Jamestown: A Novel

Jamestown: A Novel
Average customer rating:

old weird America

A Weird and Funny Book

Jamestown

Tour de Tour de Force

It was okay. maybe...

Jamestown: A Novel
Matthew Sharpe
Manufacturer: Soft Skull Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1933368608

Amazon.com

On the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, you won't want to confuse Matthew Sharpe's new novel by that name with the many commemorative histories that are coming out alongside it. In this gleefully anachronistic and deeply scatological tale, history repeats itself in a post-apocalyptic future that's as violent as the past. Sharpe connects many of the familiar historical dots (Pocahontas saves Captain John Smith and falls for John Rolfe, for example), but his settlers don't arrive from across the Atlantic in search of new land for tobacco: they flee a Manhattan where the Chrysler Building has just collapsed and the water is poison, driving an armored bus down the ruins of I-95 in search of the supplies of gas and clean food that they hope the territory of Virginia might provide. Amid the gore and smut, you'll find a surprisingly touching love story, starring a restless, de-Disneyed, and thoroughly charming Pocahontas, and thrillingly inventive language on every page that skims from Elizabethan archaism to IM slang and back, often in the same sentence. --Tom Nissley

Questions for Matthew Sharpe

Jamestown is Matthew Sharpe's fourth book (his previous novel, The Sleeping Father broke out into wide readership, thanks in part to a surprise Today show book club selection). We asked him a few questions about his latest work.

Amazon.com: What attracted you to the Jamestown story (aside, of course, from cashing in on the 400th anniversary)?

Sharpe: For a dozen years I worked as a writer in residence in New York City public schools for a nonprofit called Teachers & Writers Collaborative. In the late '90s a group of middle-school teachers in Queens asked me to help them develop some creative writing exercises for a unit they were about to teach on the Jamestown settlement of 1607 in Virginia. I read John Smith's several accounts of his sojourn there, made up some writing exercises, road-tested them, and liked the material so much I decided to do a big, novel-length writing exercise about it. I was drawn to the extremity of the story, the big personalities--Smith, Pocahontas, Powhatan--and, well, the awfulness of it. The story of Jamestown functions as one of the founding myths of our nation, and I wanted to highlight how America began in violence, bloodshed, and a level of incompetence that would be ridiculous had it not been so deadly; in other words, Jamestown was a lot like the administration of George W. Bush.

As for cashing in, I leave that to lottery winners and poker champions.

Amazon.com: You reveal how the former United States has come to this post-apocalyptic state of affairs in bits and pieces. Did you work that future history out for yourself beforehand, or did you just fill it in on the go, as needed?

Sharpe: I'm inclined to use the term post-annihilation rather than post-apocalyptic, since "apocalypse" implies revelation, i.e., the receiving of some crucial, maybe even divine knowledge. I don't see the people in my novel being the beneficiaries of that kind of knowledge, though some of them are struggling mightily to attain it. And I had a really good model for the post-annihilation future I depict, namely, the pre-annihilation present, presided over by the world's superpower-of-the-moment, us. As for working out my imaginary future beforehand or making it up as I went along: the latter, always the latter. The novel is an improvisation--a structured one, I hope, but the excitement (and terror) of writing fiction for me derives from the way I am always simultaneously playing the game and making up the game.

Amazon.com: How did you choose which elements from the original Jamestown story to include, and which to discard?

Sharpe: Mostly by intuition. I knew I wanted a cross-cultural love story and a cross-cultural horror story to co-exist: this would be the central tension of the novel, each would offset the other, or so I hoped. The primarily economic purpose of the original settlers also seemed important to include. The rest I used or invented as guided by presentiment. And, for better or worse, the things I say in interviews about the novel are mostly retroactive insights--hypotheses more than explanations. The person who wrote the book knows more about it than the person answering these questions does.

