Book review: John Eliot: The Man Who Loved The Indians

Book review: John Eliot: The Man Who Loved The Indians

…a conversational biography…

 

 

Book review:

John Eliot:

The Man Who Loved The Indians

 

by Carleton Beals

New York: Julian Messner, Inc., 1957

192 pages

 

This is an entertaining biography of the Puritan minister who was known during his lifetime (1604-1690) as the “Apostle to the Indians.” Rev. John Eliot was the colonial leader who was most influential in cooperating with Indian leaders to establish the “Praying Indian” towns in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Beals creates a fictionalized biography of convenient length. The narrative is filled with dialogue that is relevant to the story, but is, of course, completely inauthentic in the sense that there is only a fragmentary record of Eliot’s conversations with his fellow colonials and with American Indians. This isn’t a big deal. However, Beals’ conversational tone is not to my taste for serious biographical treatments.

John Eliot: The Man Who Loved The Indians is based on substantial research and offers a bibliography of 46 sources, including many that are well respected and well known to historians and students of the colonial period. There is a useful index.

Beals offers an appealing, if one-sided, complement to serious investigation of cultural and political dynamics in 17th century New England.

Caveat: Beals, without apology, writes his story within the European context. To be sure, Waban and the other Indians are characters in the story.

Beals doesn’t spend a lot of time on the brutality of their demise.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

 

Book review: The Reader (Der Vorleser)

Not just a rehash of WWII…

by Bernhard Schlink

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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
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Book review: John Eliot: “Apostle to the Indians”

Book review: John Eliot: “Apostle to the Indians”

…a very busy life…

 

 

Book review:

John Eliot: “Apostle to the Indians”

 

by Ola Elizabeth Winslow (1885-1977)

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968

225 pages

 

John Eliot is a detailed, respectful biography of the mid-17th century Puritan minister who organized Praying Indian towns in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and translated (with the help of James the Printer and other Indians) the Geneva Bible into the Algonquian language of the eastern Massachusetts Indians.

Winslow offers a  competent account of Eliot’s very busy life, and provides decent political and sociological context for his personal, tenacious, and domineering commitment to “civilize” the Indians and convert them to Christianity. Eliot’s tribulations and triumphs are clearly presented, and Winslow underscores the judgment of his contemporaries and of three centuries of scholarship that demonstrate that Eliot was a vigorous, decent, and exemplary man who did his lifelong best to promote the welfare of the Indians—as he conceived it.

There is a useful index, an extensive bibliography, and instructive notes to the text.

Caveat: Prof. Winslow was no ethnohistorian, and she wrote in a style that may be more valuable to a student than to a sincere historian. She endorses, without any apparent reluctance, the discredited conception of the indigenous Indians as “savages” who were “degraded” and burdened with “dark” minds that invited the self-conceived redemptive efforts of the colonists to “civilize” them and bring them into the English church.

This careless error—indeed, this gratuitous insult to 17th century native Americans who had a vibrant culture, lifestyle, and faith—is a very annoying distraction.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

 

A poet is a “maker”

…and it doesn’t have to rhyme…

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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
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Book review: Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life

Book review: Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life

a zealous missionary

           without portfolio…

 

 

Book review:

Harriet Beecher Stowe:

A Spiritual Life

 

by Nancy Koester

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI, 2014

371 pages, with index

 

A Spiritual Life is a robust telling of the story of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

From the first page to the last, you can’t doubt that Stowe cared deeply about most aspects of private life, her faith, and the all-encompassing religious framework of the civitas. As a woman in the mid-19th century, she was a zealous missionary without portfolio.

No surprise here, Koester gives comprehensive analysis of the writing and impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (published 1852). It was a best-seller in the United States and in Great Britain. It moved multitudes to hate slavery or hate Harriet Beecher Stowe. It did not, despite President Lincoln’s mocking jest when he met Stowe at the White House, start “this great war.” During the run-up to the American Civil War, Uncle Tom’s Cabin did help to clarify existing polemical doctrines of opposing camps.

Koester’s aim is to illuminate Stowe’s spiritual life and her very public commitment to advocating her faith and the importance of religious observance and conviction.

If that’s not to your taste, I think reading A Spiritual Life will be drudgery. For me, it was illuminating.

For my taste, Koester mentions but does not usefully detail the context of other aspects of Stowe’s life and impact on American society. She was a woman who conspicuously did not abide by the social conventions that dictated a passive, private, familial role for women. She wrote and was published extensively (I was surprised to learn that she was a prolific writer, including novels, tracts and political broadsides). She had lots of contact with the great and near-great, including President Lincoln and Queen Victoria. Stowe more or less supported her extended family with her writing—it would be interesting to know how much money she made from her writing, because Stowe persisted in a socially risky career and lifestyle that might have been unattainable without a (relatively) high income. I suspect that Stowe was not one of the 99% in her time.

Koester nobly attempts to make her case that Harriet Beecher Stowe was a mover and shaker, non pareil, in the anti-slavery movement before, during and after the Civil War. I suggest that this is a circumstantial biography of a notable lady who was notably revered—and notably tolerated—by a great many of her contemporaries.

