42. A Dangerous Age

Rated: 3 Stars

BOOKLIST BOOK REVIEW:

*Starred Review* Beloved southern fiction writer Gilchrist returns with her first novel since Sarah Conley (1997), and the legion of fans who appreciate her propensity for using recurrent characters will enjoy the reappearance of the extensive Hand family of North Carolina and Oklahoma. The focus is on three cousins, women, who face making greatly important career and personal-marital-choices against the ubiquitous, unavoidable backdrop of the Iraq War and the terrorist conditions prevalent in the post-9/11 world. Gilchrist brings these three characters into full individual realization while simultaneously connecting them to the bigger pattern that is their shared family history and also to the even bigger national event that fractured lives. The novel's opening event, a wedding, which was to gather all the Hands together, is canceled when the bridegroom perishes in the collapse of the World Trade Center only three months before the nuptials were scheduled to take place. The ripple effect of this family tragedy, and the continued impact of the war in Iraq, on the three cousins' lives gives this novel a humanity easily embraced by the reader. Gilchrist's trademark supple prose and droll sense of humor are on full display. Hooper, Brad.

41. Born Fighting

By James Webb
Rated 5 Stars
From Library

This book was recommended by one of the loopies and I am finding it absolutely fascinating reading. I have been into genealogy for a long time and while I am about 4/5ths German, descended from a long line of dull, pious, hardworking German peasants with an occasional shoemaker, tailor or weaver thrown in I also have this fascinating little line on my Mother's side that is part of the Ulster Scots-Irish group that Webb is writing about. It has been hard for me to get a handle on these people other than that they seem to have arrived ticked off at all things English in the early to mid 1700's, came down the Wilderness Trail from Pennslyvania to North Carolina and within a couple of generations became small land owners around Greensboro, N.C. It appears that every time there was a fight going on this contentious group of ancestors was in the thick of it and I found 4 direct ancestors on the list of people who signed the Regulator Petition. I have always wondered since if any of them knew Roger. As these families grew members eventually went west settling all over the South and Southwest. My G-G-Grandparents came to Missouri in the mid 1800's just in time to be on the wrong side of the Civil War They are my only Confederate leaning ancestors.

Anyway this book tell me a lot about why they left Scotland and then Northern Ireland (they left from Londonderry) and what kind of atmosphere they ended up in when they got to N.C. I need to go and thank Jane for recommending it as it's another one of those books I would never have read had not someone pointed me in it's direction.

BOOK JACKET: "More than 27 million Americans today can trace their lineage to the Scots, whose bloodline was stained by centuries of continuous warfare along the border between England and Scotland, and later in the bitter settlements of England's Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland. Between 250,000 and 400,000 Scots-Irish migrated to America in the eighteenth century, traveling in groups of families and bringing with them not only long experience as rebels and outcasts but also unparalleled skills as frontiersmen and guerrilla fighters. Their cultural identity reflected acute individualism, as well as a dislike of aristocracy and a strong military tradition; and, over time, the Scots-Irish defined the attitudes and values of the military, of working-class America, and even of the peculiarly populist form of American democracy itself."

"Born Fighting is the first book to chronicle the full journey of this remarkable cultural group, and the profound, but unrecognized, role it has played in the shaping of America. Written with the storytelling verve that has earned his works such acclaim as "captivating...unforgettable" (the Wall Street Journal on Lost Soldiers), Scots-Irishman James Webb, Vietnam combat veteran and former Secretary of the Navy, traces the history of his people, beginning nearly two thousand years ago at Hadrian's Wall, when the nation of Scotland was formed north of the Wall through armed conflict, in contrast to England's formation to the south through commerce and trade. Webb recounts the Scots' odyssey - their clashes with the English in Scotland and then in Ulster, their retreat from one war-ravaged land to another. Through engrossing chronicles of the challenges the Scots-Irish faced, Webb vividly portrays how they developed the qualities that helped settle the American frontier and define the American character."

"Born Fighting shows that the Scots-Irish were 40 percent of the Revolutionary War army; they included the pioneers Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, Davy Crockett, and Sam Houston; they were the writers Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain; and they have given America numerous great military leaders, including Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Audie Murphy, and George S. Patton, as well as most of the soldiers of the Confederacy (only 5 percent of whom owned slaves, and who fought against what they viewed as an invading army). It illustrates how the Scots-Irish redefined American politics, creating the populist movement and giving the country a dozen presidents, including Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. And it explores how the Scots-Irish culture of isolation, hard luck, stubbornness, and mistrust of the nation's elite formed and still dominates blue-collar America, the military services, the Bible Belt, and country music. Both a distinguished work of cultural history and a human drama that speaks straight to the heart of contemporary America, Born Fighting reintroduces America to its most powerful, patriotic, and individualistic cultural group - one too often ignored or taken for granted." Book jacket.