A Few Odds and Ends

A Mortal Blow to the Confederacy by Mark F. Bielski is the latest entry in Sava Beatie’s  Emerging Civil War series covering the fall of New Orleans. As with the rest of the books in this series, this one provides an excellent overview of its topic. These books aren’t intended to be comprehensive accounts but rather summaries or brief overviews. I recommend all of them very highly as introductions to their topics. If there is a Civil War battle or campaign you don’t know much about pick up the appropriate one of these and you’ll understand the outline of the battle or campaign and have an excellent list of sources for further reading. Without Fail is Lee Child’s sixth entry in the Jack Reacher series. This time Reacher is enlisted to help the Secret Service protect the VPOTUS from a credible threat. It is a very good entry in the series, it moves right along, and if you like the other Reacher books you’ve read, you’ll like this one. My Antonia by Willa Cather was an outstanding book about life on the Nebraska Prairie in the late 19th and early 20th century. For those of you not exposed in High School, the book tells the stories of Antonia Shimerda, a 13 year old Bohemian immigrant who is newly arrived in America and is travelling with her family to a homestead in Nebraska, and Jim Burden, a ten year old boy from Virginia sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska when his parents die. The two meet on a train headed West and from there their lives intertwine as they grow up. The book is magnificently written. Cather is one of those authors whose prose is so evocative that it conjures images in one’s minds eye. Frequently I would read a description of a piece of land, or a day, or a tree, or what have you and an image of it would suddenly appear in my head. Additionally, the book very effectively describes the experiences of homesteaders, the additional difficulties faced by immigrant homesteaders, and life in the small towns that grew up to support those homesteaders in that era. Remarkably, Cather does all this in a slim volume of 175 pages. It was an outstanding book, and I fully understand why Cather has her reputation as the voice of the American Prairie. The Bones of Napoleon by James Warner Bellah was a forgettable little mystery story. Matt Davan is a hard boiled NYC reporter generally nursing a hangover. His life begins taking an unexpected turn when he receives a letter from a Baltimore attorney claiming to have a client interested in purchasing an old iron yacht stored in York Seat, a large rambling mansion on Maryland’s Eastern shore. Owning neither a yacht nor York Seat he ignores the letter. A couple days later he receives another letter, this time from a woman representing Lord Innes, a British peer, begging Davan’s permission to visit York Seat to research Innes’ pet theory that Napoleon escaped from St Helena, lived in America and was buried at York Seat. Later an NYPD detective from Missing Persons shows up and grills him on his particulars at the bequest of the Baltimore PD. Then he is visited by a woman arrived bearing letters from her banker and her psychiatrist asking to rent York Seat for an exorbitant amount of money to aid her recovery from some psychological problem. Finally Davan discovers that a very distant uncle has died abroad and Davan is the uncle’s only living relative. He is the heir to York Seat. As one might expect, there is a trip to York Seat, several of Davan’s supplicants turn out to be evil doers, and things generally go to hell in a hand basket before being resolved, the book then concludes with a sort of throw-away, wildly improbable cod. Folks, you can skip this one. Bellah should stick to writing about the US Cavalry. Slow Living by E.M. Foner is another book set aboard the sentient colonization ship Flower in the author’s EarthCent universe. This is the 5th books in this particular series so it isn’t the place to start, but it was fun and engaging. This author has three series set in this universe and all three of them are excellent. 56 for the year

Kind of like Kipling for the US Cavalry

One of my favorite authors is James Warner Bellah who wrote a slew of short stories, novels, and novellas about the US Cavalry in the American West. Many of Bellah’s stories were turned into films including three of them which were used by John Ford as the source material for his “Cavalry Trilogy” films; Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande.

Much of Bellah’s stuff appeared in the long defunct Saturday Evening Post, the rest of it is long out of print and over the years I’ve spent a small fortune purchasing tatty old mass market paperbacks at outrageous prices. Now his stuff is being released on Kindle and I took the opportunity to get two of them.

The Rear Guard tells the story of Captain Robert McLaw, a US Army surgeon, who finds himself the only surviving officer of a Cavalry troop when its commander dies in the field.   As McLaw is leading the troop back to its home fort, it comes across a regiment of newly recruited infantry escorting a wagon train of settlers. The Colonel of the regiment orders McLaw and his troop to accompany the regiment as a screen and once the expedition is discovered by 1200 hostile Indians things rapidly go pear shaped.

The second book was Ordeal at Blood River. In this one, LT Flint Cohill (who many readers will recognize as one of the main characters in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) is tasked with commanding a troop of cavalry leaving San Francisco to relieve the garrisons posted along the Colorado River in Western Arizona. The mission involves loading the troopers and their horses on a sailing vessel in San Francisco, sailing around Baja California, landing at the mouth of the Colorado river in Sonora Mexico (The US and Mexico had an agreement permitting relief and resupply of the US Army forts through Mexican territory). The book starts off strong and never lets up for the entire 142 pages with lots of twists and turns in the plot.

In both books the writing was crisp, the characters were well developed, the stories were exciting, this was vintage Bellah.  If you’re a fan of westerns or stories of the boys in “dirty shirt blue” both these books are for you. And now that they’re available for Kindle, you can get both of them for less than $5!

51 for the year