The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped America, by Matthew Pearl
The title pretty much sums it up. It was summer, 1776. The kidnap victim was thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone. She was taken, along with two other girls, by a Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party. The girls had gone off for a canoe trip on the Kentucky River. Understandably given their age, they were tired of being hemmed in by the walls of Boonesboro, the settlement in which they lived. As often happens in these instances, they got more than they bargained for.
Boonesboro was founded by Jemima’s father Daniel. He was determined to create a settlement in Kentucky, despite advice to the contrary from just about everyone. In particular, the Native American tribes of the region depended on Kentucky to furnish them with game, crops, and other necessities. It was fertile, bountiful, and beautiful country.
Daniel Boone and other men of the settlement rescued Jemima and her fellow captives in fairly short order. But that was just the beginning….
Concerning this book, the descriptor that keeps recurring to me is rip-roaring. Yes – nonstop, rip-roaring adventure! Colonials versus Natives, Colonials battling each other, Natives doing much the same. Never a dull moment. And no one has a monopoly on goodness – at least, not when slavery is involved. And in this mass of confused and shifting loyalties and almost relentless fighting – it is, after all, the year 1776 – slavery is most definitely involved.
The manner in which Boonesboro settlers pushed against external controls reflected the new nation’s larger search for freedom. Independence was a complex political process, but freedom was visceral, a state of mind. Moral costs included consistent reliance on slave labor and trampling the tribes’ longstanding access to Kentucky’s natural resources.
Still, the repeated displays of raw courage on all sides are astonishing. In this remote corner of the land, a nation was struggling to be born. It is an exciting and illuminating, if, at times, depressing story.
And Matthew Pearl is the right one to tell it. The narrative is propulsive and the writing is meticulous. I would expect no less from this gifted young man. He is the nephew of one of my oldest and dearest friends. I’ve known his mother since childhood.
Matthew Pearl
Congratulations on a job well done!
Post for the Christmas Season, 2021
So, this year is not ending on the upbeat, carefree note we were all hoping for. Nevertheless, there is still beauty in the world to be thankful for. I would like to share several of my favorite art works and musical performances with you.
I’ve taken several art courses over the past year, and they’ve given me many precious images to contemplate. A course in the Harlem Renaissance served to remind me how many terrific African American artists deserve a closer look.
Jacob Lawrence:
Steel workers
This Is Harlem
Faith Ringgold:
We Came To America
Jazz Quilt
I was also introduced to some artists whose work was well worth getting to know.
Elizabeth Catlett:
Homage to Black Women Poets
Playmates
Kara Walker:
Black out Silhouettes Then and Now
In May of 2014, Kara Walker created a work of public art entitled A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. It is so…well, I’ll let this video do the explaining:
I also took a class entitled “Gustav Klimt and the Viennese Secessionist Movement.” It was a revelation. All I knew about Klimt was the The Kiss:
and Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I, also known as The Woman in Gold or The Lady in Gold:
This painting was the subject of the famous legal battle that was fought between the Austrians, claiming that the work was rightfully theirs, and Maria Altmann, a niece of Adele’s husband Ferdinand. Maria, who was living in California at the time, claimed that the Nazis had stolen the painting during the war and that she was its rightful owner.
The story is told in the book The Lady in Gold by Anne-Marie O’Connor. There’s also a film, Woman in Gold, starring Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann. Worth watching, especially to see Helen Mirren doing her usual superb work:
Our instructor took us beyond Klimt’s so-called gold period, to his later work which consisted primarily of landscapes. These I found utterly enchanting:
Apple Tree One
Farm Garden with Sunflowers
Slope in a Forest on Atterslee Lake
Sebastian Smee is a journalist whose writing about art combines insight with a rare eloquence. He absolutely outdid himself in a recent article in the Washington Post in which he analyzes and rhapsodizes on the subject of a painting attributed to the great Jan van Eyck: Saint Francis receiving the Stigmata:
To read Smee’s article, click here.
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And now, for music and ballet.
This performance of Mozart’s final symphony, the Jupiter (No.41) knocked my proverbial socks off the first time I heard it. I shall always love it. For a new kid on the block – it was founded in 1992 – the Orquesta Sinfonica de Galicia has become a major player, especially under the baton of conductor Dima Slobodeniouk. This performance is a knockout. The final movement rises to a tremendous crescendo of pure joy. The audience went wild. I don’t blame them.
A performance of rare perfection: the Adagio from Spartacus by Aram Khatchaturian, danced by Anna Nikulina and Mikhail Lobukhin of the Bolshoi:
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, by Ralph Vaughan Williams. This performance takes place in Gloucester Cathedral. This is the same venue where the piece was first performed in 1903 and conducted by the composer. A writer who was present on that occasion had this to say:
The work is wonderful because it seems to lift one into some unknown region of musical thought and feeling…one is never sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new. The voices of the old church musicians are around one, and yet their music is enriched with all that modern art has done, since Debussy, too, is somewhere in the picture. It cannot be assigned to a time or a school, but it is full of visions.
