January Book Reviews - Part 2

THE OREGON TRAIL - Francis Parkman (315 pages)

c. 1872 (reissued in 1963) This book is the real deal, not some historian’s look at the Old West.  It’s “straight from the horse’s mouth.” In 1846 Francis Parkman, a young Bostonian just graduated from Harvard and in ill health, sets off on a summer excursion to the Rockies (“a tour of curiosity and amusement”) with his cousin, Quincy Adams Shaw, also a recent Harvard graduate.

          Parkman plans to write a history of the French and Indian Wars, but since the Indians of the East are either extinct or removed to western reservations, he feels he needs to live with the still free-roaming Indian tribes out west to better understand their way of life.

          During his “tour” of the prairies and mountains, there is a mass migration of settlers moving across the landscape in Conestoga wagons, headed for a new life in California and Oregon.  The book’s title is misleading.  I expected yet another account of pioneer travels on the famed Oregon trail. But this book is about Parkman’s sojourn with an Ogallala tribe, and he never travels the Oregon Trail any farther than Fort Laramie.  There his cousin Shaw must be left behind after he develops a severe case of poison ivy.

          Parkman goes off with the tribe and keeps detailed notes of their nomadic life following the buffalo herds. The book, which the author, whose eyesight has deteriorated to near-blindness, dictates to his cousin after they return to civilization, is very descriptive of the Plains Indians’ way of life. It is said to be one of the great autobiographical accounts of the American frontier and gives a very interesting, first-hand account of Native American customs and society.

JIM WHITEWOLF: The Life of a Kiowa Apache Indian - Charles S. Brant (141 pages)

c. 1969  This was an absolutely fascinating memoir of an ordinary Kiowa Apache Indian born around 1878 in Oklahoma.  It chronicles the disintegration of the old customs and way of life of Native Americans as the white man encroached on their world.

          Ethnographer Charles S. Brant spent five weeks interviewing the old man in 1949. His introduction to the cultural and historical background of the tribe was a bit dry, though necessary for a proper understanding of the culture --- but once the old Indian began his story, in his own words, I was hooked.

          He dealt very frankly with his childhood, family, schooling, marriage, alcoholism, womanizing and gambling, divorce, his membership in the Native American Church and its peyote prayer rituals, grass and oil leases, the devastating flu that killed so many of the tribe prior to WW1, and his experiences with Western religion.  In the final years of his long life, Jim Whitewolf was one of the very few surviving Kiowa Apaches with vivid memories of the old ways of the life of his people, and as such he was a national treasure. Recommended for those with an interest in Native American history and culture.

DARKNESS VISIBLE - William Styron (84 pages)

c. 1990  I will start by admitting that I very much did NOT like the only book of Styron’s that I’ve read so far, Sophie’s Choice. But I don’t like to give up on an author after only one book, so I chose this one because it was short. 

          It turned out to be the author’s memoir of his experience with clinical depression, which struck when he turned 60 and very nearly drove him to suicide.  I don’t believe I’ve ever experienced a book that paralleled my own feelings so closely, as I too struggled with years of debilitating depression, which a number of anti-depressant failed to relieve. His feelings of helplessness and despair mirrored mine. I eventually found my release through six months of cognitive therapy; the author had to admit himself to a mental health facility to beat his illness.

          This is a book everyone should read. Nobody knows what a living hell depression is unless they’ve been through it. Sufferers should read it, simply to understand that it IS survivable. Others should read it, so they know the symptoms to look for in themselves or loved ones in case it should ever hit close to home. (I was relieved to learn, after googling the author, that he lived to be 81 and died of natural causes.)

CLOSE TO SHORE - Michael Capuzzo (137 pages)

c. 2003 Subtitled: The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916

For two weeks in July, 1916, a rogue great white shark cruised along the shore of New Jersey, spreading death and panic in its wake.  Five people were attacked in three different locations, with only one surviving. (As I was reading this exciting page-turner, scenes and music from the movie  Jaws kept coming to mind.) The attacks sparked frenzied hunting for the man-eater, and fifty-eight years later inspired the novel Jaws by Peter Benchley and the subsequent movie by Steven Spielberg (1975).

ENDANGERED PLEASURES - Barbara Holland (204 pages, LP)

c. 1995  I got a big kick out of this little book, which contains witty essays on various guilty pleasures. These are the activities people used to enjoy before politically correct, moralistic, or self-righteous experts shamed or threatened them into abandoning.

          I “found” myself many times in between the covers of this book: in the sections on napping, exercise, gardening, traveling, bad words, and getting older, to name just a few. Sometimes I was embarrassed to admit to myself these sinful indulgences. But most of the time I smugly congratulated myself for enjoying them, in spite of what others think, because the author gave me an encouraging thumbs-up.

          Because it’s broken up into short essays, one needn’t read the entire book at one sitting. A few a day, read at bedtime, will tickle the funny-bone and lead to guiltless dreams of indulging in whatever makes one happy.