Kathleen Eagle is best known for her contemporary romances and women's fiction set in the Indian Country of the Dakotas and Minnesota, but I recently learned that many years ago she wrote a few historical romances. I tracked down some of them, including Medicine Woman (1989). Set in the 1820's, it tells of a white American botanist who, in his explorations of the flora of the prairie, meets a Lakota woman who's been somewhat set apart from her tribe because of her dreams and visions.
It's a subtle, slow-blossoming romance, rich with Eagle's firsthand knowledge of Lakota culture and values. I enjoyed it.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
On Wellington (Book #67)
On Wellington: the Duke and his Art of War (Jac Weller, 1998) is a collection of essays and articles compiled after Weller's death. It's sort of an odd read. It assumes a certain level of knowledge of military history in general and Wellington's career in particular, but since the essays are short and topical, I didn't learn much I didn't already know. Probably the most interesting section, because it was new to me, was a discussion of the impact of Napoleon's and Wellington's tactics and strategies on the Civil War, followed by a speculation on how Gettysburg might've turned out if Wellington had commanded the Confederate force. (He thinks the South would've won the battle and possibly the war--it seems like that in Weller's view of the world, there's no military problem that couldn't be solved by time-traveling Wellington. He might be right about Gettysburg, since Lee's hands-off command style just didn't work after Stonewall Jackson died, IMHO. But I can't agree with an earlier essay that suggests that Wellington could've turned things around for the US in Vietnam. There are limits to what one man can do.)
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Rapture Ready (Book #66)
When I picked up Rapture Ready (Daniel Radosh, 2008), I was expecting pure snark, pure terror, or a blend of the two. Those are common approaches, you see, when outsiders try to write about the evangelical Christian subculture: either "OMG we'll be living in a theocracy within a decade if these people aren't stopped," or else "OMG look at the freaks." Radosh doesn't refrain from snark where it's deserved, but he's willing to engage with the Christians he meets as human beings worthy of respect. As a result, Rapture Ready is one of the best books of its kind I've read.
Radosh takes a tour of evangelical pop culture, observing everything from Christian pro wrestling to the arty, alternative Cornerstone music festival, from "creation science" museums to Christian comedians. He's a good writer and a perceptive, open-minded observer, and I enjoyed touring a culture I spent many years in and still inhabit the fringes of through his eyes. (And I was surprised as he was to discover that Frank Peretti is a pleasant, thoughtful, and considerate person!)
Radosh takes a tour of evangelical pop culture, observing everything from Christian pro wrestling to the arty, alternative Cornerstone music festival, from "creation science" museums to Christian comedians. He's a good writer and a perceptive, open-minded observer, and I enjoyed touring a culture I spent many years in and still inhabit the fringes of through his eyes. (And I was surprised as he was to discover that Frank Peretti is a pleasant, thoughtful, and considerate person!)
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Bath Tangle (Book #65)
I'm pretty sure I read Bath Tangle (Georgette Heyer, 1955) when I was 14 or 15. My hometown library had an extensive Heyer collection, and the plot sounded familiar. But since that was more than half my life ago, I decided it counted as a new read.
It's not my favorite Heyer--I prefer The Grand Sophy, The Spanish Bride, and Frederica--but it's a fun, frothy romp, and I like its relatively slow pace and large cast of characters. One trend I don't like in modern romances is how the hero and heroine are often the only three-dimensional characters in sight, and they fall in love and commit within the course of a few days (perhaps out of relief in finding someone who isn't a 2-D cardboard cut-out!).
That said...is it just me, or do English writers of the mid-20th century actually show more classism than those from about 150 years earlier? This isn't the worst in Heyer's canon in that regard, but there's a definite sense that everyone has their level and really ought to stick to it. Dorothy Sayers is the same way--one of these days I'm going to post my rant about how I want to step into the books and make Bunter strike out on his own and stop being so damn servile when anyone can see he's just as clever as Peter and Harriet if not more so. And I remember as a child being baffled when CS Lewis has Prince Rilian in The Silver Chair tell Jill that her bravery must be a sign that she comes of noble blood. I even asked my mom what that had to do with anything, and she did her best to explain about how Lewis wrote from a different time and place and so on.
