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The Kings of Big Spring by Bryan Mealer

Jan23

The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family’s Search for the American Dream by Bryan Mealer, author of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

I’m a West Texas girl, not a native of Big Spring but rather of San Angelo, which is about 87 miles southeast of Big Spring on US Highway 87. Bryan Mealer’s extended family and family heritage remind me of mine, lower middle class or poor, mostly, with dreams and sometimes actual accomplishments of striking it rich. However, while my family runs mostly to teachers and retail workers and farmers and insurance salesmen, Bryan’s family seems to have had its fair share of businessmen and high rollers, truck drivers and dirt and cattle haulers. And then there was the oil business, boom and bust and everything in between. I never heard of anyone in my family working as a roustabout or an oil field worker or even anyone involved in the oil business in any way. Bryan’s family members, however, were impacted in many ways by the ups and downs of the oil business.

I’m sure I enjoyed this book as much as I did because it took place, more or less, on my home turf. It was difficult to keep up with all the family members whose stories Mealer tells in his book. But when Mealer writes about his grandfather hauling caliche, I know exactly what that is because I grew up until the age of 11 in a house on a street “paved” with caliche. When he tells about the dust storms and the drought and the people praying for rain, I know exactly what he’s talking about because I experienced all of those things in San Angelo. I never met any oil tycoons, but I knew they were around, and I saw the oil wells, pumping oil out of the ground whenever we drove down the highways of West Texas. Most of all, I knew people just like Mealer’s grandmother Opal, who served the Lord in her Pentecostal church all her life and when she was dying asked the family to sing her into heaven with the old hymns she loved. I also knew a lot of “good ol’ boys” who were married to God-fearing women and eventually got right with the Lord themselves after much prayer and persuasion—and a few who never did.

Mealer’s book takes a kind but truthful look at West Texas culture and West Texas people. There’s a lot more drug use and beer and divorce and domestic violence than I ever experienced in my Southern Baptist upbringing, but maybe I just didn’t know what was goin on under the surface or behind closed doors. I wonder how Mr. Mealer was able to get his family members to be so honest and vulnerable and revealing about their past mistakes and family skeletons, but maybe he has a knack for interviewing people and getting them to open up. The book reminds me of J.D. Vance’s bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, but it’s even more immediate and recognizable to me because these really are my people. Thanks for the memories, Mr. Mealer.

If you want to read a sample of what is in the book, and some more about the latest oil boom in Texas that isn’t covered in the book, check out this article by Mr. Mealer in the magazine Texas Monthly.

Baker’s Dozen: Best Nonfiction I Read in 2018

Jan4

Old Friends by Tracy Kidder.

Unveiling Grace: The Story of How We Found Our Way out of the Mormon Church by Lynn K. Wilder.

Heaven Without Her: A Desperate Daughter’s Search for the Heart of Her Mother’s Faith by Kitty Foth-Regner.

Educated by Tara Westover. Tara Westover, either bravely or contemptibly, tells the story of her struggle to educate herself in the face of her father’s seeming mental illness and her mother’s obliviousness to the truth as well as Tara’s horrific abuse at the hands of her older brother.

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore. Female factory workers contract radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with self-luminous paint. This book tells the story of their struggle to survive and to obtain help and just compensation from the employers who knew the workers were being poisoned even as they generated large profits for the companies they served.

First Lady of the Theatre: Sarah Siddons by Molly Costain Haycraft. Ms. Siddons was “the best-known tragedienne of the 18th century.” This Messner biography tells the story of her life.

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel.

In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park. A harrowing story of escape from North Korea’s nationwide prison.

Sent to the River God Forgot by Jim and Janice Walton. Jim and Janice Walton translate the New Testament into the Muinane language in spite of many obstacles, both physical and cultural.

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann. An informative and insightful attempt to remain objective in reporting on two very different visions for saving the world: scientism versus environmentalism. Although both ways have pieces of the truth, I think there is a third way that combines the best of both worlds without their blind spots.