Amazon.com: Ben Marcus has written, "My feeling is that the impossible must be made viable, and only through language, that language is not subject to the laws of physics and therefore must not be restricted to conservative notions of 'sense' and 'nonsense,' but must pursue what appears impossible in order to discover the basic things." What's your take on that?

Sharpe: I like what Ben Marcus does with language in his own fiction and in his essays about other peoples'. I'd say one of the ways I tried to use language to depict the impossible in Jamestown was to represent the past, the present, and the future happening simultaneously. This happens at the level of content--people in a future America living one of America's originary historical events as if it had never happened before--and, I hope, it also happens at the level of style--people talking in English that is Shakespearean one moment, Keatsean the next, Otis Reddingesque the next, or all in the same sentence, or word.

Amazon.com: Jamestown is dedicated to Lore Segal, who is known in my house as the author of the fabulous kids' book, Tell Me a Mitzi, but who has had a long and varied career beyond that. What led you to honor her so?

Sharpe: Lore Segal is an excellent human being and was perhaps the most important writing teacher I had. I took a course with her at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan several years after graduating from college. It was all so dicey, "being a writer," it required an audacity I was attempting to muster. Lore's encouragement, her generosity, her good humor, her ability to help me figure out which parts of what I was doing were worth pursuing--these qualities of this wonderful woman helped me muster that audacity. She has a new book out called Shakespeare's Kitchen. Dear readers, if you have not already, please read the short story in there called "The Reverse Bug," and then, when you climb up off the floor, read the rest of the book.

Book Description

Jamestown chronicles a group of “settlers” (more like survivors) from the ravaged island of Manhattan, departing just as the Chrysler Building has mysteriously plummeted to the earth. This ragged band is heading down what’s left of I-95 in a half-school bus, half-Millennium Falcon. Their goal is to establish an outpost in southern Virginia, find oil, and exploit the Indians controlling the area. Based on actual accounts of the Jamestown settlement from 1607 to 1617, Jamestown features historical characters including John Smith, Pocahontas, and others enacting an imaginative re-version of life in the pioneer colony. In this retelling, Pocahontas’s father Powhatan is half-Falstaff, half-Henry V, while his consigliere is a psychiatrist named Sidney Feingold. John Martin gradually loses body parts in a series of violent encounters, and John Smith is a ruthless and pragmatic redhead continually undermining the aristocratic leadership. Communication is by text-messaging, IMing, and, ultimately, telepathy. Punctuated by jokes, rhymes, “rim shot” dialogue, and bloody black-comic tableaux, Jamestown is a trenchant commentary on America's past and present that confirms Matthew Sharpe’s status as a major talent in contemporary fiction.

Customer Reviews:

old weird America.......2007-09-28

Matthew Sharpe's America here is the America of Blood Meridian, a childlike, exuberant, and reflexively violent America. The writing is simultaneously coarse and refined, broad in its obsessions, but cutting and precise in its arch vocabulary. It also keeps its sense of humor all the way through. As absurdist and outlandish as this post-Apocalyptic mashup is, it remains true to the metaphors of the Jamestown settlement. The characters are well-delineated, and it's easy to relate to both the "native" populations and the interlopers as they struggle with cross-cultural communication, one's responsibilities to one's society, and what it's like to fall for a stranger who can scarcely conceive of your roots. John Rolfe's stoned reading of a Rorschach inkblot is a tour de force, moving deftly from the scatological to the heartbreaking, all the while hewing to the novel's own self-made mythos. Sharpe is conscientious about paying off his enigmas, like the red skin of the tribesman, their ability to speak English, and the nature of the war between Manhattan and Brooklyn. He's also good about slipping in historical and cultural nuggets, both ancient and modern. My only issue was with the obvious difficulty of sustaining such an over-the-top narrative. The relentlessness did get to be a little wearing on the backside of the arc.

