The Travel Auction - Mark Green

This is everything you want in a light read - interesting characters, a fascinating set of circumstances and a story that evolves to create curiosity and the need to see what is next.  So what if your fiance leaves you for a plumber just as you are about to head to South America for a month.  You have the tickets and the time, but you also have an allergy that demands a companion to give you a shot if you should eat the wrong thing.  What to do?  Well, you have a ticket, its just that is has the name of your ex and she is not going to change her mind (why would you want her too?)  So it is simple.  Go on ebay and advertise for another woman who has the same name and can just up and go with a stranger almost immediately.

It is improbable, but that is what makes it fun and of course a woman is found to meet the requirements - its just that she is blind and comes with a lot of baggage.  That will not stop a good story from evolving so the two travel together - each dependent upon the other and we are taking for a ride.  The places are fascinating and the people they encounter are colorful and help sustain the flow of adventure.

Of course we want to know if these two will become a pair in a more significant way, but the author is witty and will keep the story light with humor and provides just enough tension to sustain the overall story.

The author has a wonderful sense of character and the two primary individuals work out their complex individuality as the travels progress and we see that their relationship is definitely tempered by their surroundings - hot and humid, rainy and muddy, cold, isolated... At the end you will encounter your own laughter and a genuine love of the individuals.

Of course it is not right to tell you what happens, but suffice it to say that the author avoids cliche endings and it is enjoyable to the last word.

Custer's Fall by David Humphreys Miller

This book was a timely read and a gift from members of a group I guided to the Little Bighorn Battlefield.  First published in 1992 this book is based on the recollections of Indians who had been at the battle.  Fortunately, Miller was able to interview these men before they died - a long and productive process made more effective by the author's ability to speak in the Indian dialects.  The material was gathered from 1935 to 1957 and put in to a very effective narrative.

Rather than just giving us quotes the author tells the story of the day when General Custer began his ride to the encampment on the Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn) sending Reno and Benteen with portions of his army in different directions - thereby reducing his own strength.  He ignored his scouts, he ignored his own orders, and in getting all his men killed he proceeded to endanger and ruin the career of Major Reno and to affect a slaughter that would remove the plain's Indians from their homeland and prominence.

It is a fascinating book because it is from the side of the attacked - keep in mind, this was not a massacre. Custer was not unarmed, he was not surprised - he attacked the camp just as he has on the Washita earlier in his career.  He was  killer of men, women, and children, and his hubris knew no bounds.  With an embedded newspaper man to record his great victory and a costume that separated him from his men so that he would strike a heroic figure, he committed  his troops to mass suicide.

We learn in these narratives about the boys who find a tin of biscuits early in the movement, about Custer disregarding his men and scouts, about women in mourning for relatives who died in the battle of Rosebud that just preceded this engagement.

There are conflicts and jealousies between the bands that gathered just as there would be in any large community of diverse backgrounds.  The encampment was miles long and made up of neighborhoods of different tribes and different bands.  It was not a homogeneous gathering, but it was a gathering for discussion and not war.

As the battle proceeds there are old wounds that fester in the minds of the combatants, injustices that demand satisfaction, and a conflicting morality as Sitting Bull urges the warriors to not take from the dead soldiers and to let Reno's beleaguered troops escape the field of death.

This battle was not just the end of Custer, it was the end of a way of life and yet the day that it happened is but a mere few hours of conflict.

Thanks to the author, the interviews are blended in to a single narrative that provides a strong sense of what happened on that fateful day.

Summer book notes

Red Cloud and Crazy Horse by Ed McGaa has value as a duel biography because it is written by a Sioux and therefore contains perspectives and information that I have not found elsewhere.  I met with Ed last week and he is currently working on his own biography.  The writing is uneven, but the subject is compelling.

Unknown by Didier Van Cauwelaet - this French novel is really intriguing.  Think of a returning to consciousness after a coma and discovering that someone is occupying your body, using your name, married to your wife.  Then discover that your identity has been erased.  What do you do?  Where do you go?  How do you prove you are who you think you are?  And then there is the nagging question - are you really who you think you are?

