Empire of the Summer Moon is not for everyone. It’s an elegiac paean to frontier America and the doomed struggle of Comanche Indians to maintain their way of life in the face of an unrelenting onslaught of white encroachment. It broadly encompasses the rugged bravado of American pioneers trying to fulfill their Manifest Destiny and the individual horrors of trying to eek out a life in a hostile world. It walks the delicate line between explaining how these disparate and dichotomous worlds clashed and parsing […]
“Death is never added to death, it multiplies.”
I’m not going to review the book too deeply, in anticipation of our discussion. These are just some thoughts I had. I had no idea that Sherman Alexie wrote the screenplay for Smoke Signals. if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend that you do. If you enjoyed this book, I couldn’t recommend that movie enough. It has a similar tone, and touches on some of the same themes. Stylistically, this book could’ve been written by Stephen King. Maybe that’s a weird comparison to make, but […]
In a room with Jefferson, Wilson, Truman, and Ike, but generally mistaken for a waiter.
The first I remember hearing about James K. Polk was in my high school US history class. He was described as the greatest president you’ve never heard of, and probably the only president to achieve every goal he set for his administration. Now, I don’t typically speak very highly of my high school history classes (the teacher was given a relatively small canvas on which to paint the picture of history, and he painted with the broadest of brushes), but in this one instance, at […]
A world of broken promises lit only by the flames of a burning village.
First off, my goal was a half-Cannonball. So, yay me! The age of Jackson (roughly 1820-1860) is like a glimpse of movement in an otherwise dark and empty room: poorly understood and full of foreboding. I’m reasonably familiar with the preceding 50 years of US history, and have a more comfortable grasp on the succeeding 70 years, but the 40 years that tie them together isn’t an era I’ve read much about. I know that there were some Indian Wars, and the fervor to push […]