Book Review - The Prague Sonata by Bradford Morrow

When German troops invade Prague in March 1939 and proceed to tighten their grip on the city, 30-year-old Otylie Bartošová is forced to relinquish the two things she holds most dear: her husband, and an anonymous 18th-century sonata manuscript bequeathed to her by her father. 

Jakub disappears to join the underground resistance. In a similar act of defiance, Otylie splits up the manuscript — “her birthright and burden” — to keep it from falling into Nazi hands, and then flees the city.

Just over 60 years later, early into the new millennium, an elderly Czech immigrant living in Queens entrusts young musicologist Meta Taverner with the second movement of the sonata. 

Enchanted by the music and stimulated by the challenge of finding the other two “orphaned movements” and the identity of the composer, Meta turns her back on her studies and her skeptical boyfriend and sets off for Prague.

The city casts its spell and captivates Meta. But she becomes disillusioned after funds run dry, leads become dead ends, and some of her musical mentor’s contacts prove suspect. It is only when she meets, and falls for, Czech-American reporter Gerrit Mills that she discovers fresh purpose. 

The pair pool their resources and widen their search. However, they are closely tracked by other parties, including a former Communist Party stooge with friends in high places and an interest in the manuscript that in time turns into a toxic obsession.

More than 12 years in the making, and more than 500 pages, “The Prague Sonata” is without doubt Bradford Morrow’s magnum opus. It has echoes of his last novel, “The Forgers,” which focused on another couple making sense of past mysteries, this time through twists and turns in the antiquarian book world. 

In his new book, Morrow delves deeper and aims higher. He splices his main narrative with flashbacks to the war, to Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, and to Otylie’s years in exile in London and her new life in “strange sky-draped Texas.”

History is thrillingly re-enacted or re-created. Musical passages are conveyed with lyrical grace. Regular doses of surprise and suspense keep us immersed and involved.

Books of this length are seldom fault-free. Morrow is a little too fond of his musical metaphors. Finely sprinkled Czech words and phrases authenticate the drama but entire random sentences in Czech, followed promptly by their English translation, are an unnecessary distraction. 

And for such a capacious novel, the Prague that is portrayed is a place of curiously tight confines: a restrictively small toy-town where nobody lives or ventures beyond the picture-postcard center.

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Original review on: http://www.startribune.com

Book Review - As a God Might Be by Neil Griffith

In 1964 William Golding published The Spire, a novel that traced the journey of a dean who believes God has directed him to erect a spire above Salisbury Cathedral. 

It’s a meditation on faith but also a study of those who question the sanity of believers and, as with all novels that examine our relationship with God, it ends on an inconclusive note, for who can ever profess to know the truth?

More than 50 years later, Neil Griffiths explores a similar concept in As a God Might Be, when middle-aged Proctor McCullough abandons his family to build a church on English common ground. 

He’s quickly joined by four young misfits – Terry, Nat, Rebecca and Rich – each of whom has reason to escape their daily lives. They arrive early, work hard and although they’re not religious, they have faith in their leader and are committed to seeing the project through to completion.

Placing theology at the core of a novel can be a risky business. Griffiths has written of the difficulties he faced in finding a publisher for this book, stating that one admired it but “as an atheist, materialist and humanist” couldn’t support it, while its focus on religion also appears to have cost him his agent. 

I’m not convinced there’s any subject matter that alienates publishers as long as the material is presented in a thoughtful and original manner, and such assertions can come across as a little self-aggrandising. 

Recent novels by Michel Faber, Sarah Perry and Thomas Keneally, for example, have considered church doctrine and spirituality and all found a wide readership, while Richard Beard’s Lazarus Is Dead and Acts of the Assassins have been acclaimed for their unorthodox interpretation of biblical stories.

Although Griffiths’ novel is less metaphysical than any of these, he explores his theme with a commitment that is both interrogative and passionate. Mac is a complex creation, uncertain why he feels compelled to build his church and unable to answer his critics, who fear he has simply gone insane. 

Many of the best scenes take place when he’s in discussion on site with his four disciples, moments that never descend into turgid debates but are authentic dialogues with each character striving to understand the place of the divine in a mortal world.

Sharp distinctions

There are sharp distinctions drawn between the curiosity of the young and the disillusionment of their parents. Mac’s own peer group are a dislikable lot, arrogant and preening, while his youthful workers search quietly for meaning through hard labour.