A Weird and Funny Book.......2007-07-05

Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown takes a story that Americans are at least tangentially familiar with--the disastrous founding of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607--and transforms it into a post-apocalyptic satire. All the familiar names are here Smith, Rolfe, Powhatan and Pocahontas, but now these adventurers and Indians, the survivors of some terrible past doom, find themselves in a blasted brave new world full of violence and uncertainty. This might not sound like the stuff of fall-on-the-floor-laughing comedy, but in Sharpe's hands, it is. Divided into several first-person chapters, Sharpe allows his characters to reveal this re-hashed history in every terrible detail, from the execrable conditions at the colonists' camp to the fatally hilarious encounters between the two groups. It isn't easy to juggle so many characters, but Sharpe does so ably with a mixture of wit, cynicism, and linguistic brio, not seen in letters since Nabokov. The first-person narratives by turns are terrifying, funny, and sad (and usually all of those at once), and it is to Sharpe's credit that even the most repugnant characters are not above our sympathies. Sharpe saves the real lit fireworks, however, for his Pocahontas, who here, is a fast-talking, intelligent, vulnerable, monologist. Trust me when I tell you won't find any "Color of the Wind" fluff, here. (The character's e-mail and instant message exchanges with her sort-of beloved, Johnny Rolfe, are hilarious send ups of e-culture.) She is the funny, cynical, tragic center of this novel and one of many, many reasons why you should pick it up.

Jamestown.......2007-07-01

Gave this one star only because you din't have "0" listed. Don't bother to read. It is disjointed and difficult to follow. I read the author interview and gained some insight...he has a political axe to grind, unfortunatly he must have cut himself on the axe, the book is awful.

Tour de Tour de Force.......2007-06-27

The "Today" show and Anne Tyler's praise first brought my attention to Matthew Sharpe. I bought "The Sleeping Father," his last novel, and was completely floored--a satirical and wry comment on American life that at it heart still has heart, such a rare artistic achievement. So I'll admit, I was predisposed to enjoy whatever came next. Jamestown is more than I could have hoped for. The first thing I love about it--something I love about all great works of literature--is that you have a difficult time describing it. I want to say it's a road book, a little like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," in that respect. But it's so much more. On the surface, it takes us into the future, at a point when Manhattan and Brooklyn are at war, in the post-apocalyptic ruins of America. A company of men is dispatched to Jamestown, Virginia, where they come in contact with the local tribe of Native Americans, about whom I can say no more without giving too much away. Suffice it to say that in an acid rain world of polluted waters, poisonous air, and species evolution gone wild, the "Indians" seems to have learned how to survive. Jamestown has love stories, war stories, and an underlying analysis of humans in struggles for power. As far as women go, the teenage Pocahontas, diary writing to the world on wireless, is a character that, if I have it right, will go down in literary history: she is a joy to be with, a page-turning treat. The book has so many levels that I don't even know how to communicate them--Sharpe writes sentences that almost comment on themselves but never end up being anything less than lyrical and just beautiful. Jamestown is about America, war, and ultimately about love. It's beautifully crafted and, despite its intellectual and analytical heft that hits you when its all over, it reads like a thriller, each small chapter racing you ahead on the road into that runs simultaneously into the past and the future of America. I'm probably not being clear, so let me say this about it before I wrap up: amazing! I just have one question about the book, and that is: why isn't everyone reading Jamestown? Right now?

It was okay. maybe..........2007-06-02

I realize my title is rather blasé, but I can't garner much enthusiasm for this novel. While I did really like small sections of the book, characters may be more accurate, overall I did not enjoy it. I thought of giving up like a previous reviewer but stuck with it only to be very confused and disappointed. I really like the two main characters and Powhatan, but that's about it.

Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America

Average customer rating:

Great stories about our first steps...
Good book, with good and sometimes distracting details

Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America
Benjamin Woolley
Manufacturer: HarperCollins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

The Jamestown Project
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Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence
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ASIN: 0060090561
Release Date: 2007-04-10

Book Description

Four centuries ago, and fourteen years before the Mayflower, a group of men—led by a one-armed ex-pirate, an epileptic aristocrat, a reprobate cleric and a government spy—left London aboard a fleet of three ships to start a new life in America. They arrived in Virginia in the spring of 1607 and set about trying to create a settlement on a tiny island in the James River. Despite their shortcomings, and against the odds, they built Jamestown, a ramshackle outpost that laid the foundations of the British Empire and the United States of America.

