives a sound insight into the three characters; their philosophical approach to the sport and their motivation, as well as their developing techniques and training regimes. The technical information is there, but is concise and does not get in the way of the narrative.

Significant races are graphically described, lap by lap, grimace by grimace. Tension mounts as the times come down. Even if you know who first breaks the barrier, there is still the question of who will win the first face to face meeting (but avoid the spoiler photos in the middle until all is revealed in the text).

My interest in athletics was ignited as a thirteen year old by the 1964 Mexico City Olympics, when Robbie Brightwell’s disappointing silver medal in the 400m was eclipsed by his fiancée Ann Packer’s gold in the 800m. It was a great story and the archive clip still gives me goose-bumps. In those days and even into the 1970s the amateur nature of athletics still held sway, so the Bannister era of fitting training and races around a job and winning no more than instant glory is recognisable to me. For younger readers the contrast is stark indeed with modern full time professional athletes earning prize money and sponsorship deals.

Yet at heart the simplicity of the track athlete, man v man or man v clock, is timeless. This account of the perfect mile stands as testament to that sporting ideal, which may now be shrouded in celebrity, glitz and commercial gain but is, I think, I hope, still there.