I still like Heyer, and I downright love Sayers and Lewis, but I regularly want to wring their necks over how they treat class. But while there are plenty of class issues in Jane Austen's work, I never want to do more than "tsk-tsk" at her when she says something that goes against my values as a 21st-century American with blue collar, borderline hillbilly antecedents. And on the whole, that's how I feel about 18th and early 19th century writers in general. Yes, they generally accept a class structure I'd rail against if I found myself caught in it--but it never feels quite so rigid as in those mid-20th century authors.
I'm not sure my perception is accurate, though. It could be I'm just willing to cut Austen et al. more slack than I am a set of people whose lifetimes overlapped those of my parents. Thoughts?
It's not my favorite Heyer--I prefer The Grand Sophy, The Spanish Bride, and Frederica--but it's a fun, frothy romp, and I like its relatively slow pace and large cast of characters. One trend I don't like in modern romances is how the hero and heroine are often the only three-dimensional characters in sight, and they fall in love and commit within the course of a few days (perhaps out of relief in finding someone who isn't a 2-D cardboard cut-out!).
That said...is it just me, or do English writers of the mid-20th century actually show more classism than those from about 150 years earlier? This isn't the worst in Heyer's canon in that regard, but there's a definite sense that everyone has their level and really ought to stick to it. Dorothy Sayers is the same way--one of these days I'm going to post my rant about how I want to step into the books and make Bunter strike out on his own and stop being so damn servile when anyone can see he's just as clever as Peter and Harriet if not more so. And I remember as a child being baffled when CS Lewis has Prince Rilian in The Silver Chair tell Jill that her bravery must be a sign that she comes of noble blood. I even asked my mom what that had to do with anything, and she did her best to explain about how Lewis wrote from a different time and place and so on.
I still like Heyer, and I downright love Sayers and Lewis, but I regularly want to wring their necks over how they treat class. But while there are plenty of class issues in Jane Austen's work, I never want to do more than "tsk-tsk" at her when she says something that goes against my values as a 21st-century American with blue collar, borderline hillbilly antecedents. And on the whole, that's how I feel about 18th and early 19th century writers in general. Yes, they generally accept a class structure I'd rail against if I found myself caught in it--but it never feels quite so rigid as in those mid-20th century authors.
I'm not sure my perception is accurate, though. It could be I'm just willing to cut Austen et al. more slack than I am a set of people whose lifetimes overlapped those of my parents. Thoughts?
Friday, July 4, 2008
My first half of 2008 in books
I can't quite call 2008 a slow reading year. I'm on pace to read 120 books or so, after all. (I'd consider any year I read less than a hundred books a bad year, since I'd have to be either too busy to read enough to make me happy or completely unable to find enough books worth finishing.) But so far this year has been about good books rather than great ones. Novels that pleasantly whiled away bus commutes but didn't linger in my mind afterward. Nonfiction that gave me interesting and/or useful information but didn't have that extra spark that made them excellent books as opposed to informative collections of facts. I did, however, on reviewing my blog posts find five books that stayed with me after I finished the last page.
A Soldier’s Wife: Wellington’s Marriage - Joan Wilson: This biography of a bad marriage between good people broke my heart and gave me a fascinating and intimate look at aristocratic British life 200 years ago--making it the rare book that spoke to both my heart and my head. This may say as much about my particular historical obsessions as the book itself, but it's the most moving book I've read all year.
Soldier's Heart - Elizabeth D. Samet: Memoir of a civilian English professor at West Point, and the book that convinced me I need to read War and Peace. (Which is now on my bookshelf awaiting the moment I'm ready to fit something so dauntingly LONG into my packed schedule.)
The Sharing Knife: Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold: Beautifully written romantic fantasy that balances the romance and fantasy better than anything else of its kind I’ve read.
