The Power of Story

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Howard Gordon, executive producer and showrunner for American television shows like Homeland and 24 was the guest on a recent podcast produced by The Cipher Brief, a think tank focused on national security issues. It’s part of the site’s dip into the way national security is portrayed in popular media—television, movies, and books. And it reflects a truth that Gordon says is found in Richard Powers’s book, The Overstory, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

So, what does it take to make a Hollywood hit “in an age of geopolitical turmoil?” as Suzanne Kelly, head of The Cipher Brief termed it. You don’t have to look far to see that turmoil. Today’s news headlines include the Russia-Ukraine war, China’s world role, a new generation of Palestinian fighters, and repression in Iran and Afghanistan, for starters.

Gordon maintains that his new crime show, Accused, which addresses current social issues, is also germane to national security, because society’s strength is affected by how and how well it functions. Accused, which airs on the Fox network, challenges audiences to understand why a crime was committed. The plot lines are drawn from contemporary issues: violence, race, identity and, as what Gordon called “a vital accelerant to the drama,” social media. He says the show is “a new game every week.”

C’mon, this is tv. Is it just wishful thinking to believe fictional television is “important” in a world where so much serious stuff seems out of whack? We’re so polarized along numerous fault lines there seems no good way for people to come together. Stories, culture, food, are all “Trojan horses for empathy,” Gordon believes. If you show someone other types of people in the context of a story, maybe they will come to look differently at people they encounter in real life.

Again, how do these “culture wars” affect national security? Kelly noted that the age of interpretation and context is gone—people seem too eager “to line up on sides.” As retired four-star General Michael Hayden, a frequent contributor to The Cipher Brief has said, society is not suffering so much from a need to find truth, what we have lost is much more important—a desire and critical capacity to want to find the truth. We’ve lost the desire to respectfully disagree, to negotiate. It’s a loss that affects national security because it makes the job of our enemies so much easier.

Oscar Shorts: Documentaries

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Oscar, Academy Awards
Oscar, Academy Awards

The themes of the Academy Award nominees for short documentary films are universal—parents and children, of whatever species, coming to recognize what’s right, care for the world around us. Three are from US directors, one set in Russia is a UK entry, and one from India.

How Do You Measure a Year? (trailer) – American director Jay Rosenblatt answers that question by following the relationship of a father and daughter as she grows from a toddler to a young woman. The father made home movies every year on her birthday that recorded her answers to the same set of questions. Spoiler alert: Asked at age three what she wanted to do when she grew up, the answer was “wear makeup and chew gum.”

The Elephant Whisperers (trailer)– directed by Kartiki Gonsalves and produced by Guneet Monga. In this beautiful nature documentary, a couple in south India takes on the formidable task of caring for an orphaned baby elephant they call Raghu—“a tender and hopeful product.” [Not based on the book, The Elephant Whisperer, set in Africa; and not the same as the movie Elephant Whisperer, set in Thailand.] (You can see it here)

Stranger at the Gate (trailer) – Directed by Joshua Seftel. A returned Marine with PTSD planned to attack Afghan refugees at their Muncie, Indiana, community center and mosque. But fate and faith had a different plan for him, and again, it was a daughter’s influence that mattered. This one was my favorite. (See the whole thing here)

Haulout (trailer) – The UK’s entry, directed by siblings Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev. In the desolation of the Siberian Arctic, marine biologist Maxim Chakilev is waiting to observe the annual migration of the walrus population. He makes the melancholy discovery that warming sea temperatures are forcing the walruses to swim the entire distance, with no ice to rest on, much to their detriment. Have you ever seen 90,000 walruses at one time? Now you can! Just be grateful Hollywood never perfected Smell-O-Vision. (see the whole thing here).

The Martha Mitchell Effect (trailer) – Directed by Anne Alvergue and Beth Levison – Martha was the outspoken wife of Richard Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell. She didn’t like what she saw of that administration’s illegal activities with Watergate and said so. They tried to silence her, claiming she was an alcoholic, mentally unstable, and generally damaging her reputation. (But, as Woody Allen once said, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean no one’s following you.”) (You can see it here)

Damascus Station

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So many former CIA analysts turn to writing fiction, you have to wonder whether real life outside the agency seems to lack sufficient drama. Whatever, their willingness to lay bare their former lives often redounds to the benefit of fans of realistic spy fiction, like me. David McCloskey’s debut thriller, Damascus Station, is one of the best. I listened to the audio version, narrated by Andrew B. Wehrlen, and found it utterly engaging.

