The final part is worth reading—it’s the most fanciful, since it’s from the POV of Watson, but also, the most moving. PM really examines what it must’ve felt like as again and again Watson screwed up or was screwed over.
After reading SC, I really want to visit the Fla. Everglades. There’s a great Salon article by a travel writer who camped at the site of the old Watson homestead after reading the books. You can probably Google it.
I love PM’s work as well. A few years ago he judged a writing contest for the Asheville Writers’ Workshop and chose one of my pieces as a finalist. He scrawled “great sense of place” across the top of the first page. I should frame that and hang it over my desk or something.
I’ll look into the Japanese writers. I love Ishiguro. Thanks!
that is indeed a cool honor to have PM comment on your strong sense of place ...
I have a place in asheville which i am wanting to call home, but women and work are slowing that up right now ... I am only an hour or so from the old watson place ... maybe I will take the motorcycle down ... i will be up in town end of next week ...
Great shots, tatttms! Thanks for sharing. I love the sign photo with the vultures. Also, love that the sign reads “The Watson Place.” Not “The Watson Homestead.” Just “Place.”
Just cracked open my first serious book in three years, a biography of Andrew Jackson bt Jon Meacham called American Lion. I can already tell this is a keeper, especially if you like American History.
Truly, it is a good book but not one of those volumes you just can’t put down. Lucky if I can read a chapter or two a day. It reads more like an interesting history text. It’s an excellent intro to the causes of the Civil War and the politics of DC which seems not to have changed that much.
We were taught in school that nomadic peoples scampered across a land bridge over the Bering Strait roughly 12,000 years ago during the last Ice Age—so how could such thriving societies have developed in the relatively short period of time? Mann has an intriguing explanation, which even in the time since his book went to press has been echoed in press accounts of new findings in science: The old narrative was probably wrong. It now appears likely that even if people did move across the Bering Strait then and make their way south, they did not find an empty continent. Recent discoveries at a place called Monte Verde in southern Chile indicate that early humans were there at least 12,800 years ago.
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Mann is especially good on the subject of Native American agriculture. In 2003, in a piece that was chosen for an annual collection of the best science writing, he presented the startling notion that the Amazon rain forest has for so long been so thoroughly—and so skillfully—manipulated by Amazonian Indians that it probably makes sense just to go ahead and call it a work of art. He covers that territory here as a well, making a persuasive case that our predecessors in the Americas used fire in far more creative ways than has been understood up to now. Soil scientists marvel at the existence of a very rich, dark soil in the Amazon called terra preta de Indio. This, it turns out, is largely man-made. The fruit trees that are so plentiful in the Amazon? Planted by man. According to a recent study cited by Mann, the Indians living in the lower Amazon were growing more than 138 crops as far back as 4,000 years ago. One Spanish expedition into the Amazon in the 1540s came across a settlement so large and developed, its homes and well-tended gardens lined the river for more than a hundred miles and hundreds of thousands of people showed up to greet the visiting foreigners.
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Mann asks what it would be like to be sent whirling back through time to 1491 to meet up face to face with a member of the Haudenosaunee, whose progressive constitution—forged before the Europeans ever reached North America—stands as a marvel of early public policy. “Is it too much to speculate that beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and bedizened robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself, at least in certain respects, than your own ancestors?”