A Passion for the Impossible: The Life of Lilias Trotter by Miriam Huffman Rockness. A fascinating look at a fascinating woman. With the opportunity, according to her friend and mentor John Ruskin, to become a great and celebrated artist, Lilias Trotter instead chose to serve those least able to appreciate her gifts, the native people of Algeria. Did she waste her life and her talent? Read about her life and decide for yourself.

I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life by Anne Bogel. Essays on the joys and trials of the reading life.

Proverbs by J. Vernon McGee. I like all of the commentaries in the Bible teaching series by Back to the Bible radio teacher, J. Vernon McGee.

Old Friends by Tracy Kidder

Sep11

I like Tracy Kidder’s books. His Soul of a New Machine is a classic nonfiction introduction to the culture of the high-tech computer industry. Among Schoolchildren gives an in-depth look at the community of a fifth grade classroom. House shows the joys and challenges of building one’s own home. And in Kidder’s Strength in What Remains the protagonist of the book, also nonfiction, is a young man from war-torn Burundi who finds friends and sustenance in the United States. Mountains Beyond Mountains is about American philanthropist and doctor, Paul Farmer, who works through the medical and international aid communities to help tuberculosis patients in poverty-stricken places.

I guess one thing that draws me to Kidder’s books is their emphasis on community, on looking deeply into a community of people who are pursuing a goal or forming a group to mutually support one another in life. Old Friends is about the forced community of a nursing home. Lou Freed, a 90-something Jewish man, and Joe Torchio, a 70-something stroke victim, are assigned to each other as roommates. Lou, nearly blind but otherwise healthy, has recently lost his beloved wife. Joe has re-taught himself to walk and talk, but he still warns others that he is only working with half a brain. The two men live in a New Jersey nursing home, Linda Manor, where they interact with other residents, staff, and visitors in a “home” that will most likely be their final place, their last experience of community.

It’s a gentle story, somewhat tragic, but ultimately hopeful. The residents of Linda Manor are a mixed bag. Some are cognizant of their surroundings, intelligent and aware, and others are overcome by dementia or Alzheimer’s or some combination. Joe calls the former, the mentally alert residents, those who got-all-their-buttons. Some Linda Manor residents spend their days in bed or watching television; other roam the halls. One picks imaginary flowers from the carpet as she walks through the home. Joe and Lous participate in exercise classes, bingo games, and other planned, and sometimes unplanned, activities. They deal with visitors and phone calls and health alarms and staff cuts. They talk about how to maintain or improve their health and how to relate to or help the other residents and the staff at Linda Manor. They make jokes, act in a play directed by one of the residents, Eleanor, and monitor each other’s mental state and physical ailments.

The ending for this book was always going to be a problem because we all know how it ends. These men are not going to recover their health, go home, and start over. As it is written, the book covers a year of life at Linda Manor, and the two old friends are still old and still friends at the end of the year. Of course, I wanted to know what exactly happened to Lou and Joe and when, but a part of me is content to leave it there. I guess I know generally what happened since it’s been over twenty-five years since the events in the book took place. And that’s enough. From the introduction to the book:

There is an ancient proverb:
Don’t judge a life good or bad before it ends.
~Sophocles, Women of Trachis

Other books about growing old or about nursing home residents:
The Song of Sadie Sparrow by Kitty Foth-Regner. Sadie Sparrow is an eighty-six year old widow who has come to live at The Hickories because her daughter is too busy to care for her at home. Meg Vogel is freelance writer who has been hired to write the residents’ biographies, to take down their stories. Their friendship seems unlikely, but as they get to know each other and the other residents and visitors, their questions and the answers they find lead them to consider eternal truth and ultimate answers.
A Song I Knew By Heart by Bret Lott. This novel is based on the book of Ruth, and the characters even share (or come close to) the Biblical names: Naomi, Ruth, Mahlon, Eli, and Beau. However, this book is the story of an elderly Southern woman who has been living in the Northeast. After the deaths of both her husband and her only son, Naomi decides to return to her childhood home in South Carolina.
Winter Birds by Jamie Langston Turner.
A Severed Wasp by Madeleine L’Engle. Katherine Forrester Vigneras is an elderly, and quite famous, pianist, musician, and grande dame. She moves to lives in New York City and finds community in the people who live near and in relation to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Summer of the Great-Grandmother by Madeleine L’Engle. Nonfiction. Reflections on family life, death, and dying in a Connecticut farmhouse.
Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande. A doctor writes about his own experiences with aging parents and the issues surrounding terminal illness, hospice, nursing home care, and death and dying.