If there’s a problem with the characterisations, however, it’s one that afflicts the work of so many male novelists: the depiction of women. Rebecca, the only girl in the crew, is constantly defined by her beauty and her sexual relationships with men. 

When she is annoyed by the romantic attentions of Rich, for example, Mac consoles her by saying that her presence has allowed the boy to get in touch with his heart, suggesting that God “places women like you around the world to do this very job”. 

I’m not privy to what God’s thoughts were when he removed Adam’s rib but I doubt this was top of his agenda.

Similarly, Holly, Mac’s wife, is portrayed as unsupportive, despite her husband quitting his job, spending their life savings and abandoning her with two small children, one of whom is autistic. 

‘The terrible truth for Holly was that if she really loved him – loved him at his deepest – she would understand that he was always going to have done this,’ we are told. I’m not so sure about that either.

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Original review on: www.irishtimes.com

Book Review - My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent

There are two camps of readers when it comes to Gabriel Tallent’s breakthrough debut novel “My Absolute Darling” — those who are naming it among the best of the year (the Washington Post, Amazon.com, Stephen King, to name a few — and I’m sure it will hit more best-of lists before the year is up) and those who are infuriated by the content and think it should never have been written at all. If you’re not a follower of the book review community, it’s not the gentle, quiet, cardigan-wearing group you might imagine.

Julia “Turtle” Alveston is a 14-year-old being raised by her father on the northern California coast. Her mother died when she was young; her father, a survivalist, keeps her mainly isolated in their home in the woods. 

She attends school, but he’s instilled a strong suspicion of everyone in her so she keeps to herself. Her father and her grandfather, whose health is declining, are her whole world — and her father fluctuates between being her best friend and abusing her in every way you can imagine.

Turtle meets a pair of local boys in the woods, and through her relationship with them, she begins to see a larger world outside of the one her father has built for the two of them — but her father, sensing her pulling away, becomes more violent and begins drawing others into his warped definition of love. Turtle has to draw on strength she isn’t sure she has in order to survive.

The issue a number of readers are having with this book is that they don’t believe a male author has the ability to write a female victim of sexual violence — they see it as exploitative, written for shock value rather than literary value, and offensive, lessening the experiences of these victims. 

I’m not going to completely discount this point of view — I believe that there are books like this, where the characters are two-dimensional and the authors have no business writing about such things, where they are just for the attention such books bring.

However, I also strongly believe that this is not one of those books.

Although Turtle’s story is shocking and Tallent pulls no punches in telling it, it wouldn’t be as brilliant of a book (and it is a brilliant, breathtaking book) if he were to tiptoe around the dark, ugly shadows that make up her life. We need to experience her entire character arc in order for it to punch us in the gut as hard as it does.

As for whether a male author has the right — or ability — to write from a female point of view, especially about topics such as this (or vice-versa) ... a good author doesn’t have to be the same gender as the characters they’re writing about. 

A good author doesn’t have to have experienced everything their characters have. A good author doesn’t have to have lived where their characters have. 

A good author will research these things, talk to people who have had these experiences, visit these places — and then use their imagination and make up a world for us to fall into.

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Original review on: http://www.watertowndailytimes.com

Book Review - The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Like other works by Louise Erdrich, the story of The Round House is rooted in the lives of Native Americans. These are not people living in conical tents and wielding battle axes. 

They are a ‘regular’ community in which teenagers talk about Star Trek and people drive to work. The story begins with a drive that a thirteen-year-old named Joe takes with his father, as they go looking for his mother, who’s taking longer than usual to get back home.

This is, perhaps, the most fateful drive of their lives. As they head for a grocery store, where they think the boy’s mother might be, they see her driving past – in the opposite direction, meaning homewards – at a furious speed. 

Following her home, they discover a terrible event, one that’ll change their lives forever. The mother, Geraldine, has been brutally raped, with a degree of violence that has left her utterly traumatised.

From here on, Joe’s world becomes a pre-occupation with getting justice, trying to understand what happened to his mother, and coming to terms with his own adolescent desire for an attractive older woman.

This is also where the illusion of Native Americans being absorbed into mainstream modern American society develops many cracks. 

Getting justice for Geraldine is that much more complicated because she is Native American and the perpetrator may be non-Native; and the place of crime may be outside tribal jurisdiction. 

