One of Sr. Women Web’s reviewers mentioned to me that a friend had recommended Why We Broke Up to her and her 15-year-old granddaughter. No doubt she’ll read the book before passing it along to her granddaughter, and will know if it’s appropriate for that particular child. I’d urge any grandmother to do the same, if she wants to suggest the book to a grandchild. In this day and age, teenagers have certainly heard language that includes things like what my sons used to refer to as “dropping the F-bomb,” since its usage is common not only in schools, but on daytime television, no less. I also doubt that virginity carries the imperative that it seemed to have in my own, antediluvian teen years. I expect I will give the book to my 22-year-old granddaughter with a big grin on my face, but suggest that she wait a year or two before sharing it with her fourteen year old sister.
©2012 — Reviewed by J. S.
BOONE, a Biography
By Robert Morgan © 2007
Published by Algonquin Books; Paperback 538 pages. Also available in Hardback and Electronic Book text
As one reviewer commented, a biography written by a novelist and poet promises an even happier experience than simply academic dedication and adept writing. Robert Morgan has crafted a story of a life to rival the best fiction, while demonstrating the most diligent scholarship and devotion to primary sources any reader could ask for. Add to that the attention to details of production such as the endpapers containing the family tree, the addition of engravings and photographs, and the handsome book design, demonstrate quality on every front. For those who value the heft and appearance of a book, in spite of its size, this is a pleasure.
The man called Daniel Boone has become such an emblem of adventurous spirit and the characteristics most admired among the first European influences on this continent, the prospect of revealing more than the surface of such a person with any objectivity would daunt most writers. From his own roots in a part of the world associated with Boone and his exploits, the reader finishes the last page with a subtle sense that Morgan got to a layer of Daniel Boone unperceived by his other biographers, in part because of Morgan’s almost Jungian kinship with a man to whom the country he inhabited was home to his spirit as much as to his body. Morgan seems to let the Twenty-first Century see into a truly heroic spirit of the Eighteenth.
This is not to suggest that the person whose acts and behavior are detailed in this history was nearly perfect, only that he was one of those rare individuals who is above and worth more than his mistakes and his failings. Those errors and flaws figure largely in the story of Boone’s long life. He never got the hang of financial management, nor of foreseeing dangers in his path from people who lacked his innate or (as Morgan suggests) his Quaker-ingrained integrity. One of the most interesting things about him is his pacific nature. He lived in a time of enforced violence, yet remained in sympathy with the Indians and the animals, was compassionate and generous, and is repeatedly described as soft-spoken.
It taxes one’s imagination to contemplate the rigors that were the norm of frontier life in those very early days. Women were subjected to continuous childbearing even in shelters that were three walls and a slanted roof sometimes for twelve months a year. Families were fed only with what the men could kill with a rifle (if they were fortunate) and what crops they might be able to grow in a single season in freshly-cleared forests. Indian attacks might not kill them, but often deprived them of whatever furs they might have to trade for necessities. Their hardiness can’t be exaggerated. Morgan pulls no punches, but doesn’t dwell on the sensational. Men like Boone were more away from their dwellings than near them in order to trap and hunt for profit.
In a life so long and so filled with dramatic incident, the narrative is too complex to summarize. Indian fighting, exploration, Boone’s drive to find a way to the next new land, the need for killing (animals rather than men, even Indians), read like the stuff of myths.
The final chapter is perhaps the best part of this book. Morgan leads his reader through the accumulation of documented significance, as well as his own interpretation of a person who is rightly dubbed an “icon” to his countrymen, and to the nations across the Atlantic as well. The saddest note struck is the irony of Boone’s overwhelming love of nature, of solitude, of wilderness for its own sake, and the (predictable) results of his life’s work and his heart’s core resulting in the destruction of what he valued most. One thinks of Wilde’s, “... each man kills the thing he loves.”
The grace of Morgan’s prose, his balanced reportage with all necessary evidence, combine with his admiration for his subject, makes a history as readable and emotionally engaging as any fiction. The approximately 150 pages of notes and bibliography, along with inserts on Colonial history, technology, and customs will remind you that it’s all true.
©2012. Reviewed by Joan L. Cannon
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