I think many people feel that they could use a blessing at this time. (I know I do.) Here is an especially beautiful one, a Gaelic blessing entitled Deep Peace, written by John Rutter and sung by Libera:
At this Holiday Season, I wish everyone the best.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, by George Saunders
So, this book was a real challenge. But I felt that it was time to give the “leetle gray cells” a tune-up. So I signed on…
The four Russian writers cited in the book’s subtitle are Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol. Tolstoy contributed two of the six tales included in this volume; Chekhov, three.
Ivan Turgenev 1818-1883. (I know from reading The Europeans by Orlando Figes that Turgenev did not actually spend much of his creative life in Russia.)
Anton Chekhov 1860-1904
Niklolai Gogol 1809-1852
Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy 1828-1910
Chekhov and Tolstoy
The stories are:
“In the Cart,” “The Darling,” and “Gooseberries” by Chekhov
“The Singers” by Turgenev
“Master and Man” and “Alyosha the Pot” by Tolstoy
“The Nose” by Gogol
Saunders presents the first story, “In the Cart,” in discreet sections, with comments on each portion of the tale. The other stories are presented in their entirety, with no interruptions and commentary following.
The commentary on the stories is enlightening, although at times I became impatient with it. ( I remember this happening to me frequently in college, where I majored in English literature.) Saunders’ observations are beautifully expressed aand insightful, almost in a way that is startling.
On Marya Vasilyevna, the chief protagonist of “In the Cart:”
She’s been rejuvenated, remade into that carefree, happy, hopeful young girl she used to be. She’s like a superhero whose powers have suddenly returned.
And this, in a story with almost no action, no plot. But as soon as I read the above assertion, I recognized its rightness.
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“The Singers” is about a singing competition that takes place in a tavern in a small town. Here’s how Turgenev describes the vocalizing of one contestant, known as Yashka the Turk:
Yashka was evidently overcome by ecstasy: he was no longer diffident; he gave himself up entirely to his feeling of happiness; his voice no longer trembled–it quivered, but with the barely perceptible inner quivering of passion which pierces like an arrow into the hearer’s soul, and it grew continually in strength, firmness, and breadth.
The listeners are deeply moved, in some cases, to tears. It’s a quintessentially Russian scene, but Saunders teases out of the story a universal truism about art:
We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs–or doesn’t– in that instant. What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple.
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“The Darling” is a story I’d read before and was happy to encounter again. In his commentary, Saunders makes this intriguing assertion:
What transforms an anecdote into a story is escalation.
This made me think of countless times I’ve been pinioned by someone telling a story that seemed to have no arc, no buildup, no climax, and no satisfactory conclusion. It never fails to amaze me that such people have no idea that there’s a reason the listener’s eyes have glazed over! (Do they even notice that it’s happening?)
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Concerning “The Nose,” Saunders informs us that this particular tale is “a particular Russian form of unreliable first-person narration called skaz. It’s mainly a satire that tells its most outrageous elements with a straight face. I have to say right off the bat that this was my least favorite story in the book. I had to force myself to get through it.
However, Dmitri Shostakovich was sufficiently inspired by it to write an opera. Click here for a summary of the action in this work. And below is a rather amusing dance sequence that appeared in a production staged by the Royal Opera:
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It’s been a while since I read this book. As with “The Nose,” “Gooseberries” did not really stick with me, but unlike the Gogol story, I liked “Gooseberries” very much. In my experience, Chekhov never disappoints!
A man makes known his desire to forsake the rat race in the city and move to a small allotment he possesses in the country, in order to farm it. His brother disapproves. First, he states the wry truism that a man only needs six feet of earth. But he has more to say on the subject:
To retire from the city, from struggle, from the hubbub, to go off and hide on one’s own farm–that’s not life, it’s selfishness, sloth, it is a kind of monasticism but monasticism without works. Man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but the whole globe, all of Nature, where unhindered he can display all the capacities and peculiarities of his free spirit.
You don’t know necessarily have to agree with the sentiment expressed here, but it’s expressed beautifully, and it’s thought-provoking.
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I’ve deliberately saved the Tolstoy stories until the end. “Alyosha the Pot” is the tale of a simple young man who, in many ways, seems too good for this world. He’s like the Holy Fool one encounters, from time to time, in the literature of Russia, and of other countries as well, an individual of intense religious faith coupled with a resigned feeling about the course his life will take. This story has the feeling of times long past. Yet Tolstoy wrote it in 1905, five years before his death at the age of 82.
Alyosha enters a period of servitude, in which he is frequently taken advantage of. Such is the fate of people like him. He has a brief chance to find happiness, but it is snatched from him almost at once. He does not protest, but simply accepts his fate.