The story also places practical tribal wisdom against the lenient attitude of urban law towards a certain class of crimes. Among Geraldine’s own people, what her rapist would get is death, for such a crime can only have such a punishment. But the courts of American law might see things differently.

The crime at the core of the story leaves Joe and his parents lacerated. Connecting with them means feeling some of their pain. That’s why this book can’t be called a mere page-turner – it’s not casual reading; it leaves a deep impression.

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Original review on: http://www.hindustantimes.com

Book Review - The Impostor by Javier Cercas

Enric Marco was one of the most famous men in Spain. As President of the “Amical de Mauthausen”, an association of Spanish survivors of the Nazi camps, he spoke eloquently about the evils of Fascism. 

In a speech given to the Spanish Parliament in 2005 his account of his experiences in a concentration camp had the children of deportees in the gallery in tears. This wasn’t all. 

He had fought on the Republican side in the Civil War, been persecuted by the Franco regime and then, as Secretary-general of the CNT (the Anarchist trade union) been influential in the transition of Spain from dictatorship to democracy. Quite a life! What a hero!

But then came exposure; he was unmasked. He had never been in a concentration camp, though he had been in Germany during the war as a volunteer worker. His anti-Fascist credentials were soon questioned. 

If he had lied about the concentration camp, why should he be believed about anything? Yes, he had been a magnificent and compelling speaker about the horrors of Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain, but he was still an impostor, mocked and reviled.

Anyone who has read Javier Cercas’ novels – especially Soldiers of Salamis and Outlaws – will recognise that Marco’s is a story made for him. These books explored the unreliability of memory and personal testimony and of what may have been generally accepted as historical truth. 

Nevertheless, he was reluctant to write about Marco, despite the urging of friends, among them the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. He had met Marco and found him even in his nineties to be unstoppably loquacious and fertile in denial, self-justification, and self-pity.

Happily he went ahead. The book is written as a”novel without fiction,” with Cercas’ own feelings and reflections always to the fore. This was the method of his remarkable account of the failed military coup of 1981, Anatomy of a Moment. It worked then; it works now.

Cercas has immersed himself in the archives, talked with historians and journalists who have covered the Marco story, interviewed his acquaintances, friends, former admirers, and spent hours, days, weeks listening to the old man – well over 90 by now – and trying to make sense of his life. 

In some of his memories or claims, those relating to the Civil War, there would appear to have been an element of truth amidst exaggerations and even impossible assertions. There were puzzles not easy to resolve. 

Why for instance did he have a civil servant’s pension? Was this, as some said, because he had perhaps been a police informer in at least the early Franco years? Or was there some other not discreditable explanation?

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Original review on: http://www.scotsman.com

Book Review - Murder Ballads by Gabe Soria, Paul Reinwand, and Chris Hunt

Shit, they say, happens. For instance: Sometimes you try to create a decent blues record with a notorious and reclusive producer out in the boondocks beyond Shreveport and several people end up dying violently because of it.

That is, the whole end-up-dying-violently scenario plays out after you add a little desperation, a couple of guns, and more than a touch of drug-enhanced stupidity to the mix.

Sounds like a Coen brothers movie, maybe, right? Or: Tarantino? Macon Blair?

But, no, it's a graphic novel that's near the level of films you'd expect from any of those three camps – which is to say: quality, pretty fucking high – and it's called Murder Ballads, appropriately enough, and it's by Gabe Soria, Paul Reinwand, and Chris Hunt, with the whole full-color and grisly Macbeth-with-music mayhem of it released in an excellent package a bit earlier this year by Z2 Comics.

Macbeth-with-music, we say, and package. Because the book comes with its own soundtrack – via a download card featuring music by Robert Finley and Dan Auerbach, the latter of whom you may know as the frontman of the Black Keys. 

And damned if that soundtrack of four original songs and one Leadbelly cover, fully incorporated with the modern noir narrative, isn't some primo shit for your ears to appreciate during the reading or anytime thereafter.

So you'll probably want to find out what happens when a couple of young Brooklynites try to move their bankrupt-record-company past and their failing-marriage present to California and get sidetracked by some bluesmen called the Fontweathers brothers in a Louisiana dive bar, track down the habitually fucked-up Frank Bonisteel to render the best engineering of sound, and then figure that, huh, perhaps a skoshe of armed robbery is the perfectly logical solution to their dire financial needs, and – yeah. You get the picture. Or, if you get this book, the pictures: vivid and moody and tightly paced, a fitting evocation, as drawn by Reinwand and Hunt, of Soria's fierce script.