In the early days of the Syrian uprising, around 2011, Americans are determined to infiltrate the multi-pronged and highly paranoid security apparatus of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It’s a challenging task but certainly well worth doing.

CIA case officer Sam Joseph is helping his colleague and friend, Valerie Owens, exfiltrate an important Syrian asset. Assad’s agents are everywhere, and the panicky agent misses his meeting with Joseph and Owens. When their safe house is attacked, Joseph escapes, and Owens is arrested. Because she has diplomatic protection, they believe she will be safe. Not so. Evidence eventually emerges of her torture and death.

Joseph has plenty of motivation to return to Syria. Not only does he want to avenge Owens’s death, he must find and recruit another Syrian to help undermine the shaky Assad regime. Though student rebellions and terrorists’ assassination campaigns are doing their bit to destabilize the political situation, plenty of ruthless bad guys lead Assad’s security forces. Their anxieties and rivalries create a situation as stable as a bowl of nitroglycerine in an earthquake. The Americans need a fearless, highly motivated mole to go up against them.

Joseph finds the kind of person he’s looking for in Mariam Haddad, daughter of a commander in the Syrian Army and niece of a colonel in Assad’s chemical weapons program. Haddad works in Assad’s Palace—effectively Assad’s personal office. She is in a position to learn secrets. For family reasons, she’s vulnerable to Joseph’s outreach. McCloskey creates a nice balance between Mariam’s fear and self-doubt, on one hand, and her determination to bring down the evil men leading the security forces, on the other.

I wish McCloskey hadn’t chosen to raise the stakes by having Joseph and Haddad break one of the iron rules of clandestine work and fall in love, even though that makes the situation more dangerous for them both. Despite the cliché overtones, McCloskey manages to keep their relationship real. The tension keeps building as what he needs Haddad to do becomes increasingly difficult, and as evidence accumulates about an unthinkably deadly plot.

David McCloskey is a former CIA analyst whose writing bears the stamp of authenticity, and the book has received much praise by former Agency personnel. It was a finalist for the International Thriller Writers’ Best First Novel Award in 2022. Narrator Andrew Wehrlen makes Sam Joseph a convincing American character and creates distinctive voices for the many Syrian bad-guys as well. Highly recommended.

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Read Me a Story

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You may have seen actor Robin Miles (pictured) on the TV shows Law & Order and Murder by Numbers, but her principal creative outlet is the approximately 500 books she’s narrated—many, many of which have won awards. Journalist Daniel Gross’s recent New Yorker article, “How a Great Audiobook Narrator Finds Her Voices,” centers on voice actor Miles.

When she began narrating books, Miles was shocked to find how pigeonholed narrators were. If you were Black, you read books by Black authors; if you were Jewish, the same. “When a little more diversity came in (to the pool of audio narrators), it was like, well, nobody can do anything outside of their yard. And now, I think we’re also beginning to hopefully, break through that again.” Certainly the talented Adam Lazare-Smith is equally convincing narrating the Black and white characters of SA Cosby’s thrillers, as is Sullivan Jones narrating a whole array of ethnicities in Joe Ide’s I.Q. books, set in East Los Angeles.

Generally, a narrator is chosen who shares some major trait (gender, race) with the story’s main character. So, what about all the other characters? People different in terms of gender, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, level of education, country of origin? The best audio narrators move between characters easily and make their voices simultaneously distinctive and authentic. As another skilled narrator, Adjoa Andoh, describes this challenge, “You are the entire world.”

Miles says that growing up in a town full of immigrants—Matawan, New Jersey—exposed her to accents from pretty much everywhere. Versatility, combined with creativity, serves voice actors well. In NK Jemisin’s fantasy books, a number of which Miles has narrated, the way characters sound must be created from scratch. They can’t sound like they came from Brooklyn or New Orleans or Maine.