Saunders poses a profound, and likely unanswerable, question about this tale:
So, is it possible that Tolstoy intended us to read the story as a simple praise of Alyosha, who,…over the course of his whole life, enacted radical Christian humility– a sad story, on the human level, but ultimately a story of the triumph of simplicity and faith?
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Finally, there is “Master and Man.”
I thought that I would have a great deal to say about this story, but I find I’m having trouble finding the words.
“Master and Man” is the story of Vasili Andreevich, a wealthy young landowner, and his manservant (or man) Nikita. Vasili Andreevich is eager to inspect a property that he might be able to acquire, if he does not delay. He selects Nikita to accompany him, chiefly because he is the only one of his workers who, on that particular day, is not inebriated. (Really, reading Russian fiction of this period is enough to convince you that the vast majority of the country’s people are drunk most of the time!)
And so they set off. But they are taking a terrible chance. The notorious Russian winter is closing in on them. A ferocious blizzard is approaching. The warning signs are plainly visible. But Vasili Andreevich insists on going, despite ominous conditions. This is the story of what happens to them on this fateful journey.
I will say no more about the plot. But I have to say this: In the course of their travels, something happens to Vasili Andreevich that is so profound, so unexpected, that it took my breath away. It is something that happens mainly within the man, to his mind and to his heart. It causes him to undertake an action…Well, I’ll stop here. When I finished “Master and Man,” I closed this book and sat still for a certain period of time. There were tears in my eyes. I felt as though I had just had a glimpse – not quite hidden behind a wall of snow – of God, working His inexorable will upon one human being.
George Saunders quotes Vladimir Nabokov:
“Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth’s exact whereabouts and essential properties…Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched.”
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I’m deeply grateful to have been led back to the Russian masters. I thank George Saunders wholeheartedly for this opportunity. I studied Russian language and literature in college, but I’ve had scant occasion to revisit this treasure trove of beauty and meaning and depth. It has recently come to my attention that there is a new book out about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It’s called The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece; the author is Kevin Birmingham. I’d like to read it, but I never actually got through Crime and Punishment, and what portion of it I did read is part of my remote past.
So yes, Dear Reader, I’m taking another crack at it. I’ve selected the Constance Garnett translation, but I may switch to another, more recent one in due time. Nonetheless, I am finding the novel deeply absorbing.
The title of this famous work is one that I’ve known in Russian ever since my undergraduate encounter with this strange and enchanting language. Here it is:
преступление и наказание
It is pronounced ‘prestupleniye i nakazaniye.’
‘Nobody ever told Morse or Rebus to mind their own business.’ – A Line To Kill by Anthony Horowitz
But someone does say it about Daniel Hawthorne. Like those two famous fictional sleuths, Daniel Hawthorne, once on the trail, is indefatigable – utterly committed. He’ll see it through, no matter what.
In A Line To Kill, “it” consists of a suspicion of foul play, at work in a seemingly benign venue: a literary festival on Alderney, one of the Channel Islands. Now an island is a fine setting for a mystery, as Dame Agatha would tell you. A limited pool of suspects keeps the tension high and climbing higher. Of course, there is a murder, shortly followed by another. Officers from nearby Guernsey are present at the scene, but it is Hawthorne, acting in concert with the police, who keeps things moving towards their inevitable conclusion.
One thing must be said about Daniel Hawthorne: He pursues leads with inexorable force. If his blunt questioning causes pain, well, so be it. At one point, one of the individuals whom he’s been pressuring relentlessly rounds on him and delivers this diatribe:
“I know you’re only doing your job, Mr. Hawthorne, and you don’t really care how you get your results. I was there when you were giving your talk and it struck me then that you have absolutely no heart at all. You don’t believe in the law. You don’t want to help people or society. You don’t seem to have any understanding of morality at all. You’re a detective. That’s all that matters to you.”
Hawthorne makes no response to this ringing condemnation. The narrator, Anthony Horowitz, thinks to himself, ‘As a parting shot, it was a good one.’
In fact, to me. the most interesting thing about this series is the relationship between Anthony and Daniel. At times, they seem like two halves of the same person, but much of the time, they are seriously at odds. Anthony’s task is to shadow Daniel in order to write about his methods, much as Dr. Watson narrates the exploits of Sherlock Holmes. But there was much less static in that relationship than there is in the relationship between Anthony and Hawthorne. Anthony often feels like second best alongside Hawthorne, whose brilliant insights run circles around his own comparatively sluggish thought processes.
In the final chapters of A Line To Kill, the author has a great deal of summing up and explaining to do. I’ve encountered this tendency in any number of mysteries, and I find it off-putting – a sign that the narrative has become too convoluted, or the characters too numerous, or both. This is where the mystery short story has an advantage over a full length novel, I think. It’s limited duration keeps things relatively simple and straightforward.