Oh, wait, like that's not enough? Damn, Z2, look at you including a black-and-white bonus story – "The Ballad of Frank Bonisteel" – in which Soria's deeper character dive is limned by no less an artist than Warren Pleece. 

We'd be glad to read this thing even if we had to do it in the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines. So much better that we've got a clean, well-lighted place, instead; and that this solid volume of tunes and treachery will set a body back only $25.

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Original review on: www.austinchronicle.com

Book Review - The Savage by Frank Bill

Frank Bill might be Indiana’s most prolific novelist, but he doesn’t live in Indy or one of our college towns. 

Instead, he resides in Corydon. He still works at a factory. And in his latest novel, The Savage, he has perfected his literary formula: a stylized and extraordinarily violent version of the Southern Indiana he knows.

Bill’s previous books—Crimes in Southern Indiana, a story collection that remains his best work, and Donnybrook, a novel—take place in the present-tense Midwest. He might focus on the worst parts, the suffering small towns and murderous men. 

But he’s trying to capture something true. You can tell the time is our own, although you can also tell that time has passed his places and characters by.

The Savage switches things up. It’s based in Harrison County, where he lives, but much of it occurs in a dystopian future, where the grid has been unplugged and society has been broken. Many Americans, angry at corporate evil and a collapsed economy, have enlisted in militias that specialize in killing and stealing. In this bleak future, a teenaged loner named Van Dorn tries to survive.

Given this plot of populism gone sour, Bill understands readers may find echoes of our current age. “I started writing it around 2012,” he says, “and it’s weird. It’s not that what happened lately influenced the book. It’s that what happened back then has come to a boiling point now.”

The novel also features flashbacks to Van Dorn’s father, along with a few familiar, beat-up faces from Donnybrook. It adds up to Bill’s longest and most ambitious book yet. 

The Savage should appeal to anyone looking for fiction that’s aggressive and bloody, where every sentence swaggers.

Based on the success of Bill’s first two books, it seems like a lot of people are seeking precisely that. He has traveled to Europe, where French and Norwegian readers adore his fiction and its dark, working-class themes. 

In America, he has done events on both coasts. At one book festival in California, a woman seemed concerned. Were his books what Indiana was really like? Had he been mistreated as a child? Bill had to smile. “It’s not a nonfiction book, ma’am,” he replied.

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Original review on: www.indianapolismonthly.com

Book Review - Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

This seems to be my year for crossing paths with right-wing notables.

J.D. Vance is 33. His book, Hillbilly Elegy, has been atop the bestseller list for more than a year. My wager is that Vance will be one to pick up the pieces after Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Roy Moore and Steve Bannon do each other in.

Last year, I wrote a very critical review of Vance’s book. Much of the book, despite some poignant stories, wasn’t an elegy at all, but an exercise in moral superiority. In places, it was downright condescending. 

Sidestepping the economic devastation of Appalachia, Vance seemed determined to place most of the blame on poor choices and bad behavior by individuals, rather like the right’s favorite pseudo-social scientist, Charles Murray. In the end, poverty is about values, and character. He wrote:

We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs. … We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being…

Yet, at the same time, the book reflected a profound and moving personal journey; for much of it, Vance seemed to be trying to figure out what he really thought as he went along.

Last week, Vance and I found ourselves at a conference on the future of democracy at Oberlin. I had presented, on Thursday, with New Yorker writer Jane Mayer. Vance arrived, as a celebrity speaker, on Friday. I had never seen him live and was extremely curious.

The Vance I saw was rather different from the author of Hillbilly Elegy. Much of what he had to say was about the epidemic of opioid abuse. He spoke eloquently of the devastating human cost of the loss of jobs that offered self-respect and paid a living wage. 

He told the story of an 8-year-old, addicted to drugs by his addict parents, a person who obviously could not be held accountable for making poor choices.

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Original review on: www.huffingtonpost.com

Book Review - Coco: A Story About Music, Shoes, and Family by Diana Lopez

Pixar's Coco is delighting audiences this holiday season with a touching story about family... and music and shoes.

