Dances With Wolves.. Blake - A*

                     In the spring of 1863, Lt. John Dunbar's act of bravery so impresses his commanding officer that he is offered whatever assignment he desires.  He asks to be sent to the western frontier. Within a month, he is on his way to re-supply Ft. Sedgewick on the plains east of the Rockies in what will someday be Colorado. Upon his arrival, he finds the garrison gone. He decides to settle in, and realizes there is a Comanche camp a handful of miles to the west. He sees Kicking Bird, and after a few tentative sightings, they slowly build up a friendship, and learn to communicate by sign language. The Comanche are waiting for the buffalo and when they arrive, Dunbar joins in the hunt. He kills a buffalo, participates in the celebration and begins to feel a kinship with the Indians that he never felt in the army. As the summer passes, he spends more and more time with the Comanche and only occasionally returns to Sedgewick. Because the Indians had seen him with a wolf that followed him around the army post, they bestow on him the Comanche name Dances With Wolves. They also have Stands With A Fist, a white woman they had saved from a Pawnee raiding party when she was seven, act as an interpreter for him. He learns the Comanche language, participates in the scouting and hunting with the warriors, and slowly falls in love with Stands With A Fist. He offers to join a raiding party going to Pawnee land, but his request is denied. While the party is away, the Comanche learn that a raiding party is heading toward them. With the best warriors away, this is a very troublesome turn of events. Dances With Wolves returns to Sedgewick to recover a buried cache of rifles. He leads the defense of the village, and is heralded as a hero by all. Upon return of the war party, Kicking Bird consents to the marriage of Dances With Wolves and Standing with A Fist. On the day the Comanche were heading south for a winter camp, Dances With Wolves goes to Sedgewick to retrieve his journal and erase all evidence of John Dunbar. The fort is swarming with soldiers, his horse is shot out from under him, and he is in jail before he knows it.  The next day, the commanding officer sends him east in chains. By noon, he is rescued and three soldiers are dead.  He returns home to winter camp. The next summer is the finest the Comanche would experience. But they know that storms from the east are headed their way. A truly great novel.

The Holy Road, Blake - B+

                     Years later, Dances With Wolves, Stands With A Fist, and their children are living happily with the same band of Comanche, led by Wind In His Hair and Kicking Bird. Although all is well, they are constantly hearing from the tribes to their north that the white man is coming, killing buffalo, and laying tracks for a road that will carry an armored car.  Dances With Wolves learns from the Kiowa that the whites are offering them war or a reservation. The Comanche conclude that they must resist. Within days, Wind In His Hair leads a war party east to kill white men, Dances With Wolves rides west to hunt, and Kicking Bird rides north to seek a meeting with the white men. While Kicking Bird is in camp with the Kiowa, a white agent, a Quaker named Lawrie Tatum, arrives alone and expresses his desire to pursue peace. Kicking Bird and the Kiowa chief engage with the Quaker agent. The village that all of the men assume safe, is not. An undisciplined group of murderous civilian rangers fall on the Comanche camp one morning and murder more than half. The survivors, under the leadership of the young, Smiles A Lot, quickly move west away from the white men and toward Kiowa country. The white men rode east with a captive white woman and her daughter. They are proud to have rescued Christine Gunther after all these years. Stands With A fist is terrified that she would never see her husband or oldest children again.  Dances With Wolves joins in an attack on a wagon train and steals the clothing of a white man. He travels extensively before he finds and rescues his wife and daughter. They return to a diminished village, one suffering endless battle losses, including Wind In His Hair, and slowly starving as the buffalo is fading from the scene.  The end is at hand for all of the plains Indians.

                  Obviously, these two books have impressed me. I cannot think of a historical novel within recent memory that so aptly tells a story with so much insight  as well as these do. The reader is totally immersed in the world of the Comanche. Simply superb.

Becoming Irish American: The Making and Remaking of a People from Roanoke to JFK, Meagher - B

                    Ireland in the first millennium of the Christian era was Celtic, rural and Catholic. The Normans came to southeastern Ireland from England in the late 12th century, and revolutionized and reorganized all aspects of Irish society. Over time, they settled into a rapprochement with the Celts. In the 15th century, Tudor England sought to assert control over Ireland. England's victories in the north led to the introduction of Scottish Protestant settlers. A century later when the Civil War spread to Ireland, Cromwell reallocated most of the land in the country to the English Protestants. By 1770, Catholics owned only 5% of Ireland's land. The English Anglican elites diminished not only the Catholics, but also the Ulster Presbyterians who in the 18th century began to flee to America. By the time of the American Revolution, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 had left Ireland for the new world. The vast majority were Protestants, and they settled throughout Appalachia. They supported independence and afterwards leaned toward the Democratic-Republican party. Initially non-sectarian, the Ulster Irish began to resent the newcomer Irish Catholics in the beginning of the 19th century.