Walking to Listen by Andrew Forsthoefel

Aug10

Walking to Listen: 4000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time by Andrew Forsthoefel.

I’m a sucker for books like this one: reading projects, walking projects, Humans of New York, year-long projects. In fact, I once wrote a post about projects and “project books” that I have read and would like to read. It seems to me as if a BIG PROJECT like Mr. Forsthoefel’s must bring with it wisdom and clarity in some way.

And I guess Andrew Forsthoefel felt the same way. After graduating from Middlebury College, he didn’t know what to do with the rest of his life. So he sought counsel by walking across the country, carrying a sign that said “Walking to Listen.”

“Life is fast, and I’ve found it’s easy to confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I’m slowing down, way down, in order to give my full presence to the extraordinary that infuses each moment and resides in every one of us.”

Mr. Forsthoefel’s literary gurus were Walt Whitman and Rainer Maria Rilke, not the ones I would have chosen, but not all bad either. His counselors along the way across the country include a cattle farmer, a family of Navaho women, artists, and lots of just regular people. He thinks a lot about death and life, mostly death, and he never does come to any kind of unifying theory of life that ties his journey together. I guess I wanted some kind of epiphany or conversion or eureka! moment, and that never happened.

My favorite walk-across-america books are Peter Jenkins’ A Walk Across America and The Walk West. I’ve never read William Least Heat-Moon’s best-selling Blue Highways, partly because I thought the New Age-y-ness of it would annoy me. The meandering existentialism of Walking to Listen was sometimes a little too much for me, too, but I would recommend this book for anyone who enjoys the project story genre. It’s as much about pushing through, endurance, and completing the project as it is about the people he meets along the way, which is to say it’s a lot more about the author than it is about the people he supposedly listens to. A Walk Across America is a much better story.

Flying Colors by Robin Jacobs and Robert G. Fresson

May11

Flying Colors: A Guide to Flags from Around the World by Robin Jacobs and Robert G. Fresson.

Vexillology: the study of flags.

What a beautiful and detailed guide to the design and history of flags around the world! This book is a fairly new volume, published in London in 2017, but it has the traditional attention to style, layout, and accuracy that characterizes older, vintage books for children. (Oh, I see. Amazon says that illustrator Robert Fresson is “inspired by the work of Herge and ‘Boy’s Own’ illustrations of the 1940s.”)

I can picture children poring over this book for hours. It answers many, many questions that budding vexillologists will be pleased to have illuminated:

What is the oldest national flag in the world?
Why are there 13 stripes on the flag of the USA?
Why is the French flag blue, white, and red?
Why is there a big red circle in the middle of the flag of Japan?
What is fimbriation?
What are the saltire, the triband, and the canton on a flag?
What two flags of the world’s nations do not use red, white or blue?
What country’s flag features a dragon? A lion? A parrot?
Why is the British flag known as the Union Jack?

Not all of the countries of the world have their flags pictured and the history of that flag explained, but a majority are included. The book could also unseen index for those who are looking for a particular nation’s flag or a detail of terminology. Nevertheless, I would recommend Flying Colors for any child with an interest in geography, flags, and vexillography (the art of designing flags).

Julius Caesar by John Gunther

Apr10

Since most of what I know about Julius Caesar comes from Shakespeare (and a little GB Shaw, which I assume is mostly fiction), I learned a lot about the life and times of Mr. Caesar from reading this Landmark history book for middle grade children. Yes, his surname really was Caesar; it became a term for a ruler or king after Julius and Augustus made it famous.

