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The legend of the American frontier is largely the legend of a single individual, Daniel Boone, who looms over our folklore like a giant. Boone figures in other traditions as well: Goethe held him up as the model of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "natural man," and Lord Byron devoted several stanzas of his epic poem Don Juan to the frontiersman, calling Boone "happiest of mortals any where." But folklore is not history, and we are fortunate to have a reliable and factual life of Boone through the considerable efforts of John Mack Faragher. The contradictory admirer of Indians who participated in their destruction, the slaveholder who cherished liberty, the devoted family man who prized solitude and would disappear into the woods for years at a time--the real Boone is far more interesting than the mythical image, and in this book we finally catch sight of him.
Book Description
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History for 1993In the first and most reliable biography of Daniel Boone in more than fifty years, award-winning historian Faragher brilliantly portrays America's famous frontier hero. Drawing from popular narrative, the public record, scraps of documentation from Boone's own hand, and a treasure of reminiscence gathered by nineteenth-century antiquarians, Faragher uses the methods of new social history to create a portrait of the man and the times he helped shape. Blending themes from a much vitalized Western and frontier history with the words and ideas of ordinary people, Faragher has produced a book that will stand as the definitive life of Daniel Boone for decades to come, and one that illuminates the frontier world of Boone like no other.
Customer Reviews:
A true woodsman.......2007-08-13
This book provided very detailed information regarding Daniel Boone and his relatives. He's a legend worth learning about. You'll be able to separate the myths about him from the truth, according to the best available data.
Be ready for a long read.
Well Detailed Book on the Great Backwoodsman.......2006-10-11
Well written and detailed book on America's back woodsman who seemed a precursor to the Mountain Man. Hailing from Pennsylvania, the author tracks Boone's introduction and love of hunting from his early years through his family's move to North carolina to Kentucky finishing his mature years in Missouri due to his constant thirst for better hunting and less people. Fascinating account of Boone's unique relationship with the Indians and cool head. His ability to sustain himself like a native and stay in the wilds alone or with small bands. The author not only does well detailing how Boone led parties into Kentucky and creating settlements but also verifies several exploits such as his saving the lives of his daughter and her friend who were kidnapped by Indians by using his knowledge of the geography of the land and the trails that the Indians used.
The author also details well Boone's controversial surrendering of his men to the Indians in exchange for sparing families at Boonesboro that is still somewhat puzzling as many thought him a traitor. Also a bit of a paradox is Boone's love of the hunt, staying away from home sometimes for a year or more while fathering 8 to 10 kids with Rebecca. Also interesting is his relationship with Rebecca who endured his long hunts and disappearances and may have had a child not Boone's that he accepted as the the consequences of his absence. Well worth reading, even covers Boone's warts particularly as a land surveyor, that obviously was not his skill. And unlike Fess Parker and the legend, he never wore a cookskin cap. But the author makes the facts as fascinating as the legend as Boone was in fact a fearless and independent man of the wilderness.
Very informative and enjoyable.......2006-02-22
This is a terrific book on Boone, someone who was almost more of a legend and a myth to me than a real man. This book gives an absorbing and detailed account of his life. I didn't even know so much was actually known about Boone, but Boone was a man of great personal character and courage whose exploits were documented in many letters about him and in his diary. Also, the women get detailed treatment too, so you learn about their contributions on the frontier, too.
The American Revolution to the east mostly passed Boone by, but he was fighting another revolution and battle on the frontiers against the Indians. Some of the tribes I hadn't even heard of, such as the Westo, and I've read at least a little of Amerindian ethnology and history so I know the basics. Many of the battles and fights against the Indians are discussed in detail, which makes for fascinating reading as you see how tough and tactically sophisticated the Indians were in forest fighting engagements, which the settlers realized they had to adopt too or be wiped out.
Oddly enough, Boone was not always lionized as a frontier hero, there are cartoons of him lampooning his sometimes reclusive, loner ways, and his insatiable need for "elbow room," for which he sometimes left his family for weeks on end to go on long hunts and to explore the vast interior frontier. Sometimes the book goes fast, sometimes a little slow, as a read, but overall a very interesting book on this early American great and his adventures and trials and tribulations.