Drawing on new discoveries, neglected sources and manuscript collections scattered across the world, Savage Kingdom challenges the textbook image of Jamestown as a mere money-making venture. It reveals a reckless, daring enterprise led by outcasts of the Old World who found themselves interlopers in a new one. It charts their journey into a beautiful landscape and a sophisticated culture that they found both ravishing and alien, which they yearned to possess but threatened to destroy. They called their new home a "savage kingdom," but it was the savagery they had experienced in Europe that had driven them across the ocean and which they hoped to escape by building in America "one of the most glorious nations under the sun."

An intimate story in an epic setting, Woolley shows how the land of Pocahontas came to be drawn into a new global order, reaching from London to the Orinoco Delta, from the warring kingdoms of Angola to the slave markets of Mexico, from the gates of the Ottoman Empire to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Customer Reviews:

Great stories about our first steps..........2007-08-12

I came across this book after hearing the author interviewed on NPR on the anniversary of the Jamestown colony. From just the few minutes I managed to catch from that conversation the author had me rethinking my vague and mostly uninvestigated thoughts on that early settlement.
Wooley has a great ability to take well researched and documented accounts and weave a compelling narrative without overly indulging in fantasy or sketches compiled of heresay or assumptions.
What took me in about this book was just how much Byzantine politics and motives the early administrators of the colony had coming over from England. (i.e aliases, spies, traitors, defectors, etc.)
If you are interested in what the first steps were in The New World before Declarations and Revolutions and why they were made, I would check this out. It's an essential foundation if you are, like me, consuming our countries earliest intentions and ambitions that led us to where we are now.

Good book, with good and sometimes distracting details.......2007-08-02

With the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first colonists and founding of the first permanent British settlement in present day America, there have been a slew of books and reexaminations of the settlement. Wooley, a popular writer and broadcaster in Great Britain has contributed to this review of the Jamestown by presenting a popular history from the British viewpoint, that examines the founding of Jamestown from the perspective that tries to place Jamestown in the perspective of the new House of Stuart monarchy, a Britain with a shaken economy, and the race to make a claim in North America to compete with the Spanish Empire. Along the way, the Powhatan native tribe Chesapeake Bay have their motivations and civilization examined as this strongest of the east coast tribes.

The strongest parts of this book involve the examination of the relationship between the first settlers and the Powhatan Indians, the exploration of the Chesapeake for the first time by Europeans by Captain John Smith and why Jamestown was so important to the British government. The relationship between the founding of Virginia and the discovery of Bermuda, and why, for a time the Bermuda part of the Virginia colony was much more important economically to Britain is a nice find within a book, and Wooley does his best work of showing human drama with Bermuda.

The book is weak by dragging details of the British government out many pages past necessary for the popular reader, especially the American reader who, from the standpoint of 400 years of time will take some effort to dig into the bureaucracy of the that government for a popular history read.
If the general reader is willing to go through the 400 pages of details, at the end, he should find a great explanation for the place of Jamestown in the American, Indian and British story. The book hits its high point with its description of the first Jamestown Assembly, the first such representative government in modern times that was founded as much out of corporate business interests and a leveling out of previous British hierarchies in the American jungle.

For a popular history, Savage Kingdom shows why the British way of colonization - joint stock companies, authorized but not led by the government with a grass roots organization of the Christian church succeeded in the long run over the government/ military colonization of Latin America.

This is a fine book, but again, the general reader should be warned that it has heavy details of the details of British government among personalities that are often hard to follow.