If the South actually had won the Civil War, I think it’s possible that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, would be more than a tad less familiar to us.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

 

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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
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Book review: A Cold Welcome

Book review: A Cold Welcome

not even cold comfort…

 

 

Book review:

A Cold Welcome:

The Little Ice Age

and Europe’s Encounter

   with North America

 

by Sam White

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017

361 pages

 

Welcome this one: it’s a new take on the colonial history of America.

White’s focus is on the repeated attempts and repeated failures (mostly) of the Spanish, French, and English governments and rich entrepreneurs to establish survivable colonies on the North American continent up to and through the 16th century.

There’s a new bad guy in the story: cold weather, aka the Little Ice Age.

A Cold Welcome, indeed.

Conventionally, the Little Ice Age is a well-researched period of global cooling that ended about 1850, and began as early as the 14th century, and no later than the 16th century.

European explorers and colonists believed, and were encouraged to believe, that they could expect European, even Mediterranean temperatures and weather in the so-called New World.

They were disastrously wrong time after time. Sam White proposes that Indian resistance, bad luck, poor planning, and freak bad weather were not the only reasons that so many colonial enterprises failed before 1600.

A Cold Welcome explains that there is ample modern scientific evidence, and persistent references in the primary source texts, to verify that the inhospitable cold weather killed crops, animals, and the colonists themselves. In 1541 a Spanish adventurer in what is now Arkansas recorded: “There were such great snows and cold weather that we thought we were dead men.”

The killing cold devastated the indigenous Americans, as well.

There was no place to get in out of the cold.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

 

Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

Book review: Waterloo

The slightly Hollywood bravery

        of Richard Sharpe,

the butcher’s work done at the battle…

by Bernard Cornwell

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Book review: Colonial America

Book review: Colonial America

It didn’t start with the Pilgrims…

 

 

Book review:

Colonial America: A Very Short Introduction

 

by Alan Taylor

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013

151 pages

 

This is another blockbuster in the A Very Short Introduction series.

No matter how much you think you know about colonial America, you’ll learn more from Taylor’s sweep of all the Atlantic horizons.

I won’t attempt the thankless task of summarizing a brief summary of the historical verities of the millions of American Indians who lived in North and South America for thousands of years, and of the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch colonists who invaded the Indians’ homelands.

For a new student of American history, Taylor’s work is a stunning, almost counter-intuitive presentation of the broad array and surprising diversity of “first contact” and subsequent colonial experiences—the Pilgrims were latecomers, they certainly weren’t the “first Americans” in any way you can imagine.

For the serious student and the historian, Colonial America offers many reminders of all the things you don’t know too well (or at all), and all the things you know about colonial America that aren’t true.

Before 1492, the indigenous populations of North America and South America comprised about 7% of the inhabitants of Earth. In 1800, the American Indians were less than 1% of global population. In the 18th century, most of the new arrivals in the Americas were African slaves, not European colonists. These are a couple of the flip sides of the colonial success stories.

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It’s the tiny sound of the surf…

…listen for the sea…(my poem)

“Listen”

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

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Book review: The Myths of Tet

Book review: The Myths of Tet

Our generals lied about it…

 

 

Book review:

The Myths of Tet:

The Most Misunderstood Event of the Vietnam War

 

Edwin E. Moïse

Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2017

276 pages

 

Too many lies. That’s what Edwin Moïse’s book says about the war in Vietnam.

No surprise, more or less. Moïse carefully and compellingly documents the lies created by American generals in Vietnam (“body counts,” “we’re winning the war”) and fed to credulous U. S. government officials right up to President Johnson. In The Myths of Tet, Moïse documents the lies manufactured by North Vietnamese military leaders and used to rationalize their combat strategies that resulted in uncounted military and civilian deaths.

The U. S. was not “winning the war” at the time of the Tet attacks in 1968. The early success of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong attacks was barely understood at the time by the American intelligence apparatus. American combat deaths soared immediately, but somehow this evidence of enemy military success was not fully interpreted by the U. S. military, the American government, and the American people.

Sadly, truth wasn’t the only casualty of the Tet Offensive.

I was in the city of Hue two years after the Tet fighting. The city still looked like a combat zone in 1970. Every wall and building I saw was pockmarked by bullets and explosives. The graffiti that North Vietnamese soldiers had scrawled on the walls was still visible, and it wasn’t funny.

That’s no lie.

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A glimpse of the millennial dawn…

witness to the song of the sea…(a poem)

Chanson de mer

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.

My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

 

Thanks for checking out my website. Here’s what you’ll find:

my poetry in free verse and 5-7-5 format—nature poems, love poems, poems about grandchildren, and a spectrum of other topics—written in a way that makes it possible for you to know, as precisely as possible, what’s going on in my mind and in my imagination;

thoughtful book reviews that offer some exceptional critique of the book instead of a simple book summary;

bits of history that did and didn’t happen;

luscious examples of my love affair with words;

my reflections on the words, art, and wisdom of famous and not-so-famous people, and occasional comments on politics and human nature.

Your comments on my poems, book reviews, and other posts are welcome.

 

Book review: To Serve Them All My Days

by R. F. Delderfield

A beloved teacher,

      you know this story…

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