For young readers who would prefer to know the story before seeing the film, or for those who want to relive this story anytime, comes a hardcover junior novelization with some beautiful theming. Coco: A Story About Music, Shoes, and Family can now be yours to read anytime your heart desires.

Judging a book by its cover and overall design esthetic, I love the way the designers took the film's prologue, told through papel picado (paper banners), and applied that not only to the cover, but the book's pages as well.

There's a fun color coding system that allows readers to quickly see how much of the story takes place in our world and how much of it is set in the land of the dead. Pages that take place in our world have marigold yellow borders, while those that take place in the afterlife are navy blue.

Each chapter begins with a papel picado which features Dante if the chapter takes place in the mortal world, Miguel in skeletal makeup if it's on the other side. The first and last pages feature Miguel's family tree, which changes by the end of the story and readers are encouraged to not read the one in the back of the book until they have finished the story, lest they want to ruin a major spoiler.

Author Diana Lopez has done a fantastic job adapting the film into written form, allowing the reader to get inside Miguel's head and also pointing out some of the more subtle connecting tissue in the film that may have been lost on younger viewers.

Since it's told in the third person, readers gain some perspective on a few other characters as well. Like the dialogue in the film, the book also swaps English words for some commonly known Spanish ones.

This is to the great benefit of any bilingual readers or any who have taken Spanish classes before, but might make it a bit challenging for anyone with no context for the language in written form. Musical moments are highlighted in the book and I recommend that readers have the soundtrack handy as well so they can hear the songs as they arrive at those moments in the story.

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Original review on: www.laughingplace.com

Book Review - TO THE GOLDEN SHORE BY COURTNEY ANDERSON

Adoniram Judson, at age nineteen valedictorian of Brown College’s class of 1807, returned home to Massachusetts after an unsuccessful summer in New York City’s theater district.

Uncertain of his goal in life, although a successful author, he had little ambition in literature. And certainly no intent to follow his father’s career as a church pastor.

On his way home from New York, Judson chanced to stop at a small town inn over night.

The only remaining room was next to that of a very ill man.

The man caused no real disturbance, but Judson heard occasional moans, and people coming and going next door.

When paying his bill next morning, Judson casually asked about the man’s condition.

“He’s dead,” the inn-keeper said.

“Who was he?”

“Young man from the college in Providence. Name was Eames. Jacob Eames.”

Judson’s closest friend in college and a man with little or no belief in God.

His shock left no recollection of the next few hours, but he arrived home in mortal fear for his own soul.

He had only one question to ask himself, “How shall I so order my future as best to please God?”

Judson became the first American missionary to foreign lands.

In 1813 he and his wife Ann (“Nancy”) reached Burma (now called Myanmar), an Asian country with twice the population of the whole USA at the time.

Burma’s king ruled his Buddhist country with an iron grip.

Few Burmans dared express interest in Christianity.

Judson spent the first six years on translating the Bible into Burmese.

It’s a difficult language, letters like circles and half-circles, no spaces between words, and entirely different meanings depending on the spoken tone.

Yet both Adoniram and Nancy became fluent.

Nancy cultivated acquaintance with the Rangoon city governor’s chief wife.

Arrival of another missionary with a printing press made possible a much wider spread of the Gospel.

Judson’s first Burman convert to Christianity occurred six years after Judson’s arrival.

Rangoon was in turmoil, King Bodawpaya had died; the British government reacted with hostility to Burma’s incursions into India.

When young King Bagyidaw summoned the viceroy of Rangoon to Ava, the national capital 400 miles up-river, Judson obtained permission to accompany him and petition the King to permit publication of the Bible in Burmese. The new King expressed no interest.

In 1821, however, a new missionary and physician, Dr. Jonathan Price arrived.

His skill in removing eye cataracts caught the King’s attention, who then commanded Price’s appearance “at the Golden Feet.” in Ava.

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Original review on: http://www.shoshonenewspress.com

Book Review - The Desperado & A Noose for the Desperado by Clifton Adams

In two masterfully written, fast-paced Westerns reprinted from the 1950s, a hot-headed teenager on the run from the law becomes a bandit... and the fastest gunman ever to come out of Texas.

The Desperado and the follow-up, A Noose for the Desperado, penned the following year, are two thrilling tales by Clifton Adams, a two-time winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award.