I’ve been an Audible subscriber for more than twenty years. I’ve listened to hundreds of books. In 2004, I listened to all of Dickens, as well as Jane Smiley’s biography, Charles Dickens. Back then, audiobooks were a small part of the literary marketplace, but in 2008, Amazon paid about $300 million to buy Audible. They’ve done nothing but gain listeners in droves ever since. Today, audiobooks “are about as popular, in dollar terms, as e-books, and may soon generate more revenue than Broadway,” reports Gross.

Some authors decide to save the approximately $100 to $400 an hour it costs to hire a narrator/producer and read their book themselves. Having listened to so many terrific narrators, this seems risky and I’d never do it, but John le Carré did a great job reading his Agent Running in the Field. As in so many creative domains these days, AI is rearing its computer-generated head in the field of audio narration. When I think of the subtlety deployed by my favorite narrators, my instinct about this development is pure Luddite. As an example, Gross describes how Miles recognized a line was a bad joke and let her voice trail off as the character realized how unfunny she was. A manufactured voice might be able to read a textbook, but subtlety . . . I don’t know. How about sarcasm? Dawning uncertainty? As Gross says, “When publishers and producers inevitably try to sell us synthetic voices, it’ll be up to us to hear the difference.”

Oscar Shorts: Live Action

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Academy Award, Oscar

A theme for this year’s Oscar nominees for Live Action short films might be “little girls” or “parents and children.” Four of the five nominees fit in either category, just not the same four. Unlike the 2019 nominees—which were so unrelievedly bleak they put us off watching the shorts for several years—these provided not only emotional variety, but also some laughs. Most of the films are under 20 minutes.

First up was the darkest of the entries, Ivalu, directed by Anders Walter and Pipaluk K. Jørgensen, based on a graphic novel about a young Greenland girl who goes missing and her younger sister’s quest to find her through the snow, in the ice caves, and under the sea, where experience and myth commingle. An ominous soundtrack accompanies the stunning scenes of the ice mountains, a reminder of how they, and the Greenlanders’ way of life, are headed for extinction (trailer).

Night Ride – directed by Eirik Tveiten. It’s Christmastime in Norway and not necessarily a season of good will toward man. At the end of a tramline, the driver takes a bathroom break, refusing to let a waiting woman sit in the car to be out of the cold. The passenger slips inside anyway and plays with the controls. The tram begins to move. Simultaneously thrilled and frightened, she drives away. When she has to stop to let passengers board, it turns out their default is starting trouble (trailer) or (see the whole thing).

Alice Rohrwacher wrote and directed Le Pupille, the longest of the entries at 38 minutes (trailer). This is an entry from Italy and Disney+. With Disney comes the money for a large cast, a scruffy dog, clever music, and other production values. The story takes place in an Italian orphanage run by exacting nuns during World War II. Again, Christmas approaches. On that special day, orphanage visitors ask the little girls, costumed as angels, to pray for them. It’s a thinly disguised and not particularly successful fundraiser. Some hilarious moments with the charming and mischievous orphans. Don’t miss the closing credits!

In the tension-filled The Red Suitcase, directed by Cyrus Neshvad, a panicky 16-year-old Iranian girl arrives at the Luxembourg airport to meet the much older man to whom she’s been betrothed. All she possesses is her red suitcase and a very different vision of her future (trailer).

An Irish Goodbye – written and directed by Tom Berkeley and Ross White. Estranged brothers Turlough and Lorcan return to the County Down family farm with their mother’s ashes. Besides the farm, which Turlough doesn’t want (he lives in England) and his brother does, the mother has left a list of “things I want to do before I die.” Turlough agrees to stay long enough to complete the items on the list. This turns out to be a more complicated endeavor than expected. You don’t see much of the family priest, but whenever he does appear, he manages to say the worst possible thing in the circumstances. Warm-hearted portrayal of people doing their best in a bad time (trailer).

Philip Marlowe’s Big Leap

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“Philip Marlowe has taken his place among characters of American myth, with Natty Bumppo, Captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn, and Thomas Sutpen,” Apparently myth-deprived, I had to look up Sutpen—protagonist of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! But you knew that.

Marlowe was elevated to this status by Nasrullah Mambrol in a fascinating essay in Literary Theory and Criticism I’d missed until now. Time helps. It’s been sixty-five years since publication of Chandler’s last Marlowe novel, Playback.