Julius Caesar was a successful and intrepid general and an excellent and shrewd politician; that’s how he rose to the place where he was a threat to the Roman republic and ripe for assassination. I didn’t really realize that he won so many important battles or subjugated so much territory. I also didn’t know about, and still don’t understand, the intricate and corrupt state of Roman politics in the time of Julius Caesar. Caesar had to weave his way through some labyrinthine politics that would challenge a modern American political consultant or campaign manager. And I thought our political system was bad. If Washington, D.C. is a swamp, Rome was a swamp in which people actually died over their failure to back the right candidate for tribune or consul. And that’s before Julius Caesar died for being so ambitious. (Apparently, Sulla was a bad dude.)

I learned or had confirmed a few more things about Julius Caesar:

~ He liked the Jews and gave them special privileges to practice their religion in Rome.
~ According to Gunther, it was on Caesar’s watch that the library of Alexandria burned down. (Although Wikipedia says no one knows exactly when it burned and that there may have been several separate fires over the space of hundreds of years.)
~ Caesar did have a fling with Cleopatra, and she did get delivered to his headquarters in a pile of rugs. (GBS was right about that.) Egyptian politics were just as complicated, devious, and deadly as Roman politics.
~ The Rubicon is (was?) a shallow, insignificant river, but crossing the Rubicon, the boundary of his authority to lead an army, was a momentous decision for Caesar, the beginning of the end for Julius Caesar and for the Roman Republic.
~ Julius Caesar used the phrase “Veni, vidi, vici” in a letter to the Roman Senate after he had achieved a quick victory in his short war against Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela.

Gunther leans heavily on Shakespeare in the concluding chapters of the book, but I think both Gunther and Shakepeare were leaning heavily on Plutarch and Suetonius for the facts on Julius Caesar’s life, his death and the aftermath of his assassination. According to Gunther, “Friends, Romans, countrymen” was an actual speech that Mark Antony gave at Caesar’s funeral, and it was indeed a real barnburner. Portia really did commit suicide by swallowing burning coals (ouch!), and Brutus truly was a noble but indecisive character. According to Gunther, everything went pretty much the way Shakepeare wrote it many years later. (Except for Caesar’s ghost, which probably didn’t appear; I’m not much of a believer in ghosts, and Gunther doesn’t mention any spooks.)

This book would be an excellent prequel to watching Shakepeare’s Julius Caesar. The movie version with Marlon Brando as Mark Antony is an excellent film, even if it is in black and white.

To learn more about the Landmark series of biographies and history books for young people, check out this podcast episode, Parts 1 and 2, of Plumfield Moms, What Are Landmark Books? Why Do They Matter?

2017 Nonfiction for Elementary Age Children

Mar13

Alexander Graham Bell Answers the Call by Mary Ann Fraser. His father was a speech therapist. His mother was hearing-impaired. Young Aleck was an inventor and an experimenter. After his brother and sister both died of tuberculosis, Aleck “was inspired to do more with his life.” He became a teacher of the deaf by day and an inventor and scientist by night and in his free time. This picture book biography of the Father of the Telephone emphasizes Bell’s childhood, but takes him through to the invention of the first telephone and those famous words, “I need you, Mr. Watson.” Then, a couple of pages in the back of the book tell about Aleck’s other inventions and give a timeline of the major events of his life. As an introduction to the life of Alexander Graham Bell, this colorful book should serve quite well.

Voyager’s Greatest Hits: The Epic Trek to Interstellar Space by Alexandra Siy. The device of dividing the book into “tracks” instead of chapters is a bit gimmicky, as are the track titles: Thing 1 and Thing 2, King Jupiter, The Lord of the Rings, Last Tango in Space, etc. Nevertheless, the photographs and the information about the eight “tracks” of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are vivid and informative. The style is breezy and colloquial, but accurate: “Most planets spin like tops as they orbit the sun. But Uranus spins on its side. It’s totally tilted.” And as justification for the title and the chapter designations, did you know that Voyager carries a “Golden Record” with 90 minutes of the best music from many cultures and times? It’s meant to be a message to any extraterrestrials who might encounter Voyager in space someday.