A short story writer for pulp magazines in the late 1940s, Adams began his literary career as a novelist in 1950 with the first of two adventures featuring Talbert ‘Tall’ Cameron,
the young tearaway turned hard-bitten gunslinger.

Published by Gold Medal Books, The Desperado became a popular novel on its release and legendary crime writer Donald E. Westlake would later cite it as having an influence on his writing. It was also made into a hit B-movie by Allied Artists.

Bud Elmer, in his entertaining introduction to this fine Stark House reprint which comprises both novels, dryly remarks of the movie version: “For an act or two the plot streamlines the book pretty well. 

Then things go to heck in a hand-basket and any similarities with the book ride out of town.”

The novel is set in the early 1870s, with Texas under the rule of a carpetbag government led by northerner E.J. Davis whose despotic state police organisation administer rough justice to all who challenge their authority.

When Ray Novak, the former marshal’s son, loses his head and hits a Yankee cavalryman who happens to be one of the governor’s kinfolk, all hell breaks loose in John’s City. Before Novak flees town, he stops at Talbert ‘Tall’ Cameron’s home to warn him that the police will want to punish all local troublemakers.

Tall was guilty of a similar offence months earlier, clubbing a carpetbagger with his rifle butt, and so it seems likely that in Novak’s absence the police will make an example out of Tall.

Heeding the advice of his parents, he leaves town, intending to stay with his uncle on the Brazos for a while and then come back when the carpetbaggers are gone from Texas, but his love for local girl 

Laurin Bannerman stops him straying far from John’s City.

While evading the posse hot on his trail, he meets the legendary gunman Pappy Garret, a man who will change his life forever.

Pappy, an old-timer who proudly admits to having ‘never stolen a dime in his life,’ is a cold-hearted killer who carries ‘a beautiful piece of killing equipment,’ the sort that would make a man ‘glad to get shot by a gun like that, if he cared anything for firearms.’

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Original review on: www.wigantoday.net

REVOLUTION SONG A Story of American Freedom By Russell Shorto - Book Review

“There is properly no history, only biography,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Russell Shorto, in his new book “Revolution Song,” seems to be of similar mind. He writes about six people, all of whom lived in the Revolutionary era, but he does not roll them up into a single narrative or use their lives to bolster an overarching thesis.

Instead, he artfully weaves their stories together and leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions. “I have tried not to preach or even teach,” Shorto writes in the preface — and it proves a decidedly refreshing approach.

Shorto has an eye for intriguing subjects (his previous books include “Amsterdam,” “Descartes’ Bones” and “The Island at the Center of the World”), and this book is no exception.

The Seneca chief Cornplanter (or Kayethwahkeh in Seneca) was a fine looking, philosophically minded man who was also, in Shorto’s words, “something of a killing machine.”

Allied with England during the Revolution, Cornplanter and his warriors slaughtered patriot soldiers and civilians, even children. In retaliation, George Washington sent an invasion force that destroyed crops and leveled village upon village, killing and scalping along the way.

The war devastated the Senecas, and afterward Cornplanter counseled accommodation, urging his people to learn English and know something of white ways. But as the Senecas lost more territory, they grew increasingly hostile to white culture.

A message came to Cornplanter from the Creator, telling him to “remove from his house and sight every article of the workmanship or invention of the white man.” He destroyed mementos, including a sword that had been a gift from Washington, and gradually withdrew from the wider world.

Shorto concludes with the optimistic side of the Creator’s message, describing ancestral lands and ancient ways that Cornplanter, having thrown off white culture, could dream of once more. But the conclusion to Cornplanter’s story is actually very sad.

Although the United States government guaranteed in 1794 that the Seneca grant where Cornplanter was buried would never be taken, in 1964 it was. The Army Corps of Engineers moved his remains and those of hundreds of Senecas buried near him in order to construct a dam on the Allegheny River.

Another of Shorto’s subjects is Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, a dark-haired beauty who wrote a delightfully scandalous memoir. Some scholars have thought it a forgery, but Shorto argues that it is not, and without doubt it is a good read.

Coghlan’s father, a British officer assigned to the United States during the Revolution, forced her at age 14 to marry the British lieutenant John Coghlan, probably to put an end to her dalliance with Aaron Burr. She detested her husband, ran away and availed herself of an English lord, whereupon her father sent her to a nunnery. After she escaped, he disowned her.

Read the original book review on: www.nytimes.com