Book Talk

Past and Future

You may think that you know the story of the OK Corral. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday – all the big names of the old west were there. But of course history is different than Hollywood, and Jeff Guinn has researched diaries and letters from private collections, and even Wyatt Earp’s sketch of the end of the shoot out, to write The Last Gunfight: the Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral- And how it Changed the American West. He explains how the clash of ruggedly individual competing interests came together that day, and it wasn’t in the O.K. Corral!

Well, first of all Davy Crockett ALWAYS signed his name David Crockett, and rarely wore a coonskin cap. The second surprise was that he was an elected U.S. Congressman. Though popular for his exploits as a hunter and frontiersman, he was no political match for Andrew Jackson. Michael Wallis clarifies many of the myths of Crockett, including his supposed surrender at the Alamo, in David Crockett: the Lion of the West.

Noted historian David McCullough has written, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. Inquiring minds and adventurous spirits did not always head west. The period of 1833 to 1900 saw many creative and hungry minds head to Paris. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the U.S., was there. Charles Sumner enrolled at the Sorbonne where he saw black students as ambitious as he. Later as a U.S. Senator, he was an unyielding supporter of abolition. James Fenimore Cooper wrote there; Samuel B. Morse came home with the idea for the telegraph.

Robber barons, industrialists at the public trough, economic panics…sound familiar? These were all part of the landscape of the great railroad projects of the 19th century. Railroaded: the Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, by Richard White, shows how those abuses sparked new anti-monopoly legislation in the Gilded Age..

Fiction

Anna North has created the island America Pacifica, the last habitable place in the United States after the second Ice Age. It is also the only home Darcy has ever known. Her mother was one of the early arrivals which put them among the elite. Last-boaters were the second class citizens forced to struggle to survive. The arrival and departure of a mysterious stranger sets Darcy on a quest to find her. It takes her through the slums of the island and uncovers the truth about the island's beginnings and her Mother’s part in it.

Driven from New York to Texas by bad luck and pride, sculptor Francis “Gil” Gilheaney is offered a commission by rancher Lamar Clayton. Ben Clayton was killed in WWI and will be memorialized in what Gil hopes will be his greatest work. But Lamar is a complicated man with a heavy secret. Remember Ben Clayton by Stephen Harrigan travels from New York to outlaw settlements, Paris cafes and WWI battlefields.

Two hundred fifty years after a nuclear war wiped out civilization, the human elites plot to leave the planet and abandon the enslaved gene-trash. It’s time for the rebellion, when the slaves fight for survival against a corrupt world government on a destroyed planet. Read Mind Storm by K.M. Ruiz.

In 1911, the new Eugenics Records Office is sending its agents to catalog the sick, the insane and the criminal, creating a “cull” list. Industrialist Garrison Harper plans to create a utopian community in Eliada, Idaho. Eutopia: a Novel of Terrible Optimism, by David Nickle, reveals the terrible cost and evil of perfection.

Virginia Cooper
Adult Services Librarian