The Whydah: A Pirate Ship Feared, Wrecked & Found by Martin W. Sandler. “The exciting true story of the captaincy, wreck, and discovery of the Whydah — the only pirate ship ever found — and the incredible mysteries it revealed.” The pirate ship Whydah sank in a storm off Cape Cod in 1717; it was finally found and recovered in 1984. This book tells the story of the ship’s pirates history as well as the details of how the ship was recovered and what the archaeologists found when they brought the ship’s contents to the surface. This title is a great one to give to pirate enthusiasts who want to know the truth about piracy and its history.

Amazon Adventure: How Tiny Fish are Saving the World’s Largest Rainforest by Sy Montgomery. Not just a picture book about saving the rain forest, this book, with lovely photographs, is an in-depth look at the ecological system in the Brazilian rainforest and at the ways that scientists and businessmen and fishermen are working together to preserve those systems and keep the balance of nature, well, in balance. Science is showing that catching the tiny fish called piabas is good for the environment: as people catch the piabas and sell them for pets around the world, they also work to preserve the environment that enables the piabas to grow and reproduce. And since the people who live in and around the rainforest can make a living from fishing for piaba fish, they are less likely to engage in other kinds of commerce that might destroy or damage the rainforest. The book provides a fascinating and thought-provoking look at how people can work together to solve ecological problems in a real-world, practical way.

Irenaeus by Simonetta Carr. The latest in a series called Christian Biographies for Young Readers, this biography of a second century hero of the faith combines a lively and informative text with beautiful illustrations. This book was chosen by WORLD Magazine as Outstanding 2017 Nonfiction for Children (Real Lives Category), and it certainly lives up to the award. It’s so important for children to be introduced to the controversies and heroes of history, Christian history in particular. We have, in so many areas, forgotten our heritage and forgotten how to think clearly and deeply about theology, teaching, and doctrine. Irenaeus and the other books in this series are a start in the direction of correcting that deficit.

10 Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2017

Dec30

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance. I think I am a “hillbilly” from the flat, desert lands of West Texas, if that makes any sense at all. There were so many cultural and familial traits and traditions that I recognized and identified with in Mr. Vance’s family narrative: the fierce independence, the tendency to eccentricity, the strength, the commitment to faith and family, and even some of the dysfunction.

The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher. The call for community and community-building in Mr. Dreher’s book is a topic dear to my own heart, and I am glad to see it treated with the serious consideration and wide-ranging discusion that it deserves.

Ten Fingers for God: The Life and Work of Dr. Paul Brand by Dorothy Clarke Wilson. Dr. Brand is an inspiration, and reading about his life was both encouraging and challenging.

Different: The Story of an Outside-The-Box Kid and the Mom Who Loved Him by Sally Clarkson. Don’t we all have “different” kids? And isn’t it a gift to be able to appreciate them for who they are, no matter how difficult and challenging the journey? This book and Cindy Rollins’ Mere Motherhood are the best homeschooling/parenting/Christian living books I’ve read in years.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer. Classic mountain-climbing adventure—and tragedy.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. By living with and among the poor, first in a run-down tailer park and then in a tenement building, Mr. Desmond is able to describe first-hand the plight of a few of these millions whose housing situation is unstable at best and tragic at its worst.

Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard. I’ll read almost anything about Churchill, and Candice Millard is an excellent writer of narrative history.

The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ by Andrew Klavan. I bought this book for my son for Christmas—so that I could read it. And Mr. Klavan’s conversion story did not disappoint. This story of a Jewish boy with father issues who became a writer and a conservative news commentator and also something of a comedian is fascinating and never dull or overtly pious. Full review to come soon.

