What I'm Reading This Month
By Nadine Holder
October 2006
Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick. I had noticed this on the bestseller list but didn’t really intend to read it. I accidentally ran across Philbrick reviewing the book on Book TV and was very impressed with his passion about the book. A few days later a cousin in Chicago shared a copy of the book by mailing it to me so I was obligated to read it. I am about two thirds through it and it is so packed with information there is really no way to write a decent review, even in two parts so am giving you the author’s words from the book jacket:
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“I thought I knew about the voyage of the Mayflower. But when I started to explore what happened when an old, leaky ship arrived off the coast of New England in the fall of 1620, I soon realized that I, along with most Americans, knew nothing at all about the real people with whom the story of our country begins."
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“The oft told tale of how the Pilgrims and the Indians celebrated the First Thanksgiving does not do justice to the history of Plymouth Colony. Instead of an inspiring tableau of tranquil cooperation, the Pilgrims’ first half-century in America was more of a passion play in which vibrant, tragic, self-serving, and heroic figures struggled to preserve a precarious peace - until that peace erupted into one of the deadliest wars ever fought on American soil. The English fatalities were catastrophic, but the rebelling Indians were virtually obliterated as a people. The promise of the First Thanksgiving had given way to the horror of total war."
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“A hundred years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this culminating event - King Philip’s War - brought into disturbing focus the issues of race, violence, religious identity, and economic opportunity that came to define America’s inexorable push west. But as the Pilgrims came to understand, war was not inevitable. It would be left to their children and grandchildren to discover the terrifying enormity of what is lost when two peoples give up on the difficult work of living together."
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“More than 375 years later, in a world that is growing more complicated and dangerous by the day, the story of the Mayflower still has much to teach us.”
~ Nathaniel Philbrick
Though I am a dedicated history buff this book is hard slogging and I am not sure I will finish it. But the main thing I have gotten from it is reflected in Philbrick’s last statement, as I can still see hope for America in our current complicated and dangerous times, because I see from the Pilgrim’s hardships and surmounting of hardships that there is something in the people who have immigrated to this country over a span of nearly 400 years that will survive and thrive, no matter what the circumstances. In our democracy, flawed though it is, are the seeds for continuing a viable government no matter how difficult dissension about race and religion becomes. We will survive our political squabbles and we will stand tall as world leaders!
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