Anyway, don’t let these final observations put you off reading the book. It was fun and a fast read. I recommend it.
“…to take on the work of fate is to incur full responsibility for its consequences.” – Second Place, by Rachel Cusk
Don’t know about you, but I’m somewhat relieved to encounter a happy marriage in a novel – or in a work of nonfiction, for that matter – or in real life, also. This is no doubt partly due to the fact that I’m in one myself, and terrible grateful for it, and wishing its particular gift of happiness and contentment to grace the lives of others as well.
The main character in Second Place is similarly wed. Her husband’s name is Tony; she is identified only as M. They live out in the country, in a place characterized by a wide. marshy region. (Not sure; might be somewhere in France). They are in an isolated location, but they enjoy entertaining company. This motivates them to build another, smaller cottage on their considerable property, so that their guests can stay in comfort and have privacy. This, then, is the eponymous Second Place.
Sometimes, when things are going well, people can get restless. They want to inject a new element into the fabric, shake things up a little. This seems to be at least partially the reason why M. decides to invite an artist to take up residency in the Second Place. The artist, known to us only as L, accepts the offer. It proves to be a fateful decision. No surprises there.
Second Place is narrated in the first person by M. It is cast in the form of a lengthy missive, or perhaps a journal entry, addressed to someone called Jeffers. Man or woman? Friend or relation? Some sort of confessor? If this was ever clarified, I missed it. Right from the beginning, the tone of the narrative is urgent, becoming ever more so as time advances and L finally arrives on the scene, a young female friend unexpectedly in tow.
This is how the novel opens:
I once told you, Jeffers, about the time I met the devil on a train leaving Paris, and about how after that meeting the evil that usually lies undisturbed beneath the surface of things rose up and disgorged itself over every part of life. It was like a contamination, Jeffers: it got into everything and turned it bad.
Well.
First off, I Was reminded of the story by J. Sheridan Le Fanu called “Green Tea,” first published in the U.S. in 1945:
“There was very little light in the ‘bus. It was nearly dark. I leaned forward to aid my endeavour to discover what these little circles really were. They shifted position a little as I did so. I began now to perceive an outline of something black, and I soon saw, with tolerable distinctness, the outline of a small black monkey, pushing its face forward in mimicry to meet mine; those were its eyes, and I now dimly saw its teeth grinning at me.
“I drew back, not knowing whether it might not meditate a spring. I fancied that one of the passengers had forgot this ugly pet, and wishing to ascertain something of its temper, though not caring to trust my fingers to it, I poked my umbrella softly towards it. It remained immovable—up to it—through it. For through it, and back and forward it passed, without the slightest resistance.”
Secondly, I thought to myself, I’m not going to be able to read this.
I was wrong.
Second Place is a short novel and a curiously compelling one. Cusk has deep insight into the vagaries of human conduct, especially as regards relationships. “Green Tea” is a masterpiece of horror writing, but Second Place has little to do with that genre of literature. It is instead firmly grounded in the reality of the here and now – almost painfully so.
At the back of the book, Rachel Cusk informs us that “Second Place owes a debt to Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir of the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico.” Having recently read and very much enjoyed Burning Man, a new biography of Lawrence, in which Mabel Dodge Luhan necessarily plays a major part, I was pleased by this confluence and could immediately see how Luhan’s relation of her turbulent experience hosting Lawrence in the spellbinding but isolating desert of New Mexico lent some key elements to Cusk’s narrative.
Second Place is an intriguing, evocative, and beautifully written novel. I highly recommend it.
Rachel Cusk
1979
Allie Burns is young, ambitious, and smart. She wants desperately to make it as an investigative reporter. For the time being, she’s on the staff of a small regional paper The Clarion of Glasgow. She considers this position a stepping stone that will lead, hopefully, to a position with a major news organization.
Meanwhile, she finds a congenial colleague in Danny Sullivan; both his drive and his goals are similar to hers. Together, they embark on a story about tax fraud that targets some heavy hitters. After scoring with this investigation, Allie and Danny decide to go after bigger fish. and then bigger – until….
You’ll have to read it to find out.
Val McDermid has based this story on her own experiences as a young journalist – ‘journo,’ as I often see them called in British crime fiction. It has a ring of authenticity. The other Clarion reporters come across as genuine and believable. But it’s Allie and Danny’s show, that’s for sure. They’re enthusiastic, resourceful, and above all, just plain gutsy. This is the start of a new series; I for one am eager to follow Allie on her (sometimes harrowing) adventures.
In the course of this narrative, McDermid pays tribute to some of the great writers in the crime fiction field, both past and present. At one point, Allie, in need of some good reading material, finds just the thing in a nearby bookstore: Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell. YES!!!
Val McDermid
Books to the Ceiling 