Who was Daniel Boone? .......2006-01-16
John Mack Faragher believes that he was an American so steeped in legend and myth that while his name is known to all he is completely misunderstood. Faragher seeks to draw a portrait of Boone the man, minus the legend and myth, and his work is a wonderful reassessment of this iconic American hero. What we learn is that Boone was fine frontiersman who enjoyed the forests and the natural environment of Kentucky. He had a genuine affinity with the Shawnee Indians, with whom he had much in common but fought repeatedly and eventually helped to vanquish from the region. Boone was at his best when he was able to demonstrate a natural courage in the face of adversity, whether it be in fighting the Shawnee or in confronting other enemies. He had ambitions as a land speculator and entrepreneur but never made it work. He made and lost several fortunes in his lifetime.
The Daniel Boone of this biography is neither the intrepid loner of legend nor the larger than life frontiersman. He was essentially a family man who tried to ensure his place in the economy of Revolutionary America, going to the frontier to do so, and securing an inheritance for his children. Even-tempered and intelligent, if not well-educated, Boone was a man out for the "main chance." In dangerous times he rose to the occasion, as in the siege of Boonesborough in 1778, his captivity by the Shawnee for several months, and the rescue of his daughter Jemima and Betsy and Fanny Calloway from Indians when they were abducted.
Faragher does a fine job in separating the fact from the fiction of Boone's life, and this is an elegant and entertaining as well as illuminating book. If you have any interest whatsoever in the life of Daniel Boone this is the book to start with in learning about his remarkable life on the American frontier.
One of the Great Biographies of Boone the Kentuckian.......2005-08-16
This is an excellent book in many ways. I would recommend it as a companion to the works of Draper, Bakeless, and of course his own "autobiographical" article in Filson, and the interviews with his son by Draper ("My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews With Nathan Boone").
My particular interest in Daniel Boone is his association with Big Bone Lick, and his early visits there and I have written on this subject. Anyone seriously interested in early Kentucky history should read this book.
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Daniel Boone (Johnston, Marianne. American Legends.)
Marianne Johnston
Manufacturer: PowerKids Press
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ASIN: 0823955796 |
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Daniel Boone: Frontier Legend (Historical American Biographies)
Pat McCarthy
Manufacturer: Enslow Publishers
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ASIN: 0766012565 |
Book Description
This centerpiece of the trilogy captures the British at the height of their vigor and self-satisfaction, imposing their traditions and tastes, their idealists and rascals, on diverse peoples of the world. Index. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
Customer Reviews:
Outstanding.......2007-04-03
I picked this up on a whim in a used bookstore, but I'm certainly glad I did. Although I finished reading it months ago, it still stands out in my mind as an excellent book. This is not your standard history book -- there are no names or dates to memorize, and the focus is more on the common man than on prime ministers and generals (though you get some of those too). Rather, it is a portrait of an era. I have never read a book that did such a good job of conveying the *feeling* of a particular time and place -- even though that "place" covered something like a quarter of the earth's surface, and included hundreds of diverse cultures. It really gets you inside a British colonial of the era: their attitudes, their social status, what they read, how they felt about their place in the world.
On top of all this, Morris is simply an excellent writer. I understand from researching her other books that some people are thrown by her writing style, but in a book as impressionistic as this, it is entirely appropriate.
A slight warning: those looking for it might be disappointed that Morris does not spend more time on the more unsavory aspects of the British Empire. She doesn't whitewash anything, but be aware that this is generally a very positive view of the empire. If you're willing to accept it on those terms, you'll love this book.
Highly recommended.
Empires Compared.......2004-01-28
This book is an exemplar of historical writing, about the British Empire at its peak, that should serve to tell Americans of today some of the advantages and hazards of an accumulating hegemony. The central event, around which the book is organized, is the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, celebrated throughout the Empire in 1897. Full of pomp and circumstance of a proud nation, showing the world its power and glory, the celebration marks the pinnacle of its reach, though few sensed it at the time.