Private Arrangements - Sherry Thomas: Not a perfect romance, but a fun, well-written one that’s renewed my willingness to give debut historical romances a chance.
Napoleon and Wellington - Andrew Roberts: Extremely readable dual biography.
We'll see how the second half of the year goes. I'm looking forward to reading the new Kushiel book soon, and there's also a new Temeraire book about to come out, though I'm going to delay reading that one for at least a few months. Even though my Napoleonic alternative history lacks dragons and has a different style and focus, I don't want to read something that close to my WIP while I'm deep in draft mode. Anyway, I still haven't read the newest Loretta Chase, and I'm probably going to try Bernard Cornwell's Arthurian and Saxon series this year, so I've got plenty to look forward to.
A Soldier’s Wife: Wellington’s Marriage - Joan Wilson: This biography of a bad marriage between good people broke my heart and gave me a fascinating and intimate look at aristocratic British life 200 years ago--making it the rare book that spoke to both my heart and my head. This may say as much about my particular historical obsessions as the book itself, but it's the most moving book I've read all year.
Soldier's Heart - Elizabeth D. Samet: Memoir of a civilian English professor at West Point, and the book that convinced me I need to read War and Peace. (Which is now on my bookshelf awaiting the moment I'm ready to fit something so dauntingly LONG into my packed schedule.)
The Sharing Knife: Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold: Beautifully written romantic fantasy that balances the romance and fantasy better than anything else of its kind I’ve read.
Private Arrangements - Sherry Thomas: Not a perfect romance, but a fun, well-written one that’s renewed my willingness to give debut historical romances a chance.
Napoleon and Wellington - Andrew Roberts: Extremely readable dual biography.
We'll see how the second half of the year goes. I'm looking forward to reading the new Kushiel book soon, and there's also a new Temeraire book about to come out, though I'm going to delay reading that one for at least a few months. Even though my Napoleonic alternative history lacks dragons and has a different style and focus, I don't want to read something that close to my WIP while I'm deep in draft mode. Anyway, I still haven't read the newest Loretta Chase, and I'm probably going to try Bernard Cornwell's Arthurian and Saxon series this year, so I've got plenty to look forward to.
Wellington and His Army (Book #64)
Wellington and His Army (Godfrey Davis, 1954) assumes reader familiarity with the general course of the Peninsular War and Waterloo Campaign, focusing instead on Wellington's personality, his interactions with his officers and men, and everyday life with the army. I didn't learn much new from it, but I do try to keep myself immersed in this kind of book, because these are the people and the world I write about. (More or less. Since I'm doing alternative history, everything is a little...different.)
One thing that struck me with this book is the degree to which the archetypal Wellington story involves some soldier getting out of a flogging or worse by making him crack up. A typical example: a soldier in the act of stealing honey is accosted by Wellington, who asks him where he got that. The soldier, not recognizing the army's commander because his face is half-hooded against the bee stings, tells him where to find the hives, and helpfully urges him to hurry up if he wants some, because there's already a crowd helping themselves. Wellington laughs, and the soldier goes unpunished. There must be at least half a dozen similar incidents reported in books like this, and of course it's impossible to tell at this distance which are real and which are apocryphal. I'm struck (probably because I'm geeky and strange) by the contrast with, say, the archetypal Robert E. Lee story, which usually involves him showing semi-anonymous mercy and personal care to some soldier, whether Confederate or Union--the Lee stories emphasize that general's reputed saintliness, while the Wellington stories instead undercut his reputation for seriousness and strictness.
(Yeah, I know. I'm geeky and strange.)
