The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America by Scott Weidensaul

Published in 2012 by Houghton Miffllin Harcourt Publishing Company

I have had Scott Weidensaul's The First Frontier for longer than a year, buried in my legendary pile of books (actually, I am more organized than that, they are all in 4 milk crates) but when I heard an interview with Weidensaul on the John Batchelor radio show I was reminded to dig it out.

Weidensaul is to be commended for a very thorough job of researching the history of the relationship between the natives and the European colonists. The records are scant, the spelling is haphazard and so much of it is buried in myth and politics.

He starts with the disposition of the American Indian population prior to the arrival of Europeans. The limited history of pre-Colombian contact is discussed (with the Vikings and various fishing fleets) and the discussion of the similarities of differences of the various American Indians arrayed along the Atlantic coastline is quite interesting.

But, as Weidensaul's narrative continues and the colonies become established the book becomes quite repetitive and I found that I had to force myself to plow through what seemed to be an endless list of atrocities from both sides up and down the coast from Maine to Connecticut. There would be a misunderstanding, one side would strike back with violence, the other would escalate and then the European colonists would obliterate a native village, burn their corn and then there would be quotes with atrocious spelling and then it would start again in a new village.

Hannah Duston/Dustin statue in
Haverhill, Massachusetts 

Now, please understand what I am saying. First, what am I not saying? I am not saying that these struggles were unimportant or that these deaths were not tragic. I am not saying that this history is unimportant or that these people do not count. I am saying that the way this was presented made the whole thing a blur of violence and misunderstanding with precious little analysis. Rather than tell every sad story (with its related  quotes and back stories) up and down the New England coast for nearly one hundred dreary pages these could have been summarized with the highlights being told.

The exception in those stories was the extraordinary and gruesome tale of Hannah Duston/Dustin and her retribution against the group that kidnapped her and killed her baby - she killed and scalped them all so that she could turn in the scalps for the reward. Weidensaul's discussion of Duston/Dustin and what she has meant and what she means now is quite good.

The section on the Carolinas was better as it was told as more of a cohesive narrative but the section that ended the book with the beginnings of the occupation of western Pennsylvania was too long for a re-hash of the trends that had been happening since the early 1600s. I think the focus of the book was too much on catching all of the individual events and less on catching the trends and making the story something that was more friendly to the reader. This reader, who loves history, teaches history and talks about history all of the time found this book to be a well-researched but not very well-written. It was something that I had to slog through, which is too bad.

I received this book from the publisher at no charge through the Amazon Vine program in exchange for an honest review.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon here: The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America.

However, I do recommend this book instead: Struggle for a Continent: The Wars of Early America. 

Reviewed on April 4, 2013.

My Mother's Secret by J.L. Witterick

Published in 2013 by iUniverse

J.L. Witterick's My Mother's Secret is the true tale of Franciszka Halamajowa and her daughter Helena who are  native Poles trying to survive the German occupation of their country. They speak German since Franciszka was married to a German (the father of Helena) but she left him to return to Poland before the war. Helena works in a German factory and is dating the manager, the son of the owner. She and her mother are somehow scraping by even though the war is a daily reality for them and German soldiers have been known to park their vehicles right next to their house and officers have even come over for dinner. Oh, and they are also hiding two Jewish families and a German soldier who refuses to fight, keeping them all fed and unaware of each other.

German soldiers in a Polish village
in 1942 or 1943

Witterick tells this story in a spare writing style that emphasizes the matter-of-fact way that these two ladies took in families that needed help with little discussion. People came to them needing help and they helped them. That's it. 

It is sad that this is remarkable in this world, but it is.

This story reminded me of the famed Levi Coffin who helped between 2,000 and 3,000 slaves escape along the Underground Railroad before the Civil War. I have visited his home in Newport, Indiana and he was always worrying about how to hide the extra food and water that extra mouths consume. I cannot imagine how hard it was to hide this extra consumption (not to mention dealing with the bodily waste) on a daily basis. Levi Coffin said when he was asked why he did what he did: "I thought it was always safe to do right." I am sure these ladies never heard of Levi Coffin or of the Underground Railroad, but they were of that same admirable mindset.

I would recommend this book for grades 5 and above. The reading level is not too high and the horrors of the Holocaust are not listed in gruesome detail so as to bother younger readers.

See the author's website by clicking here.

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review.

4I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. 

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: My Mother's Secret: A Novel Based on a True Holocaust Story

Reviewed on April 3, 2013.

Streets of Fire (audiobook) by Thomas H. Cook

"That's the trouble with a situation like this - you just don't know who is who."

Published by Highbridge Audio in 2012
Read by Ray Chase
Duration: 11 hours, 35 minutes.