The Man in the Basement, Walter Mosely.

I loved this book.  Imagine a rich and famous white guy shows up at a black residence knowing that the owner is single, in terrible debt and in need of cash.  Then the man proposes to rent the basement of the house at an outrageous price and to move in to the basement, where he will be literally locked in a cell.  What to do?  Do you want to be the black man caught with a white man locked up in your basement?  Can you afford to turn down his cash?

Cooked by Michael Pollan.

No one writes about food in a more interesting way that Pollan.  But of course he does not just write about food - he writes about the people who prepare it, the history of its presentation and the experience he has in duplicating what they did.  BBQ, beer making, and sour dough bread are only three of the topics in this book on fire, water, earth, and air - the historic elements of Earth. 

The Accidental City - Lawrence Powell

Powell gives us a detailed look at the complexity of the city that would become New Orleans and helps us understand this city that has no counterpart in the US or anywhere else.  It is a city built where no city should be built and it has withstood more foreign intrigue and natural disasters than any other major city.

“During the city’s lush decades, just about everything the Mississippi Valley sent to eastern markets had to pass through New Orleans, as did all the buttons and textiles, shoes and wine, that mid-America received in exchange.  It was as though the city were the drain plug in an immense bathtub.  And as the basin released its county, so the city’s coffers swelled.”

In the beginning, no one wanted to make a city here, except the man who had gained ownership of the land.  “The colony’s early capitals weren’t on the river.  They were at Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and, after 1701, in the environs of Mobile, Alabama, many miles to the east.  The capital was transferred in 1717, but not to Louisiana.  It was placed Biloxi… Only Bienville and his supporters wanted to relocate the capital to the New Orleans site.  He had cleared that location in 1718.”

And then it was only because of our first major economic fiasco.

“But for the bursting of the [Mississippi Bubble – the first stock market crash] New Orleans might have been built in the shadow of Baton Rouge at a now forgotten bend in the river known as Bayou Manchac.  This was where officials in France, whose word was supposed to be final, had wanted to put it.”

The river was the key, but even that was hard to find.  

“The continental shoreline is pitted with these estuaries.  They are easy to make out from the offshore.  But the Mississippi’s deltaic mouth, which is often shrouded in fog and bordered with alluvial plumes of sediment, is practically indistinguishable from the minor streams and bayous that spider seaward through the marshy coastland.  For nearly two centuries, Spanish ships yearly brushed the Louisiana coastline en route from Vera Cruz to Havana without once recognizing the discharge of the prodigious stream.  Extant maps of the upper Gulf Coast were misleading.  From earlier explorations and Native American lore, Spain knew that a large river flowed into the sea somewhere along its northern shore, but their charts showed it emptying into the Bay of Espiritu Santo, in present-day Texas.  What did catch their eye when they skirted the Mississippi’s birdfoot passes were cones of mud that had been pressured to the surface by river silt piling up on the ocean floor.  Where the cones broke the water’s surface, early Spanish mariners mistook them for “black rocks” palisades of “petrified trees,” and they gave them wide berth except when sludge, some of the “mud lumps” lurking just below the ocean’s surface were known to erupt with enough flatulence to lift passing ships completely out of the water.”  When LaSalle returned to North America after his great exploration of the river he could not find the Mississippi and ended up in Texas!

But the story of the city goes beyond the shifting flags of Spain, England, France, West Florida and the US.  It is a story of creole, Indians, African, and white populations - nationalities and languages, and always it is about freedom and slavery.

There is no city more caught in the racial tensions and the idiocy of slavery than New Orleans and the fact is the city was settled more by the black than the white populations and the white population could not have prospered without the black labor and industry.

This story evolves over time and the racial mix is part of what makes this community so separate from all others, but there is a real sense of sadness in the lengthy process of equality.