                   The Napoleonic Wars had seen England rely heavily on Irish exports, thus bringing prosperity, and a significant population increase to the island. After 1815, that boom ended. In the thirty years preceding the famine, almost a million left Ireland for North America. "As the huge Protestant Irish immigration seemed to disappear into thin air, Irish Catholics, were growing rapidly and becoming more noticeable." The newcomers to America were met with increasing nativist opposition and violence. A million and a half Irish immigrants came to the US in the decade after the famine began in 1845. They were impoverished laborers. The 1860 census showed only 7% of Irish immigrants had white collar jobs. They stayed in the big cities of the east, because they could not afford to travel to the midwest and beyond. They struggled because of their "simple lack of money, craft skills, or even familiarity with a modern commercial society." The Irish faced the fierce hostility of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB ie., the Know Nothings). Because the Protestant hierarchy championed abolitionism and opposed the Irish, the Irish wound up supporting the Democrats and slavery. Indeed the antagonism of the abolitionists and Protestant establishment assured that virtually no Irishman outside of Illinois voted for Lincoln. They worried that the Republicans wanted to free the slaves and impoverish and disenfranchise them. The Irish fought bravely for the US, and after the war, they memorialized their commitment to the union to adhere to the American mainstream.  Nonetheless, they still faced anti-Irish racism on every front.   

                The Irish continued to arrive in America. In the half century after 1880, 1.7 million more came. They joined the burgeoning second generation Irish who were making substantial economic progress. By 1900, a quarter of them had white collar jobs. A third of the second generation women were schoolteachers. Nonetheless, the Irish seldom owned businesses or rose to upper management. "Irish American Catholics had significant advantages over other groups, being white and Christian, of course, but the Protestant establishment did set an upper limit to the Irish rise that would frustrate the most ambitious among them through much of the twentieth century." As they could not be insiders, they became the leaders of those looking in. They dominated big city politics and the labor unions. They adjusted to the influx of central Europeans, Italians and Jews by bringing them into the urban Progressive movement of the Democratic Party. The party rose in stature, began to put more and more men in Congress, and elected a president in 1912. But, pushing against liberalism in the public arena was, of course, the Catholic Church, which preferred that the Catholics remain separate. The Knights of Columbus, a pan-ethnic religious group, fostered a vision of a Catholic world as an alternative to Protestant America. The 1920's saw a "rebirth of religious and ethnic nativism." The Ku Klux Klan exploded in popularity, and a new immigration law enshrined America as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation.  The divisions in America were embodied in the 1928 presidential election, which pitted Catholics v. Protestants, cities v. the countryside, immigrant v. native, and wets v. drys. 

                   The Depression hurt all, particularly the urban working classes. However, the circumstances of the Irish improved throughout the 1930's thanks to the New Deal and the renaissance of the labor movement.  Irish politicians grew in numbers and influence. There was, however, conflict between the inherently conservative Catholic churchmen, and the elites in Roosevelt's administration. Irish Catholics supported the war and a higher percentage of the Irish population served than any other ethnic group.  Pius XII's obsession with communism permeated the church after the war. "Third generation Irish Joe McCarthy" fanned the red scare from the Senate. Another conservative Irish Catholic, William Buckley, battled the liberal elites. During the postwar years,  the Irish focused on riding "the postwar prosperity economic boom that the war had prompted to college educations, new and better jobs, and homes in rapidly growing suburbs." But they were still not assimilated. A writer observed that for the Protestants "it was their county, handed down to them by the Pilgrims." Throughout the 40's, 50's and 60's, Irish Americans had larger families than other ethnic groups, and were more religious than they had ever been.  The election of one of their own to the presidency sealed their acceptance as part of the American establishment. They no longer faced structural prejudices. The Vatican Council took some of the edge off Catholic solidarity and encouraged reconciliation with all faiths.  Increasingly conservative, the Irish have drifted away from the Democratic Party and attend church less frequently than their ancestors.  They marry non-Irish and non-Catholics more and more. Fully assimilated, the Irish Catholics are fully American.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

The Queen's Men, Clements - B

                       The second in the series is set in 1587, five years after the debut of Walsingham and Dee in their efforts to protect England and Queen Bess. An attempt is made on the Queen's life by a band of Dutchmen hiding out around London. Walsingham pursues them while Dee is trying to create an English iteration of Greek Fire. The assassins steal the Greek Fire and almost ambush the Queen on her birthday, but, of course, fail. The tensions between Spain and England and all the maneuvering between the two countries are the highlights of the series, which does a superb job of spreading light on the topic.

The Yellow Birds, Powers - B

                      The author is a combat veteran infantryman who was in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. The focus of the novel is 'Murph,' an eighteen year old who seems lost at sea thoughout the whole process. The narrator tells Murph's mom that he'll take care of him and bring him back. His company's sergeant overhears the promise, and decks the narrator for his foolishness. Murph cannot handle the pressure and fails to survive the tour. Survivor's guilt is a theme and, more importantly, despair overrides  the entire telling of their training and combat experience.