One thing that struck me with this book is the degree to which the archetypal Wellington story involves some soldier getting out of a flogging or worse by making him crack up. A typical example: a soldier in the act of stealing honey is accosted by Wellington, who asks him where he got that. The soldier, not recognizing the army's commander because his face is half-hooded against the bee stings, tells him where to find the hives, and helpfully urges him to hurry up if he wants some, because there's already a crowd helping themselves. Wellington laughs, and the soldier goes unpunished. There must be at least half a dozen similar incidents reported in books like this, and of course it's impossible to tell at this distance which are real and which are apocryphal. I'm struck (probably because I'm geeky and strange) by the contrast with, say, the archetypal Robert E. Lee story, which usually involves him showing semi-anonymous mercy and personal care to some soldier, whether Confederate or Union--the Lee stories emphasize that general's reputed saintliness, while the Wellington stories instead undercut his reputation for seriousness and strictness.
(Yeah, I know. I'm geeky and strange.)
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Crazy for God (Book #63)
Frank Schaeffer grew up and came of age as a child of the evangelical Christian "aristocracy" during a time of transformation. Crazy for God (2008) is his memoir of his childhood, his decade or so as an evangelical "superstar," and his eventual abandonment of an absolute, highly politicized, Calvinist evangelical faith for the rituals and mystery of the Orthodox tradition.
He's the son of the founders of L'Abri, a mission/community in Switzerland that's had a huge, yet subtle, impact on American evangelicalism. For example, the area director for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in Philadelphia during my Penn years was at L'Abri as a young man around 1970, and he never stopped raving about the profound impact it had had on his life. A lot of the 1960's and 70's "Jesus People" passed through L'Abri--which gives me a tenuous connection to the place myself. My church, Bethany Presbyterian, has been around for over a century, but it was revitalized by Jesus People, and I think you can still see the movement's influence in Bethany's quirky mainline-yet-evangelical nature and informal yet contemplative worship.
All that is early Schaeffer, what L'Abri was during the 50's through the early 70's, and overall it's a good thing. (I'm speaking from a perspective not unlike Schaeffer's current theology--I have more questions than answers, and I don't remotely consider myself part of the Religious Right, but I continue to seek God and find comfort and joy in being part of a church community.) But then the elder Schaeffer, with his son urging him on, got involved in the conservative politics and celebrity culture of the rising Religious Right...
Crazy for God has raised some hackles in the church, and in some cases I can't blame people for being offended. Schaeffer has mellowed with age, but he hasn't entirely shed the elitism and intellectual snobbery his brainy parents raised him with, and I couldn't help reflecting that the ordinary American evangelicals he all but calls inbred "sheeple" are, well, my kin, seeing as how I was raised Southern Baptist and have roots in the red clay of central Alabama. But it's still a worthy memoir of a dysfunctional childhood and an informative tour of the last five decades of evangelical Christianity.
He's the son of the founders of L'Abri, a mission/community in Switzerland that's had a huge, yet subtle, impact on American evangelicalism. For example, the area director for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in Philadelphia during my Penn years was at L'Abri as a young man around 1970, and he never stopped raving about the profound impact it had had on his life. A lot of the 1960's and 70's "Jesus People" passed through L'Abri--which gives me a tenuous connection to the place myself. My church, Bethany Presbyterian, has been around for over a century, but it was revitalized by Jesus People, and I think you can still see the movement's influence in Bethany's quirky mainline-yet-evangelical nature and informal yet contemplative worship.
All that is early Schaeffer, what L'Abri was during the 50's through the early 70's, and overall it's a good thing. (I'm speaking from a perspective not unlike Schaeffer's current theology--I have more questions than answers, and I don't remotely consider myself part of the Religious Right, but I continue to seek God and find comfort and joy in being part of a church community.) But then the elder Schaeffer, with his son urging him on, got involved in the conservative politics and celebrity culture of the rising Religious Right...
Crazy for God has raised some hackles in the church, and in some cases I can't blame people for being offended. Schaeffer has mellowed with age, but he hasn't entirely shed the elitism and intellectual snobbery his brainy parents raised him with, and I couldn't help reflecting that the ordinary American evangelicals he all but calls inbred "sheeple" are, well, my kin, seeing as how I was raised Southern Baptist and have roots in the red clay of central Alabama. But it's still a worthy memoir of a dysfunctional childhood and an informative tour of the last five decades of evangelical Christianity.
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