The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History

Average customer rating:

A book everyone should read
A Must-Read for 2007
Review of The True Story of Pocahontas
The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History

The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History
Linwood Custalow , and Angela L. Daniel
Manufacturer: Fulcrum Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1555916325

Book Description

The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History incorporates the sacred oral history of the Mattaponi that has been passed down to Lin "Little Bear" since his childhood, by his father, the late Mattaponi Chief Webster "Little Eagle" Custalow; his uncle, the late Mattaponi Chief O. T. Custalow; and grandfather, the late Mattaponi Chief George F. Custalow; and those that came before. The Mattaponi Indian tribe, along with the Pamunkey tribe, was one of the original core tribes of the Powhatan Chiefdom, which the English colonists encountered in the 17th century while establishing Jamestown. For nearly 400 years people have heard the Euro-American rendition and interpretation of events that transpired between the English colonists and the Powhatan Indians. The True Story of Pocahontas is the first public publication of the Powhatan perspective that has been maintained and passed down from generation to generation within the Mattaponi Tribe, and the first written history of Pocahontas by her own people. The True Story of Pocahontas will be published in 2007, in connection with the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown Colony.

Customer Reviews:

A book everyone should read.......2007-07-18

The authors of this book felt that this was the time to finally tell the true story of Pocahontas, and I completely agree. It's time people, especially Americans, face the truth that has been shrouded in romantic myth for far too long. It may be difficult for some to think of such historical figures as John Smith, John Rolfe and others to be anything but heroes, but it's far more important to the history of this country that the truth be told. The Mattaponi, Pocahontas's tribe, has kept their secret knowledge of the truth to themselves for 400 years. It is with bravery and no doubt a sense of relief that they finally decided to share it with the world. The time for Disney movies and romaticized stories is over: it is now time for the truth.

A Must-Read for 2007.......2007-04-12

This is a very important story that should be read by as many people as possible. It is essential that we recognize the value of oral history--and the other side of history that is presented here. We generally know so little about the native people who interacted with the English settlers of Jamestown--their beliefs, their way of life, and their perspective. We are very fortunate that Dr. Custalow was willing to share the story that he knows with the rest of us, particularly as we turn our attention to Jamestown during this "celebration" year. It is beautifully and evocatively written and well worth your time and thought. I know that reading it has affected me, and increased my understanding of this pivotal time in our nation's history. Thank you for your contribution, Dr. Custalow.

Review of The True Story of Pocahontas.......2007-04-11

After reading this version of Pocahontas, a lot of things became clearer to me. I could never understand how, when the Natives from the rest of the United States were treated so horribly by the Anglos, that the Natives of Virginia escaped, virtually unscathed, during the time of Powhatan. It was very informative, beautifully written and I am grateful that the truth has been told. My congratulations go out to both Linwood Custalow and Angie Daniels for writing this book. I know that Chief Webster 'Little Eagle' Custalow, from his present vantage point, is very proud of this contribution to history. I only wish that he were here, in person, to tell you this.

Thank you for sharing,
Barbara 'Little Doe' Adkins
Gloucester, Virginia

The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History.......2007-03-14

The book tells a "new" story to me from the standpoint of the Powhatan Indians of Virginia. I enjoyed learning of Pocahontas from the viewpoint of her ancestors. This oral history of her life was enlightening. It made me rethink how my English ancestors behaved and how they may not have been as truthful and honest to a trusting Powhatan Indian Chief, Pocahontas's father, to gain successful knowledge about planting and growing crops in the "New World." I also never knew that Pocahontas might have been kidnapped by the settlers. To learn in this book that Pocahontas may have been poisoned in England, where she died, it was very sad.
Great read!
Thanks to Dr. Custalow.

Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith

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"About Our Continent in the Days of OKEUS, from whom . . .
Postmodern Pocahontas (or Pockahuntiss)
Vollmann's Career = Revenge of the Nerd
Like Trying to Find the Northwest Passage
William is blind to his own failings.

Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith
William Vollmann
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0142001503

Book Description

In Argall, the newest novel in his Seven Dreams series, William T. Vollmann alternates between extravagant Elizabethan language and gritty realism in an attempt to dig beneath the legend surrounding Pocahontas, John Smith, and the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia-as well as the betrayals, disappointments, and atrocities behind it. With the same panoramic vision, mythic sensibility, and stylistic daring that he brought to the previous novels in the Seven Dreams series-hailed upon its inception as "the most important literary project of the '90s" (The Washington Post)-Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Native Americans and Europeans in the New World. In reconstructing America's past as tragedy, nightmare, and bloody spectacle, Vollmann does nothing less than reinvent the American novel.

Customer Reviews:

"About Our Continent in the Days of OKEUS, from whom . . ........2005-05-19

We Stole Puccoons; and whose Snake-Erring'd Nation the ***POWHATANS*** Lost, By the Scheming of our Counsell-Men, Princesse Poka-huntas (a country lass) to TOBACCO (but gained Discount cigarettes); Lost Kingdoms to *ARGALL* . . ."

In the Seven Dreams series one may begin with any volume, but of the four currently published volumes, Argall would be the most "American". Here we have a post-modern retelling of English colonization. As with volumes one and two, Vollmann adapts his writing style and language to the flavor and times in which he dwells. His research is deep and impeccable, and one of the most interesting things to me in reading the Seven Dreams is his unique style and method of mixing ". . . colors not only from the palate of times, but also from the palate of places" (The Rifles, 377). Did I really read of a bullet or bullets laying on the frozen ground in one foreshadowed scene from The Ice Shirt (which took place in the 10th Century)? There are a few such strange instances in Fathers & Crows. Less so in Argall, though, which mostly sticks close to the life and times of Captain John Smith (1580-1631). Smith is a similar "yeoman" type character to Poutrincourt & Champlain in Fathers & Crows, and perhaps Eirik the Red in The Ice Shirt. Vollmann utilizes these men as launching points into their time-periods, reassessing their trials and tribulations, conquests and failures. Likewise, in each of the first three volumes we find historically forgotten, but important women. They include Freydis Eiriksdottir & Gudrid Thorbjornsdottir in The Ice Shirt, Born Swimming & Tekakwitha in Fathers & Crows, and in Argall, Pocahontas. As of yet, I have not read Vollmann's so-called prostitute novels/trilogy, but am familiar enough with his research into and use of prostitutes in his various stories. Having now read the first three volumes of the Seven Dreams in order (and looking forward to #6, The Rifles), it's not surprising to find this recurrent theme of a male "glory seeking adventurer doomed to failure meets and interacts with his depraved and deprived female counterpart" (note also, interactions between Pere Brebeuf & Born Underwater in Fathers & Crows). What's fascinating about all this is that through Vollmann's modern day lenses (and those are some thick lenses!), "historie" and "histoickall facts" come across as more than the "Symbolic History" he is creating. What happens is exactly what he wants to happen, and that is to ". . . further a deeper sense of truth". The phantom-like, piratical title-character Argall, as is the town of Gravesend which John Smith hales to & from (in "several compass circles") are good examples of the blending of truths and untruths in order to create "an account of origins and metamorphoses". In reading Argall you are not reading history, exactly. It is based on history, but is closer to poetry than a novel, because poetry transcends the strictures of a traditional novel. Its genius lays not only in its concept as part of a larger North American landscape puzzle, but in its execution. While The Ice Shirt contains a captivating dis-harmony of time & place, myth, legend, history, and modern travelogue; Fathers & Crows a more refined and fine-tuned sense of direction & story-telling; Argall is a magnificent culmination of language & character. It felt very enlightening, especially to one who grew up with very idealistic and naïve notions of adventurous Pilgrims arriving on the Mayflower, trading and sharing Thanksgiving feasts with blissful, welcoming Indians. And Pocahontas seemed some romantic "Indian princess" who delighted those bold and faithful colonists. Of course, most of us become less naïve and more enlightened as we grow older and expand our horizons. As with any deep poetry or "meditation", Argall (and The Ice Shirt, & Fathers & Crows) is an enlightening experience for those able and willing to venture forth. Admittedly, as less enthusiastic reviewers have pointed out here and elsewhere, Vollmann can seem long-winded, wanting of an editor, and somewhat superficial in terms of character morality, etc. Personally, I take my time with books, and enjoy the lengthy narratives, twists and turns, use of chronologies, maps, lengthy source notes, whimsical drawings, so on and so forth. I feel like I've got my money's worth. (As one should for a $40 coverprice!). In terms of morality, I think Vollmann (as a post-modern writer) comes across as dry and lacking "wisdom" in any deep moral sense, as compared to say the Victorian-era writers such as Tolstoy and Dickens not because he can't feel or provide insight into his characters, but because: 1. it would be disingenuous given the subject & overall plan of the Seven Dreams, and 2. it frees up YOU, the reader to interact with the text using your own values and judgments without the author getting in the way. It's up to you to find your way (but there are plenty of notes to guide you in whichever direction you so choose).

