book report VII

Subtopic for today is history. I've finished Everything in its Path, by Kai T. Erikson, on the Buffalo Creek flood in West Virginia in the early '70s; Captors and Captives, by Evan Haefeli and Kevin T. Sweeney, on the Deerfield raid in the early 1700s; and Battle Cry of Freedom, by James M. McPherson, a one-volume history of the Civil War.

Battle Cry of Freedom was quite an achievement. It's hard to imagine trying to get a single-volume overview of the Civil War that still reads well and doesn't seem too crammed and overly dry, but also doesn't have any obvious gaping holes. McPherson even found room to go into details. The volume was particularly good where it covered the events leading up to the war, which I find many histories tend to pass over quickly in order to get to the battles. An excellent addition to my reference library!

Everything in its Path had a lot of really interesting things to say about the mountain mentality. My mother's family is from West Virginia (not that far from where these events took place, I believe), and so it was interesting to get an insight into their lives. I also appear to be amassing quite a collection of disaster literature! Johnstown flood, circus fire, black death, influenza pandemic ... not to mention, of course, the Civil War. Apparently something about people's past suffering—and the ways they rose above it—resonates with me.

The one I'm not entirely sure about is Captors and Captives. Here again, disaster literature: the Deerfield raid was Native Americans and French attacking a small frontier English settlement, carrying off a number of the settlers to France and Indian village. I have another book on this event, The Unredeemed Captive, the story of minister's daughter Eunice Williams, who chose to remain a Native American rather than return to the family and culture of her birth. But I was
looking forward to C and C to help paint the picture of the event more clearly ... and I'm not sure but what there were too many details. It all sort of swam together in my mind—the French, the Indians, the English, the captives. And so I'm still not sure if it's a keeper or not. Do I really want to try and slog through it again? Will I really use it as research? Probably not, to both.

Tomorrow night, the next entry in history books: Our Army Nurses, by Mary Gardner Holland, which deserves an entire entry all to itself.