Mere Motherhood: Morning times, nursery rhymes, and my journey toward sanctification by Cindy Rollins. Except for the fact that I have six daughters and two sons while she has eight sons and one daughter, I almost felt as if Cindy and were twins or doppelgängers or something. Cindy Rollins writes about homeschooling and Christian living and motherhood in this book in a way that spoke to my heart and my mind, and she is able to articulate many of the inchoate and unspoken thoughts that I would love to be able to communicate about these important parts of my life. Thanks, Cindy.

The Turquoise Table: Finding Community and Connection in Your Own Front Yard by Kristin Schell. This book shows a way to the kind of hospitality and community I would like to foster in my own neighborhood, but I’m way too introverted and reserved to do it—so far. Here’s to “finding community and connection” in 2018.

The Jersey Brothers by Sally Mott Freeman

Aug25

It’s raining; it’s pouring here in Houston, Texas. And Hurricane Harvey is headed for Corpus Christi and set to bring Houston a whole heck of a lot of more rain and possible/probable flooding. And my personal and family life is a bit of a mess, too.

However, if ever a book would cause me to pause and count my blessings, The Jersey Brothers: A Missing Naval Officer in the Pacific and His Family’s Quest to Bring Him Home is that book. I thought the scenes and descriptions in Unbroken by Laura Hillebrand were harrowing and violent and disturbing, but this book tops that one for sheer cruelty and horror, man’s inhumanity to man. It’s not gratuitous, either. As far as I can tell the scenes and events the author describes really happened and were the central truths of the experience of Barton Cross, an American Navy prisoner of war to the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II. YOu’ve heard of the “Bataan Death March”? Well, that’s described in this book in excruciating detail, even though Ensign Cross didn’t have to participate in that particular piece of history. (Many of his fellow prisoners did.) And the Battle of the Coral Sea and Iwo Jima and Tarawa—all described, again in horrific detail because one or the other of Barton’s two brothers were there. All three brothers were Navy officers, and the older two, Bill (the author’s father) and Benny, spent the war fighting on Navy ships or working in Washington, D.C. and trying all the time to find Barton, their baby brother.

Between the three of them the Jersey Brothers, called that because they were from New Jersey, had a sweeping view of the war in the Pacific, from FDR’s War Room in the White House to Pearl Harbor to the battles across the Pacific to the prisons and camps of Mindanao and Leyte and other Philippine islands. As I read about the experience each of the brothers and of their mother, Helen Cross, at home in New Jersey, I was overwhelmed with gratefulness both for their sacrifice and that of many, many others and for my relatively easy and uneventful life. We may have our problems, but not many of us since World War II have had to suffer or endure anything near what those “greatest generation” men and families did.

I was also convinced again that maybe the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the best solution for an intractable problem—that of ending the war with the least possible loss of life for all concerned. The Japanese were employing suicide bombers (kamikaze) to a much greater extent than I ever remember reading about, and they were not willing to surrender. General MacArthur was intent on invading the Japanese islands, but the predictions of 600,000 American casualties—or more—convinced Truman that the threat of the atomic bomb would save many American and Japanese lives. The army was predicting Japanese casualties during an invasion to run over a million. The Japanese civilians and military were instructed to fight to the death, and many, many were willing to do so. Deaths from both atomic bomb blasts were much, much fewer than any of those estimates and many times fewer than the deaths already sustained by both the Allies and the Japanese in the battles across the Pacific. As horrific as the atomic bombs’ destruction and devastation were, they were not nearly as cruel as the terror and savage brutality that the Japanese visited upon the prisoners of war and the subject peoples that they conquered and ruled over in the Philippines and elsewhere. Take what you’ve read about the Holocaust and the concentration camps in Europe and transfer it to jungles of the Philippines and Southeast Asia, and you will have some idea of the absolute evil that was put to an end by the evil of two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes, the atomic bombs were vicious and horrible, but maybe it was God’s mercy that allowed it to happen.