Mambrol says Chandler believed detective fiction was a heroic form modern readers could believe in. Modern writers, too, since they continue to follow in his footsteps with greater or lesser success. In last year’s The Goodbye Coast (my review), author Joe Ide erases any doubt about whom he’s emulating by naming his protagonist Philip Marlowe.

Raymond Chandler, Philip Marlowe, Humphrey Bogart
(art: wikimedia.org)

Establishing a realistic hero in modern times wasn’t an easy decision. The American frontier had disappeared, removing the possibility of stories about the self-reliant loner pitted against the hostile forces of man, beast, and terrain. (I’m ignoring the nomadic Jack Reacher here.) Chandler’s heroes instead inhabit what he termed “the mean streets,” whether they emerge from a back alley or run past gilded mansions. Says Mambrol, he’s “more interested in exploring cruelty and viciousness among the very rich than among the people of the streets.” This to me also has many more dramatic possibilities. Characters at the very bottom of the social ladder rarely have much agency. It’s the people higher up in society who do have choices and who make bad ones that interest me.

Chandler believed strongly in the possibilities of redemption, though many of his contemporaries were shunning that aspect of heroic tradition. Except, Chandler believed, Hemingway. When a character in Farewell, My Lovely, asks Marlowe who Hemingway is, he says “A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.”

Marlowe’s instinct is to help society’s victims. This makes him both interesting and vulnerable, and he shields himself with a tough-guy persona, but it’s a pose, in which he wisecracks his way through tricky situations. You’ll recognize his protective impulse in the symbolism deployed in The Big Sleep, where a stained glass panel shows a knight in armor rescuing a lady.

With all the forces rending the social fabric and leaving gaping holes for corruption to slip through, Marlowe lives and works by one principle: loyalty, especially client loyalty. In the age of chivalry, people believed in rigid established standards of behavior. In modern times—and one might say, increasingly so—there is no common understanding of “good behavior,” which is why Marlowe developed his own guiding principle.

In this much longer and fascinating essay, Mambrol credits Chandler, particularly The Long Goodbye, with marking the transition of the detective novel into “the realm of serious fiction.” Any crime novels you’ve read lately that make that leap?

More Ways to Annoy Your Reader

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In the litany of authorial sins that readers object to, are quirks that require readers to reread or rereread a passage to figure it out. So said the hundreds of readers who responded to a recent Washington Post query, written up here (paywall).

One cause for having to reread a passage can be the abandonment of quotation marks—Cormac McCarthy is an author who omits them (though, I admit, I don’t mind rereading him).

Hilary Mantel had the opposite quirk. She kept the quotation marks but eliminated everything like “Cromwell said” or “said the Cardinal.” Some dialog passages needed several readings to be sure I had the words coming from the correct character’s mouth. Most confusing in Wolf Hall, but better in the later books.

Another annoying source of confusion are gratuitously complicated timelines. The structure of a book should make it easier, not harder, to follow. Even Sulari Gentil’s clever The Woman in the Library (my review) baffled me at times. In a plot like nesting dolls, you have to stay alert to a change in point of view. Is it the author writing or the author she’s writing about or . . . . ???

On to the complaints about characters, starting with “unrealistically clever children or talking animals.” No, please.

A big one we should have evolved past by now is sexy descriptions of women in non-sexy situations. I read a lot of cringy stuff focusing on a woman’s appearance, especially her figure, top and bottom. Need I mention such descriptions are almost always written by men? Turn the tables and write about male characters in such a salacious way, you see how awful it is. (See this column by Alexandra Petri, “If male authors described men in literature the way they describe women.” Or this essay by Prasanna Sawant, “The Bizarre Ways Some Male Authors Describe Women.”) I don’t believe the male authors are even aware they’re doing it. Appearance is what they notice about women in real life, so that’s what they put on paper, whereas the male characters just show up.

Readers also object to “disabled characters who exist only to provide treacly inspiration.” That holds for any character who is meant to demonstrate a point, like the protagonist’s open-mindedness: “Look, he has a Black friend, a gay friend, a loyal dog!” Authors need to give those friends and mutts something to do.