That said, I hope you take some time to read Argall, and the Seven Dreams, as I think you'll learn more about our (the North American) continent than you thought you knew, including the exploits of various peripheral characters you may never have heard of, but who certainly existed - especially one Captaine Samuel Argall.

Postmodern Pocahontas (or Pockahuntiss).......2002-06-13

It helps if you're a little bit compulsive about reading Vollmann. Oh, he doesn't need the help, but as a reader, you do.

It's easy to compare him with Pynchon, since they both attempt a similar feat of matching subject with style in an expansive format that contains much humor peppered within the story. But Vollmann isn't a humorist at heart, he's part historian and part seer. He brings you the characters that you'd love to believe really are; he worms his insistent way into their hopes and imaginings so that he can present you with their characters.

You learn a lot of history reading the Seven Dreams series, of which "Argall" is a part. You learn more about how Vollmann regards history. But what makes the author so necessary and integral to my reading is that way of making me see how his characters regard themselves.

So throw your reading schedule out the window. Pick up "The Ice Shirt" and start in on this yet-to-be completed chronicle of how the Europeans came to the Americas and what that meant for both the Europeans and the people who were already here. Catch up soon, because you'll want to starting wishing for the next book in the series to appear... compulsively so.

Vollmann's Career = Revenge of the Nerd.......2002-04-07

William Vollmann is like the nerdiest person you knew in college or high school. He grew up to become a novelist who gained notoriety by writing in great detail about his experiences with prostitutes and having the audacity to claim that it took some sort of moral heroism for him to smoke crack with them in roach-infested transient hotels. Of course, it wouldn't do to be slumming all the time -- otherwise he'd just be another John Rechy or Bruce Benderson. So he adds Ivy League intellectual patina to these books by positioning them as meditations on the history of North America, or as reflections on how "all loving relationships are really forms of prostitution." He writes long, long books hoping that you'll be very, very impressed with him.

Folks, read this book or any other book by William Vollmann and keep in mind that this is an author with a profoundly stunted emotional growth. There's nothing cute about celebrating prostitution as the "most honest form of love" -- it's sickening writing, the babbling of a man still stuck in the fantasies of adolescence who will never understand that real love transcends economic exchange into a pure giving of oneself to another. He pats himself on the back for his "ferocity," when in fact he's never really outgrown being a journal-scribbling teenager who thinks every word he scribbles needs to be published and admired. His writing amounts to one big infantile gesture of lashing out at his Mommy and Daddy -- he admits as much in his interviews -- but at the same time hoping all these books he writes will make his parents love him. It's sad.