I recommend The Jersey Brothers, if you are able to read about the savagery and the suffering that went on during the war in the Pacific. It did make me thankful for the problems I have and the ones that I don’t.

The Mississippi Bubble by Thomas B. Costain

Aug4

I’m on a mission to read all of the Landmark series of children’s history books, and Thomas B. Costain is one of my favorite authors, especially his series of books on the medieval history of England: The Conquering Family, The Last Plantaganets, The Magnificent Century, The Three Edwards. I love those books and have read through them more than once. So I was excited to read Costain’s Landmark history (#52) of the founding of Biloxi and New Orleans, The Mississippi Bubble.

It was an exciting story of intrepid explorers and land speculation and fortunes made and lost, with both heroes and villains, winners and losers, and a narrative thread of consistent and faithful service on the part of one man in particular with the goal of building a “New World” in America at the mouth of the Mississippi River. However, the book shows the strengths and weaknesses of its date of publication, 1955, as Mr. Costain loses his attention to historical detail and his concern to portray all of the parties to the situation fairly and accurately when it comes to Native Americans and enslaved Africans.

The story begins with a “group of Indians . . . busy fishing in the mud-colored waters of Mississippi.” These “savages” encounter Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, and although at first they are wary, they “liked La Salle.” These Native Americans are then compared to the Iroquois of Canada and the north, with whom the French had already met and fought and allied and co-existed. According to Costain:

“And while the Indians of the delta country—the Bayougoulas, the Quinipissa, the Moctobys, the Tensas, the Pascagoulas—were not more fierce or brave than the tribes of the north, they were sly and treacherous and with a brand of savagery all their own.”

Readers are left to imagine what that “brand of savagery” looks like, but Costain does say many pages later in the story that “the savages worked swiftly and cunningly” to attack the French forts in various places, incited by the English or the Spanish. Then, a few pages later, we read that “many times the Indians had saved the lives of the colonists with supplies of food from their own stocks.” By treating the Indians as a monolithic group and by stereotyping them as savages, mostly, Costain gives a very confusing and contradictory picture of the Native Americans of the Louisiana and Mississippi regions and of their relationship with the French invaders. In other words, the Native peoples and individuals in this version of history are stereotyped and written off as foils to the conquering French European heroes who are the real story.

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t write off this book because Mr. Costain has another story to tell: in addition to giving us his account of the exploration and settlement of the Mississippi River delta, Mr. Costain in his little book also tells of an economic bombshell back in France. So, in the meantime back in Paris, c.1719-1726, while Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville was literally holding down the fort in Louisiana, a Scotsman named John Law was busy taking over the financial system of France. I read about John Law’s financial plans, ideas, and schemes both in The Mississippi Bubble and on Wikipedia, but I can’t say either source successfully explained his theories and his financial dealings in a way that I could fully understand. But the history is exciting with kidnappings and violence and huge fortunes made and lost and gambles and success and disgrace all combined. It’s worth reading about, and Costain tells this story of financial chicanery, speculation, and panic with a great deal of drama and human interest.

The Mississippi Bubble is not the best of the Landmark books I’ve read, but it’s a worthwhile introduction to the history of Louisiana and New Orleans and Biloxi with a lot of economic history throw in. John Law is the villain of the piece, and Bienville is the hero. And the Native Americans and the black slaves? Marginal and mostly disregarded or stereotyped.

Other books about the early history (antebellum) of Louisiana and the Mississippi delta region:
The French Explorers in America by Walter Buehr
The Explorations of Pere Marquette by Jim Kjelgaard.
LaSalle And The Grand Enterprise by Jeannette Covert Nolan.
The Louisiana Purchase by Robert Tallant.
The Pirate Lafitte and the Battle of New Orleans by Robert Tallant.

Fiction:
Minn of the Mississippi by Holling C. Holling.
Swift Rivers by Cornelia Meigs.

To learn more about the Landmark series of biographies and history books for young people, check out this podcast episode, Parts 1 and 2, of Plumfield Moms, What Are Landmark Books? Why Do They Matter?