I finished the audiobook of Elmore Leonard’s crime novel Pronto, about a bookie on the run from the Miami Mob who goes into hiding in an Italian seaside resort town. Not Leonard’s best, but it does introduce a very popular character, Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, later the star of the TV show Justified. He’s the best part of the book.
My current audiobook is Robert Heinlein’s Friday, about a genetically-engineered courier, assassin and spy on the run in a not-too-distant-future high-tech society. A bit preachy at times but mostly good.
Also making slow progress through Brian Steel Wills’s George Henry Thomas: As True As Steel, a thick bio of a Civil War general and hero of mine. I’m now up to the Mexican War.
I’m a big Archer fan. His First Among Equals is a terrific political novel about three men (four, in the British edition) rising through the House of Commons to all eventually vie to become the next Prime Minister. Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less is a real page-turner of a comic revenge fantasy. His early short story collections are also quite good.
I have read about half of a book called Disappointment River, which tells two stories: the adventures of Alexander Mackenzie as he explored the Northwest Territories and paddled the Mackenzie River (how convenient to discover it was named after him!) in search of a northwest passage in the 1700s, and the adventures of the author (Brian Castner) as he attempts to paddle the river himself. The writing is good, the book is very well-researched (some of the history is a bit tangential and could’ve used a little tightening), and the author is an engaging person to spend time with. Unfortunately it’s taken me three weeks to get this far…
Mackenzie is better known than the Elusive Mr Pond that I mentioned in a previous thread, but owed a lot to Pond’s earlier travels in the great North-West. It’s the usual story: the person who does things and then writes about them survives better in history than someone who does things but just tells tales by the fireside when he’s old.
I’m just reading a book entitled “Early Voyages and Northern Approaches: 1000 - 1632” by an Icelandic-Canadian historian, Tryggvi Oleson. It’s the first of the Canadian Centenary Series, a multi-volume set on Canadian history which was published around the time of the Canadian Centennial by Noted Canadian Historians.
It’s badly dated in two respects. First, it’s entirely Euro-centric. He just assumes that Canada’s history begins when Europeans arrived in North America. It doesn’t even occur to him (or the general editors of the series, apparently), that just maybe Canada’s history began when the ancestors of the Indigenous people arrived in northern Canada and began to spread throughout North America. It’s very much the “animatronic” approach to history: indigenous people are just part of the landscape and only come to life when white folks contact them.
The second dated approach is how the author interprets the influence of the Icelanders. He was a specialist in Icelandic / Greenland history, and one of the first to explore the possibility of extensive Icelandic influence in the eastern High Arctic. The facts of Icelandic exploration have been supported by subsequent archaeological finds, but the author draws the conclusion that any improvements in the culture of the High Arctic people’s came from the Icelanders, who inter-married with the indigenous people and eventually “degenerated”. Ouch. Quotes lots of disparaging comments from medieval sources comparing the tall and attractive Icelanders to the squat and ugly Indigenous peoples, which the author takes as proof of the superiority genetic and cultural influences of the Icelanders on the indigenous eastern High Arctic populations.
I’ll continue reading, because the extracts from the sagas are interesting, but definitely not the definitive history.
Technically he’s not wrong, “history” did start when the Europeans arrived. History is defined as “People writing about themselves or other people writing about them”.
That however, doesn’t equalize the inherent racism in not giving the indigenous people’s a voice and a past.
Interesting; when I was a history major back in college several eons ago, I never heard that definition. We did spend a chunk of time thinking about different definitions of “history” and why it was that so many of them paid no attention to non-Europeans (leavened with occasional references to the people of the Middle East and east Asia).
The thing I remember about that most was a claim that “history is the study of change in cultures,” and so sub-Saharan Africans, or Native Americans, or the indigenous residents of the Andes, or the Australian aboriginal peoples, didn’t qualify as interesting to true historians. ISTR an article by British historian Hugh trevor-Roper (?) on this subject. (Maybe it was another British historian–AJP Taylor possibly. One of them.) It was completely obnoxious, highly ignorant about the realities of these cultures, and thoroughly snooty.
I’m actually not willing to buy your definition today either tbh (I am not a professional historian but I have written a lot of history books for young adults and chapters in history textbooks).
Sounds like…quite a book, and perhaps more informative for the prevailing attitudes in the sixties than for the actual subject.
yes, Peter Pond is an important figure in Disappointment River. he does sound like quite a guy–I’m intrigued by the murders he committed and his single-mindedness, and the former first grade teacher in me loooooves his invented spelling, which Castner enjoys quoting (“Thus Ended the Most Ridicklas Campane Eaver Hard of”). No question that no Pond would’ve meant no Mackenzie.
I think you’d probably enjoy the book, but you might find yourself skipping some of the historical stuff as it’s clear you already are familiar with a chunk of it.