The Empire then included something like one quarter of the landmass of the earth, with a navy and merchant marine that dominated all of the oceans, and was without peer. Its control of communication through its vast network of telegraph lines and underwater cables was unchallenged. Britain was the main source of the industrial revolution of the 18th century, and its technology was an essential element to its domination of the less developed world.
In that Empire, 50 million British whites dominated 372 million people of all nationalities spread over an area some 90 times as great as the British Isles. Morris concentrates his attention on the atmospherics of the time, and happily does not get bogged down in a pedantic recital of meaningless names and forgotten events. This was quite a different sort of empire from the present day American effort and was probably more moral to boot.
The Brits had no notion of spreading democracy as our present satraps pretend, but rather were more interested in opening up markets for the factories at home, encouraging emigration of the less fortunate citizens, and spreading the gospel among the heathens provided an important moral impetus. The American neo-cons, on the other hand, have no interest in spreading Christianity, and are more interested in attacking the "fundamentalists" of other faiths. And they are content to see our factories shuttered and the jobs shipped overseas, and favor open borders at home.
Morris does an excellent job in his lively writing style describing the times. The book is rather lavishly illustrated, and it is certainly thought-provoking for anyone contemplating the imbecilities of the current scene.
Customer Reviews:
Trilogy is a wonderful work on the British Empire.......2002-05-26
Jan Morris is a fascinating personality. She originally was a he, and he was a guardsman in the British army, an officer from a good family. He left the service, became a historian, and then went to Denmark or wherever, and came back a she. She now writes unusual, affecting, eccentric, entertaining books that are terribly British and a bit disorganized. The Pax Brittanica trilogy is her life's work, near enough, though she's done other books that are very good. This one, however, is three volumes long, quite involved and very detailed. The series includes Heaven's Command, Pax Britannica, and Farewell the Trumpets. The first generally deals with the Empire in the 1840s on, the second follows things through the thirties, and the third follows the empire through its disbandment.
As I said, Morris is eccentric. This means that though the books are sort of chronological, they aren't exactly sorted the way you would expect, and this isn't really a history of the empire or the era. Instead, it's an anecdotal collection of tales, incidents, and sketches, marvelously told. Sort of like the difference between going through a cafeteria once and a sumptuous buffet where you go back and forth, taking time with what you enjoy. I thoroughly enjoyed the books, though I would hesitate to recommend them to someone who wasn't clear on either geography, or at least some basic history of the British Empire. Since this isn't either of those, you need them to understand what she's talking about occasionally.
The Best Book on the British Empire.......2001-10-12
I bought the trilogy in 1984 and have re-read it every year since then. Morris's attention to the finest details is amazing! I especially love the footnotes that provide further details to the cast of characters or updates on places, bulidings or sites as they are today. Jan's travel writing background especially evokes the visceral, from the bright colors, smells even the humidity of far flung places.
Its the only series you will ever need to read on the British Empire!
The Best Popular History I've Ever Read.......2000-07-22
James Morris' PAX BRITANNICA, which uses the British Empire as it was in l900 as a framework, is the best work of popular history I've every read. Morris (who is now "Jan" rather than "James") is one of the world's great writers. This absorbing book focuses on the personalities, great and small, who shaped and controlled the Empire in its glory days. Of course there are many diversions, surprises and curiosities, and Morris fully exploits his brilliant talents as a teller of stories. Morris is as much travel writer as historian. Much of the pleasure (and credibility) of PAX BRITANNICA rests in the fact that Morris visited most of the places of empire and he describes many of them as they were when he was writing the book in the early 1970s. Nothing brings history to life like going to the places where it happened.
PAX BRITANNICA is part of a trilogy. Although the first in the series to be written, chronologically, it falls between HEAVEN'S COMMAND, about the creation of the Empire, and FAREWELL THE TRUMPETS, about the loss of the empire. Although quite splendid, in my opinion, the latter works lack the edge of inspiration, engagement and liveliness which make PAX BRITANNICA so special.