Unabridged.

Thomas H. Cook's Streets of Fire is set in Birmingham, Alabama in the spring of 1963 during Martin Luther King's famed "Birmingham Campaign" that featured the Children's March, "Bull" Connor, boycotts and fire hoses being turned on demonstrators.

Sergeant Ben Wellman is called away from taking detailed notes on Martin Luther King's speeches at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church (one of many policemen that were used as spies who filled notebooks and turned them in to their superiors) to investigate a dead body found in a shallow grave in an abandoned ball field in Bearmatch, a black neighborhood. Generally, the all white Birmingham police department didn't do much investigating into murders in this working class Black neighborhood - they are logged and if it is not solved with minimal investigation, it is left to the people of Bearmatch to mete out justice if they can.

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. 
Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, 
Prints and Photographs Division, AL-898-5

But, Wellman is touched by this case. A 12 year old girl in a simple dress was raped and killed and buried in the middle of a neighborhood and no one noticed because so many people were involved in the protests. Wellman digs into this case and also into the racial divisions of Birmingham. As he investigates he also discovers deep fissures in white and black society - neither are monolithic and the protests are causing both societies to split apart.

The Birmingham police department is also splitting under the pressure. Some cops are true racists, some are just following orders and some are quietly on the side of the protesters and wondering and how they should proceed. As the book proceeds, Wellman moves from being a simple order follower to being solidly on the side of the protesters.

This is a great police procedural. Sometimes it is a buddy book, sometimes it is one man against the system, sometimes it is just a look at the tragedy that racial hate has wrought on American society. The back story of the protests adds a great deal of depth and urgency to the story. Be prepared, the history is not one hundred percent correct, but I suggest that the changes are minimal enough to make the story to work (changed for dramatic effect as they say in the movies).

The only complaint I have is the large number of characters. Ray Chase, the reader, does a tremendous job of creating separate voices for all of them.. His reading is actually quite remarkable and I heartily recommend the audio version. However, there are so many characters that are so integral to the story that they just sort of flow into one another one after a while, especially when it comes to the police detectives. It makes sense that there would be so many police in the department, but to make so many of them characters makes it a bit complicated.

A bit complicated but very much worth it.

This audiobook was provided to me at no charge by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

Streets of Fire can be found on Amazon.com here.

Reviewed on April 3, 2013.

Riders of Judgment (Danny Duggin #3) by Ralph Compton

Unique twist on the traditional Western but fails to deliver

Originally published in 2001.

Riders of Judgment is the third in the "Danny Duggin" series. The first two book are Death Rides a Chestnut Mare and the second is The Shadow of a Noose. The trilogy is about Danielle Duggin, the crack shot daughter of a master gunsmith who was gunned down by a ruthless gang led by Saul Delmano, the rich and spoiled son of a man who has led his own gang for decades.

Danielle transforms into "Danny" and starts to hunt down the 10 men in the gang that killed her father. She has a list of names and is slowly working her way through it, marking them off as she kills them. She is joined by her twin brothers in her second book. In the third book they are down to one last name: Saul Delmano.

Saul Delmano is hiding in Mexico, protected by the government of Mexico because Delmano's father rules the valley he lives in and polices it and shares some of the spoils with corrupt officials. Delmano's father has put a $2,000 bounty on Danny Duggins head and every crooked bounty hunter and gang leader between Duggin and Mexico is looking to collect.

While I do give Compton credit for a unique twist on the traditional western, I found this book to be rather scattered with lots of random plot changes and new characters  that did little to move the story along and just padded the book. The romance that blossoms is very forced but the look at what this long crusade to avenge her father has done to "Danny" was interesting but, sadly, under-explored.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Riders of Judgment

Reviewed on April 1, 2013.

The Second Rule of Ten (Tenzing Norbu #2) by Gay Hendricks and Tinker Lindsay

Too Much Plot for Just One Book

Published in 2013 by Hay House Visions

So, The Second Rule of Ten, the second book in the Tenzing Norbu series, is jam-packed - so jam-packed that it really should have been two books.

Tenzing "Ten" Norbu is a welcome addition to the L.A. mystery genre. He is an ex-Tibetan monk and an ex-LAPD officer turned private investigator who is struggling to figure out his place in the world, looking for the right woman and dealing with a poor relationship with his father.

In this mystery, Ten is trying to solve the murder of an ex-client, a Hollywood producer with a reputation for making enemies. Along the way, he discovers a much larger plot involving a Latin gang, illegal drugs and a survivor of the Holocaust.

I really like the character Ten - he is an active practitioner of meditation but in no way does he have all of his problems solved by meditation - he still gets irritated in traffic jams, can't figure out how to deal with the new lady in his life and he carries a gun (once he gets his permit, that is) and is a genuinely nice guy.