Then the readers got down to nitpicking. Somebody will object to almost anything, it seems: overused phrases like “his smile didn’t reach his eyes,” “she exhaled the breath she didn’t realize she was holding” (I encounter that one a lot). Even individual words would prompt readers’ to get out their blue pencils: burgeoning, preternatural, inevitable, lugubrious. In the comments on the article, one reader objected to “spelling based on sound, not a dictionary. Just read one novel that referred to riggers (not rigors) and emmersed (instead of immersed). I was stunned to read the author’s note in which she complimented her editor.” I, on the other hand, was pleased and surprised to see that such creatures still exist.

Post writer Ron Charles, who compiled these complaints, predicts that “somewhere some cynical, market-driven AI scientist is working on a novel-writing program that can accommodate all these complaints.” I hope not. Words written by a real person—blind spots and annoying habits and grammar lapses and all—are preferable to a formula any day.

Read Part 1 of this article here.

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How To Annoy Your Reader

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What pet peeves set readers’ teeth on edge? Washington Post writer Ron Charles wrote about them in this recent article. He asked members of the Post’s Book Club newsletter to let their opinions fly, and, he says, “The responses were a tsunami of bile” from hundreds and hundreds of readers. In case you’re working on a book now or even thinking about it, you’ve been warned.

Readers don’t like dreams. And why not? Is it because as you’re starting to get a mental grip on what’s going on in the story, you suddenly hit that “and then I woke up” line that means you have to mentally erase what you just read? Or, is it as one respondent said, “They are always SO LITERAL.” One example where this type of thing was handled very well was in Paul Cleave’s latest book, The Pain Tourist (my review here). There was never any confusion about whether you were in the comatose boy’s dream-mind, and he put together reality (what was going on around him in real life) and his mind’s protective mechanisms (the illusion that masked the horrible events that led to his coma) was quite astonishing and revelatory.

As you’d expect, readers take offense at historical anachronisms and factual inaccuracies. In essence, “say, dear reader, blah-blah-blah.” Too jarring. At the same time, unless an author is writing for twelve-year-olds, they shouldn’t avoid the occasional word that might send some readers to the dictionary. Not to be pretentious, but because it’s exactly the right word.

Readers want authors to write with authenticity. One respondent warned that “taking a cruise to Alaska is not enough to write a novel about the Last Frontier.” You can take the cruise and write the book, of course, if you bolster that with a lot of additional research.

Typos and grammar errors. Oh, boy. I confess I look up “lie” and “lay” nearly every time I use them (this was one of the errors singled out, along with popular misused homonyms). I’ve read it wrong so many times I don’t even know what’s correct any more. It’s worth the twenty seconds to check, so I don’t lie (ha-ha) awake at night, wondering.

Recently, I read a UK thriller where the author repeatedly used the wrong pronoun case. “He gave it to him and I,” “the book was for her and I,” etc. I was fuming. That’s something he should have learned in junior high. If you turn the sentence around, you see how bad it is: “he gave it to I and him.” And, while this particular error might be forgiven in dialog, because people do make mistakes while speaking, it kept appearing in the narration. This particular book was also, alas, morally bankrupt, so there was a lot not to like.

Readers complained about books that are simply too long. Especially books by best-selling authors Do they think “every word they write is golden and shouldn’t be cut?” one respondent wondered. And it isn’t just the book that’s too long, so are the prologues, chapters, descriptions, and everything else in them and especially those italicized passages. It seems italicized paragraphs hit a nerve with readers. Don’t do it, they say.

“What Readers Don’t Like” – Part 2 WEDNESDAY

George Street Playhouse: Clyde’s

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© T Charles Erickson Photography tcharleserickson@photoshelter.com

Opening night of the dramedy Clyde’s at George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, was a lively evening, despite the chill outside (minus 4 on our way back to the train!). The original Broadway production of Clyde’s received multiple awards and is one of two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage’s trilogy of stories set in Reading, Pennsylvania. She calls Clyde’s the series’ “grace note.” Directed by Melissa Maxwell, the New Brunswick production opened February 3 and runs through February 19 and is great fun!.

Before the action even starts, the audience is treated to the “backstage” view of a diner (named Clyde’s), which specializes in sandwiches. The clever use of neon, the battered kitchen equipment, mop pail, staff lockers, and other accoutrements—the set’s terrific. But if it jibes with what you imagine a diner kitchen might look like, the staff may surprise you. The diner owner, Clyde (played by Darlene Hope) served prison time for something her employees are not quite sure what. What they do know is that somewhere along the way, her compassion for others was knocked out of her. She’s a terrible and terrifying boss.