I’m attracted to the book partly because I like books about adventure and exploration, and partly because I like history, and in this case also because I really like paddling. I have never paddled anything resembling the Mackenzie River, but while reading I have been reminded a few times of a canoe trip I went on back in the…seventies, I guess, in what I considered far northern Ontario. We drove north from International Falls/Fort Frances, fifty (?) mostly empty miles to the Trans-Canada highway, drove along the mostly empty highway for a long time, headed north on one of the only roads that jutted off in that direction, traversed another fifty mostly-empty miles, and finally reached the end of the road, literally, and our destination: a network of backcountry rivers and lakes good for a (decidedly non-leisurely) eight-day trip. Nothing like the Mackenzie, but some of Castner’s descriptions bring me back anyway.
One memory we all have of that trip was reaching the tiny town at the end of the road. It didn’t have much, but it did have a Chinese restaurant. Of all things. So here I am reading this book, and as the author approaches the tiny, tiny town of Fort Simpson–smaller, much further north, and much more isolated than the town in Ontario I’m referring to–he discovers that the town has, yes, a Chinese restaurant. I had to laugh.
I’m afraid I completely disagree with you, DZedCNfsed.
Oral history is an important part of modern historical principles.
It has different challenges from written history, but it’s crucial to understanding the history of Indigenous peoples. It’s just as much history as written.
My, my. That doesn’t match the approach to history I got. But trevor-Roper or Taylor would be candidates for that approach to history. Grand sweep of (European) empires and all that.
The history of the High Arctic peoples actually shows major developments. There were at least three different cultures, arriving at different times and interacting with each other as well as the Icelanders: the Thule, the Dorset, and the Inuit/Eskimo peoples. They had different art, different clothing, different technologies for hunting and fishing in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth - and surviving or being replaced. It’s fascinating, in part because it depends so much on archaeology, oral history, and, increasingly, DNA analysis.
Reading your comment makes me realize that I am probably giving the exact wrong impression…the claim was T-R’s or A-J-P’s, but the professors were spending their time hacking it to pieces. Not a difficult thing to do!
No, the history dept where I went to school certainly had some holdovers who believed that stuff, and certainly the courses tended heavily toward what we might call “white” history–but the times they were a-changin’, and we were very much encouraged (especially by the younger members of the faculty) to see “history” as a term that applied just as much to non-Europeans as it did to folks of European descent.
Last night I finished Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars. It was good! More interesting than I expected it to be. I will definitely read Never a Dull Moment: 1971 The Year That Rock Exploded by the same author…eventually.
I want to read Dark Sacred Night, the new Michael Connelly book about Renee Ballard and Harry Bosch, but decided to start with The Late Show, which introduces the Ballard character.
Finished Greybeard, by Brian Aldiss. Very much a work of its time, (mid-1960’s) but better than I expected. It also included something I don’t recall ever seeing in a book before…
There’s a mystery, and the villain (who didn’t do it) solves it.
And now for something completely different: Janet Lambert’s High Hurdles, a YA romance written at approximately the same time.
I finished reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, a series of loosely linked stories about the widows and spinsters who make up the cream of “genteel” society in a small village. I was very pleasantly surprised by how funny it was; the only other novel of Mrs Gaskell’s that I have read is North and South, which was pretty good but relatively serious.
Finished We Sold Our Souls by the incomparable Grady Hendrix. It had a part that was almost too scary for me to read, and page 239 brought tears of happiness to my eyes. Really fun overall, though the ending was weak.
Seems like an interesting bookend (if you will) to my recently-read “rise and fall of rock stars” nonfiction! I downloaded a sample to my Kindle. I have no idea when I’ll actually get around to checking it out, but I’ll be sure to let you know when I finally do.
I read Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great. right afterwards, I stumbled across a copy of Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God. if I took things as a sign, I’d take this as a sign. Armstrong’s book is deliberately said to be a response to Hitchens’ book (and other “new atheist” books).
I’m still reading Armstrong’s book. So far it isn’t a rebuttal, but a history of religion and the changing meaning of “Belief”. It’s all extremely interesting (both books), but I have the feeling that the carefully described True Meaning of belief and religious te4rms and concepts that Armstrong is pushing (and which she believes Hitchens has missed and is mistaken regarding) was not really held by anyone besides a highly-educated and motivated upper stratum of theologians. the vast bulk of communicants in any religion don’t have the interest, time, or intellect (or various combinations of these) to put much thought or effort into their religion. I recall myself, as a teenager, thinking that my own Catholic upbringing was an odd attempt to force-feed us some pretty esoteric doctrine cooked up by the Fathers of the Church, and that they must necessarily have cut a LOT of corners in trying to make it comprehensible to grade schoolers. THAT’S your body of churchgoers, not the intense and concentrated philosophers who realize the impossibility of trying to verbalize what an ineffable deity is like. To most churchgoers, God was The Invisible Creator King in the Sky, and they wouldn’t have much time for Deep Thinkers who would try to argue that God really wasn’t the Creator, and you couldn’t even really say God “existed,” since God was the essence of existence. These are the folks who erected the institutions that Hitchens and others railed against in their books.