Other notable books by Morris include OXFORD, HONG-KONG, THE WORLD OF VENICE, AMONG THE CITIES and MANHATTAN `45. The versatile, wide-ranging Morris has also recently written a book called LINCOLN: A Foreigner's Quest.
Excellent panoramic journey into the Raj........1999-04-04
I just finished this volume. The writing is exquisite. I must confess that I found the first volume, Heaven's Command, better and more gripping. Here again, my only quibble, is that in the Harcourt set that I have there are no pictures!! That definitely takes away a star!!
The perfect springboard to start a study of British history........1998-12-01
This book focuses not only on the actions of history, but the aesthetics as well. It colorfully illustrates the lives of the "Imperial pioneers"; Kitchener, Rhodes, Churchill, Livingston and many more. It also covers the grandest moments of Imperial history- the beginnings of the mercantile empire in Asia, to the moral thrusts in Africa and the Carribean. It is part of a tryptich set, which includes "Heaven' Command" and "Sound of the Trumpets" Though thorough, the book is never preachy.
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Pax Britannica Climax of an Empire (Pax Britannica)
Jan Morris
Manufacturer: Faber Faber Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0571194672 |
Book Description
The definitive account of the Everests of mathematics--the seven unsolved problems that define the state of the art in contemporary math.
In 2000, the Clay Foundation announced a historic competition: whoever could solve any of seven extraordinarily difficult mathematical problems, and have the solution acknowledged as correct by the experts, would receive $1 million in prize money. There was some precedent for doing this: In 1900 the mathematician David Hilbert proposed twenty-three problems that set much of the agenda for mathematics in the twentieth century. The Millennium Problems--chosen by a committee of the leading mathematicians in the world--are likely to acquire similar stature, and their solution (or lack of it) is likely to play a strong role in determining the course of mathematics in the twenty-first century. Keith Devlin, renowned expositor of mathematics and one of the authors of the Clay Institute's official description of the problems, here provides the definitive account for the mathematically interested reader.
Customer Reviews:
Seven of the greatest mathematical problems.......2007-05-13
If you want to know about seven of the most difficult unsolved math problems for which the Clay Mathematics Institute offers 1 million dolars a piece to whoever can solve them, this is the right book. Actually, we might talk about six unsolved problems since Perelman apparently solved the famous Poincaré conjecture.
A quite readable account for someone who has some training in math.
The best that could be done in a linear medium.......2007-01-19
This compromise between the desire to be comprehensible to a wide audience, and to describe aspects of highly abstract mathematics, works better than one might expect, but it is still a compromise. (I skipped years of school and took my Math degree at London University too immature to be successful.)
In my opinion, the only way this (book)/project could have been successful would have been for the Clay Institute to have commissioned a website with home pages for each of the problems, and a large web of explanatory pages for the various mathematical concepts involved.
There was one place I thought the author (no doubt overwhelmed with the purely mathematical difficulties of the task he had set himself) missed an opportunity to be clear. His Navier-Stokes equations describe a perfectly incompressible fluid. Clearly this is a mathematical abstraction - the speed of sound in such a fluid would be greater than the speed of light, indeed infinite. I think the whole thing would have been clearer if he had noted that the real question to be answered is "are the equations for an incompressible fluid a useful approximation to the behaviour of a real fluid, or does the attempt to approximate inevitably lead to nonsense?". Attempts to simulate multi-body gravitational interactions on a PC screen, for example, seem easy to program, but simple programs that calculate forces at an instant and then step positions forward a finite time, inevitably lead to all the particles eventually shooting off the screen, simply because two particles very close together at the instant have mometary huge forces on them, and the approximation that the force is constant over a step is then nonsensical. So far, the Navier-Stokes equations seem to fail in the same way. The question is, can this be fixed? At least that's my understanding, but it does not come through in this book.