But, no matter how much I like Ten, this book slowly morphs into an overly-complicated mess with an extraneous investigation into the missing sister of a Holocaust survivor and a trip to India for Ten to deal with family issues back at his father's monastery (this was interesting but very forced attached to the end of the book, including a side trip into Chinese-occupied Tibet. This would have been a fantastic stand-alone plot in another book - a book that really looked at what's going on in Tibet under Chinese rule).

One other issue, more of a pet peeve than anything else: shotguns and rifles are not the same thing. In a struggle on page 306 I was confused about how many weapons were in the room when the authors used the terms interchangeably.

See my review for The First Rule of Ten by clicking here.

I was offered this book from the publisher through the Amazon Vine program in exchange for an honest review.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Second Rule of Ten.

Reviewed on March 30, 2013.

Quest, Inc. by Justin Cohen

Published by Telemachus Press, LLC (March 19, 2012)

Quest, Inc. features an all-star cast of self-improvement experts who have joined together to offer the complete  package for those seeking self-improvement. There is an expert on fitness, a psychotherapist with a focus on relationships, a financial expert, a therapist who deals with addictions and a body language and image consultant.

The book starts out with Robert Rivera, the fitness expert, He has become fat and completely unmotivated. He has lost his home and his wife and fails at an attempt to kill himself. The other four experts know him from a presidential commission that they all served on and they re-unite to save Rivera and their own reputations (his failure throws doubt on all of their advice).

Once Rivera has his life back on track (roughly the first half of the book), the five of them start Quest, Inc. and promote themselves as the Worlds #1 Personal Development Agency. The rest of the book features a reporter for the Huffington Post who is determined to torpedo their venture because she despises the self-help "industry" and a series of clients. 

I had no problem with the book per se, but it just did not have a real ending. Instead, this felt like the novelization of the first two episodes of a television show, a show like ER that deals with self-help clients rather than medical issues. The first episode (the first half of the book) introduces all of the specialists and demonstrates that they are vulnerable people just like their clients. The second episode (the second half of the book) starts us on our "clients of the week." The reader gets to hear about interesting problems and how they might be helped while the main characters' individual plot lines continue moving forward at a glacial pace. The book screams to be the first in a series.

I found the book to be a little slow-moving. The clients were interesting but were so numerous that they were really just a device to introduce interesting ideas and cause the main characters to interact. I quickly lost interest in all of the experts (and their hang-ups) except for Robert Rivera. He was the only one that was developed in any way but as the story progressed he became less and a part of the story.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: Quest, Inc. by Justin Cohen.

Reviewed on March 25, 2013.

Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (audiobook) by Tosca Lee

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio 
Published February 5, 2013
Read by Jason Culp
Duration: 9 hours, 11 minutes

As the title says, Iscariot: A Novel of Judas tells the the story of one of the most infamous people in history - Judas, the disciple that betrayed Jesus.

Tosca Lee tells the story in a very sympathetic manner. At no point in the story is Judas an evil man. In fact, he is the opposite - he is an exceptionally good man who lives an upright life, tries his very best and truly loves Jesus, the man he calls "teacher."

A close up of Judas Iscariot (front) in
Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper"

Tosca Lee creates a sympathetic back story for Judas involving a life full of loss, pain and a tragic multi-generational search for the messiah. Judas has decided that searching for a messiah is the surest way to get hurt. Instead, he has joined a secret society that is working to push the Romans out of Judea. But, things radically change when Judas meets John the Baptist and then goes on to meet Jesus.

Interestingly, throughout the story, as Judas hears what Jesus teaches he rarely gets the real meaning. He argues with Jewish officials that Jesus speaks in metaphors all of the time so his stories cannot be taken literally but Judas mainly misses the point time after time. Judas is looking for a military leader and does not truly hear what Jesus says about his true purpose and when his kingdom will commence.

Tosca Lee's writing style is often clunky with old-fashioned phrases. It can be be very tedious but it does blend easily with quotes from the Bible when they are worked in (she tends to use quotes that are similar to  the more formal style of the NIV translation rather than some of the more informal newer translations). For all of that clunkiness, there are some moments of literary magic here. The scene where Jesus heals the leper comes to mind as does most of the story of Jesus's trial.

Jason Culp brought this book to life. The multitude of voices he created just work to create a different world.  Even better, Culp really acts out the anguish and the passion that prevail throughout the end of the story.

I received a copy of this audiobook from the publisher in exchange for an honest review as part of the Audiobook Jukebox Solid Gold Reviewer program.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Iscariot: A Novel of Judas

Reviewed on March 22, 2013.