Category: Adult books – fiction

Tripods Sequel Update

John McNichol (now added to the sidebar) posted this good news for fans of Tripods Attack!:

I am now working on the 2nd draft of the Sequel, tentatively titled “The Emperor of North America.”

Gilbert returns to his American homeland, Herb and Gil become separated in more ways than one, and both boys face temptations, trials and dangers in an attempt to survive the onslaught of the self-declared Emperor.

Here’s hoping you enjoy it as much as the last one!

If you haven’t read Tripods, I highly recommend it.  Not my usual genre, but I have both a weakness for all things GKC, and a boy who enjoys the normal quota of aliens, slime, plots-to-takeover-earth, etc.   Real win-win in the literature department.

(The Curt Jester approves, too, if that helps you decide.)

History Book Round-Up : “Discovering” America

‘Tis the season for talking about explorers, colonizers, and the people who had to deal with them.  Here are my four off-the-top-of-my-head favorite books to date.  The ones that if I need to quick grab something from the shelf, here’s what I grab.

(I should note that I will be grabbing from other people’s shelves: three from my local public library, and the fourth from my dad’s house. 3 of the 4 come with a ‘buy’ recommendation, but since I don’t have to do so myself, I won’t.)

Read all four, and you should be well on your way to being able to discuss all the hot Thanksgiving-related history topics that will be no doubt swirling around the table next week.

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Don’t Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned by Kenneth C. Davis

This one showed up on the New Books shelf of my local library either last winter or the year before, and I grabbed it despite myself.  From the title and cover it sounded like it was going to be one of those cute little wow-your-friends-with-trivia books written in large print with lots of bulleted lists of amazing factoids, destined to circle the internet in spamlets for years to come.  Not so.  Far from it.

Each chapter is devoted to a famous moment in American History, as usually taught in American public schools.  Columbus, Pilgrims, all that stuff.  (You can look at the table of contents on amazon).  The content is the setting-the-record-straight work that college professors do to incoming freshman, essentially filling in the details and nuances to stories that are too-often summarized in three sentences through most of k-12.

I think I must have found the book tedious at times — I had to make myself finish it for the purpose of being able to write a review.  For certain there are moments when Davis gets on roll and his politics start showing, especially when he steps beyond his area of expertise.  And of course if you read the book this week, you may find yourself an insufferable dinner companion at Thanksgiving next week when a well-meaning relative tries to tell the neices and nephews about ‘The story of Thanksgiving’ and you feel compelled to offer additions and corrections.

All that said, it is still a useful reference for anyone who is interested in US history but hasn’t been through a good college-level course lately.  Loaded with details and facts surrounding various controversial moments in US history.  If you have your brain intact and can therefore read critically and reserve the right to form your own opinion, this book is a good starting point for making the transition from a sound-bite ‘knowledge’ of history to a competent understanding of what actually happened, to whom, by whom, when and how.

–> I recommend it as a library find.  Not sure I’d pay for it (above and beyond my regularly scheduled tax dollars), but I’m glad I read it.

Mayflower 1620 published by the National Geographic Society is one we bring home every year from the library.  If I couldn’t get it there, I would buy it.  The topic is the historic voyage of the Mayflower, with photos from the travels of the living history group that re-enacted the trip. Lots of good, solid, detail-laden historic evidence.

Look for it in your children’s department, but the book would be of interest to anybody who wants a thorough primer on the topic. The text is for older-elementary years and up.  As a read-aloud to younger children, I find myself having to do way too much explaining.  Younger kids, however, will enjoy the photos, and you can tell a pared-down version of events as you browse.

(Nerd-person tip of the week: Because it is easily readable, illustrated with lots of captions, and interesting across age ranges, this would be a fun one to bring along to Thanksgiving, for the browsing pleasure of people who don’t do football, and are otherwise at a loss for post-dinner conversation.  If yours is the sort of family where perusing a history book could count as ‘fun’.  It probably is, if you read this blog.)

And here are two that longtime readers may remember:

I just re-posted my original review of Squanto’s Journey.   Excellent book, beautifully illustrated and told.  Best for middle-elementary age and up — a touch too detailed for little listeners.