Clyde’s four staff members are all ex-cons too, but a decade or so younger than she is. Don’t mistake her hiring them for a generous heart. She’s hired a staff that doesn’t have many other employment choices, and she knows it. There’s Montrellous (Gabriel Lawrence) who sees sandwich-making as an art and tries to elevate the sandwich-making (and life) aspirations of the rest of the staff—Letitia (Sydney Lolita Cusic), Jason (Ryan Czerwonko) and the fry-cook, Rafael (Xavier Reyes). The lettuce flies while a lot of sandwiches are made, troubles explained, and secrets shared. They’ve had troubles, but at Clyde’s they can be an uneasy team, with an abundance of witty banter. One recurrent bit: they try to outdo each other in describing ingredients of the most “perfect” sandwich. (Don’t go to this show hungry!)

Despite the many genuine laughs, Nottage reveals how hard they have to work to make a life outside prison. She lets you see a very specific world you won’t soon forget. Entertaining and indelible.

Production credits to Riw Rakkulchon (set designer), Azalea Fairley (costumes; something must be said about the awe-inspiring skin-tight costumes and high-heel boots Clyde wears that fit her perfectly, in every sense), Cheyenne Sykes (lighting), Scott O’Brien (composer/sound designer), Fre Howard (wig and makeup design) and Cristina (Cha) Ramos (fights and intimacy).

Clyde’s is on stage at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center. Tickets available here or by calling 732-246-7717. Check the website for current information on NBPAC’s covid requirements.

My Ancestors and Indigenous Americans

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One of the joys of genealogy is the thrill of discovery. Unknown corners of the past that involved or affected my family. A good example: my Standifer ancestors initiated the “racing of fine horses” in both Maryland and Virginia. Mint juleps all around!

But I’ve also discovered other kinds of information: A fourth-great uncle who in 1807 Georgia had illegitimate children by two different women two months apart. Or the murder trial that involved several generations of the family’s men, which ended in an Alabama jury’s verdict of “not guilty,” but can’t have been a behavioral high-water mark for the family.

Lately, I pulled it all the scattered mentions of family members’ interactions with indigenous Americans together. It’s not pretty. These interactions were inevitable, because all the lines of my family settled in the New World in the 1600s and 1700s. Settlement led to conflict. While my family members didn’t lead the efforts to displace indigenous people, they certainly benefited from them and, by their presence, helped precipitate them. Some family members benefited from the Georgia and Alabama land grabs, which culminated in the Trail of Tears period; some fought in the Creek War and the Second Seminole War, or participated in local Virginia militias that skirmished with the natives.

Still, several of my forebears were shopkeepers who traded with the Indians, a number learned their languages and served as interpreters, and a few, as Presbyterian ministers, later served the tribes relocated to Oklahoma’s Washita Valley. Three-greats uncle Lemuel Jackson Standifer spoke fluent Cherokee, and was well regarded by them. When he and his wife built their Alabama home, the Cherokees came and filed past her, and each laid a gift at her feet.

Histories of the period point out how sensationalistic and self-serving were stories of “Indian atrocities.” Several of these appear in my family history, with varying validation. The most plausible is the that of Chloe Standifer Van Bibber (my first cousin, 5 times removed), who, stories say, was kidnapped by natives and rescued by her father, John, a friend of Daniel Boone. Chloe later married Jesse Boone, Daniel’s son.

My ancestors encountered the members of a great number of tribes, from the Pequot of Massachusetts to the Susquehannock of Pennsylvania, the Choptank and Nanticoke of Maryland, the Rappahannock, Potomac, and Chesapeake of Virginia, the Chickasaw of Tennessee, the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole of the southeast, the Shawnee raiding parties throughout the east, and the Tonkawa, Kiowa, and Comanche of Texas. When my family migrated toward central Texas from Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi both before and after the Civil War, “Texas remained, for all intents and purposes, a Native American world, inhabited by a constellation of peoples as culturally distinct as the region was vast,” says historian Sam. W. Haynes.

Read more?

  • Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, a 2020 finalist for the National Book Award
  • It’s not all way in the past: David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. New York: Vintage Books, 2018, National Book Award finalist