Good reading for non-experts .......2006-09-09
It is probably impossible to satisfy everyone when writing a book about modern mathematics: no matter how good the book, some readers are bound to find it too primitive, while others will be hopelessly lost. The author seems to have tried to find the middle ground, perhaps a little on the "simple" side. A professional mathematician would probably find this book far too elementary; as a chemist, I found it educational. In places, it goes on and on about elementary concepts instead of progressing quickly to something more advanced. But overall, it was a good and stimulating reading that provided a glimpse of contemporary mathematics. Recommended if you are a non-mathematician with an interest in mathematics.
hard math made interesting..........2006-06-17
This week I finished reading The Millennium Problems, by Keith Devlin. It's a look into seven of the hardest, unsolved mathematics issues we have on our hands today. A prize for solving any of these puzzles has been offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute, offering one million dollars to anyone who solves or resolves any of them.
Devlin's book is a math populizer, and he does his best to illustrate the seven puzzles in question. They are:
1. The Riemann Hypothesis, which asks if there is a pattern to the distribution of the prime numbers, related to the zeta function.
2. Yang-Mills Theory and the Mass Gap Hypothesis, which would help us understand why the electron has mass.
3. The P vs. NP problem, which seeks to understand the types of problems that computers can analyze, by trying to determine whether problems can be broken up into two groups: easy to find an answer (P), vs. easy to check the answer (NP).
4. The Navier-Stokes Equations, which are differential equations governing fluid dynamics, but don't have known general solutions.
5. The Poincare Conjecture which is a toplogical problem for 4-dimensional objects, asking the question as to whether the surface of a four-dimensional sphere is simply connected.
6. The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, which relates to whether a particular class of equations have solutions.
7. The Hodge Conjecture, which is a rather complicated piece of work in analytic geometry.
I have to be honest...while I followed the explanations given in the book for the last two, I know I have no hope of explaining them. The author does his best with the material, but he even admits that those two problems are rather obtuse.
All in all, it's a good book, for the mathematically inclined. The author provides good explanations for the problems, illustrating their histories, and the stories of those folks who originated the problems. Check it out...but only if math is your bag, baby.
An uneven account.......2005-11-28
As the author himself relays many times in the introduction, it is not the easiest task to explain to lay readers the forefront of mathematical research (or for that matter, the forefront of any academic discipline). However tried the author did, and in my opinion failed to convey the fundamental issues.
History is always a good place to start from when describing a problem. And the author excels in putting together the many strands of history leading up to the seven millennium problems. But history in itself cannot be sufficient in itself without describing the actuals. For instance in a chapter describing the Navier-Stokes theorem the author bluntly writes down the differential equation for users to read. Yes, specialists will relate to them, but for the lay readers? The chapter on Hodge's conjecture is even worse. The author acknowledges honestly there that he has no means to explain in lay terms the question in hand. In such case shouldn't the chapter be expanded to attempt to explain instead of just stating that there is no easy way? How else would writing a book on such topic be justified?
Even in the better chapters (the chapter on Riemann's hypothesis for e.g.) the disconnect between the good historical material and the lack of description for the real problem are evident. The book should either have been written for professional mathematicians or, if intended for general readers, should have limited its scope to things the author found clear-cut methods to explain. I admire the author's attempt, but as it is, the book appears uneven and incomplete.
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Sustainable Development and Environmental Management of Small Islands (MAN AND THE BIOSPHERE)
Manufacturer: Informa Healthcare
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ASIN: 1850702675 |
Book Description
Written by thirty experts, this text is aimed directly at people who involve themselves in the affairs of small islands- scientifically or politically . The authors wield the disciplines of economics, ecology, geography, anthropology, and environmental sciences in order to help solve the problems facing small islands. The first part of the book addresses issues relating islands in general, the second section presents case studies of particular islands and island groups. The final part coalesces the first two sections into recommendations for specific geographic regions.
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- Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick
- Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness (Kodansha Globe)
- Elia Kazan: A Life
- Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues
- Evita: In My Own Words
- Fall Down Laughing: How Squiggy Caught Multiple Sclerosis and Didn't Tell Nobody
- Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
- Fight Back and Win CD: My Thirty-year Fight Against Injustice--and How You Can Win Your Own Battles
- Following the Milky Way: A Pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago
- Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey from Down Under to All Over
Books Index
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Daniel Boone: An American Life
Lewis and Clark among the Indians (Bicentennial Edition) (Lewis & Clark Expedition)
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