And finally, moving off the whole Thanksgiving topic, but still very much concerned with the early encounters between europeans and native americans is the novel Cacique by Bishop Robert Baker.   Unless you’re from Florida (and even then) you may not have studied the history of the early spanish missions in that state.  This is a very fun way to learn a good bit about the topic, if you like breezy action-adventure tales.  (Who doesn’t?  And written by a real live catholic bishop, so you can feel virtuous for reading it.)  My original review is re-posted immediately below.

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That does it for this week.  Have a great Thanksgiving, and try to be gentle with your fellow diners as you whip out all your newly-acquired historical knowledge.

(re-post) Book Review of _Cacique_

And here’s another one for the round-up, originally posted on the old site in February 2007.

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Cacique: A Novel of Florida’s Heroic Mission HIstory

By Bishop Robert J. Baker with Tony Sands

St. Catherine of Sienna Press, 2006

ISBN-13:  978-0-9762284-4-8

ISBN-10:  0-9762284-4-0

www.bishopbaker.com

I sent this book to my dad for Christmas, thinking it was more his genre than mine.   The plan was for him to read it, and then if he thought I’d like it, I’d read it over vacation.   First part of the plan didn’t work out — Dad has been short on reading time lately — so we skipped directly to step 2.  I read it, it was good.

Bishop Baker’s novel (pronounced ca-SEE-kay) is a fictional account of a franciscan mission to the Potano tribe in northern Florida.  The genre is Hardy Boys meets Butler’s Lives. The writing is clear and concise, not artsy — the prose serves as a vehicle for the story, not the end in itself.

Unlike the Hardy brothers, the heroes in this story do actually grow old and even die, such that in order to cover the entire life of the mission, Bishop Baker uses a sucession of main characters.  We begin with Fr. Tomas, the young and determined priest who founded the mission which is the subject of the book.  We end with the perspective of Felipe-Toloca, the cacique of the Potano village at the time the mission is disbanded by the Spanish.    The transition from one principal character to the next flows smoothly, and helps build the overall study of the life of the mission, which lasted over 100 years.  In moving from generation to generation we gain a sense of the history of the community, as well as a meditation on the communion of saints.

Also unlike the Hardy boys, our heroes are concerned with more than just fighting crime in Bayport.  The overarching theme of the many adventures is nothing short of evangelization and the bringing about of the kingdom of God.  Here Bishop Baker does a great service for catholic characters everywhere, for once rendering a series of faithful catholic heroes — first and foremost a priest — whose interior life is solid and sound.   Their struggles are not with the holy faith, but with how to live out that faith in the particular time and place given to them.

The novel succeeds where history books sometimes fail, in keeping the people real.  Neither the Spanish nor the Indians are made out to be a homogeneous pool of Good Guys or Bad Guys; we get individuals of all stripes, none perfect, and none are beyond the hope of forgiveness, mercy and redemption.

One of the risks of historical fiction is that we learn more about the author than about history.  Those looking for clues into Bishop Baker’s secret thoughts will discover the same messages that he has proclaimed throughout the diocese in his public life.   None of this was heavy-handed in my opinion;  even if our heroes are extraordinary for their own time — or our time — they are nonetheless consistent in action and attitude with other missionary saints of the 1600’s.

If you like an action-packed adventure story, this one is fun.  There are martial arts, traps, disguises, battles, shipwrecks, the whole nine yards.  If you are looking for a peek inside the mind of a missionary priest, that’s there too.  And at the end of the book there is brief note about the history that inspired the novel, as well as a bibliography for those who want to do further research.

Good book, very readable, very enjoyable.

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And a bonus feature This book  deserves an award for making a major advance in the world of southern literature: It treats the landscape of northern Florida as if it were, well, a perfectly normal place to live.  No long odes to Spanish Moss or treatises on the humidity — mosquitoes are mentioned so infrequently you might temporarily forget where this story is set.  The land is simply there.  Alligators, springs, quicksand, palmettos — they are all present, but mentioned only when they are relevant to action at hand. There is a time and place, of course, for seeing a well-known landscape with the eyes of an outsider; but frankly it is a relief to see a novel that is not only set in the south, but told through southern eyes.