The fact that Vollmann has a big crowd of admirers says a lot about the sheep-like mentality and the moral vacancy of too many people who like cutting-edge literature. Read the bombastic praise Vollmann receives that is printed on the dustjackets of his books, and reviewers envious of his lifestyle just look like fools with the pumped-up praise that lavish on Vollmann. Go to a Vollmann reading and look around -- the people there are the sort who are hip, cynical, wear funky glasses and hate their parents, and whose main worry is keeping up with the latest slick novels and edgy CD's to hit the shelves. They have no ability to think for themselves and they are bored with life -- so they are profoundly impressed by this guy who writes about his experience with prostitutes. If you recognize yourself in this description, you need to get a life.

There's a certain sort of bourgeois person who believes their life can be redeemed by writing a novel in which they'll "show 'em all" -- the 'em being Mommy and Daddy, the cool kids who rejected them in high school, the jocks who called them nerds, etc. Vollmann is the "patron saint" of this sort of misfit. I read an interview in which Vollmann stated confidently that he is as important as Shakespeare or Faulkner. He doesn't seem to understand that the self-absorbed navel-gazing of a well-read prostitute's john doesn't quite cut it as great literature, no matter how many big words and descriptive phrases he tries to pack into his sentences. Vollmann's delusions are as bloated as his books, and his vision lacks even a hint of the universality or breadth or understanding that literary importance requires. Nobody but a few misfit loners and antiquarians will be reading Vollmann fifty years from now. Vollmann is a Montherlant in the making -- that is, an irrelevant curiosity that even most highly educated people will not have heard of.

Please think for yourself and don't buy this book just because you think it's kind of neat and edgy that this guy writes about his experiences with prostitutes. Don't engage in the sad spectacle of living vicariously through William Vollmann's sad, warped world. You'll just put yourself one step closer to moral oblivion.

Like Trying to Find the Northwest Passage.......2002-01-20

Ok, Vollmann is brilliant, a genius. One has to give it to him with this and his other huge tomes in which he goes full-tilt in an attempt at literary greatness, and his passages are often riveting.

The book tries to out-do ULYSSES. It does. But finally, around the 400th page, who cares?

William is blind to his own failings........2001-11-30

Vollmann's books are a shotgun wedding of Kerouac keyboard improv and finicky, ultra-thorough research that would shame the most hardcore library mole. His unique voice is the result of the collision between his modern sensibility -- which he's endlessly amused by instead of, like too many contemporary authors, uncritically in love with -- and his passion for exhausted and outmoded forms of thinking and of writing. For Vollmann, "modernity" is sometimes a sort of limbo, the temporal version of the Greenland in his book The Ice-Shirt, where everything that can happen has already happened and the former sites of great battles, couplings, and doomed utopian experiments are now bare swatches of anonymous turf -- witness the last few pages of Argall, where "William the Blind," as Vollmann calls himself, drives through Pocahontas' former haunts and finds an endless cortege of theme parks and strip bars -- and sometimes an ongoing process to be participated in. As is well known, Vollmann is something of an adventurer, doing his Geraldo Rivera guerilla-journalist bit with the Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan long before they were the flavor of the month. What fascination his books have comes from this contradiction. Are we living history, or is everything over?

Sadly, I must report, his books are not yet as fascinating on their own merits. Argall is admirable in almost every way -- Vollmann is obviously stoked with the passion to rescue marginalized figures from the rubble of history, and he even works up genuine anger about wrongs committed centuries ago, whereas most people these days conform more to William Hazlitt's dictum: "The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings." On top of this, his prose is impossibly energetic and rich, like that of a postmodern Fielding. But as industrious as he is in terms of researching and writing, that's how lazy he is in terms of his conceptions and grand designs. His graphomania works against him, in short -- he fills seven hundred pages here without stopping to think, as most people will before half the book is over, that Blood Meridian has already been written and was done quite well already. There is literally zero distance between Vollmann's title character and McCarthy's The Judge -- both are seen as omnipotent spectres representing the depredations of America's colonial thrust, and both even talk in the same Shakespearean-Melvillean patois. And though the unquestioned verbal virtuosity of Argall ( the book ) is more than enough to carry you through to the end, it ultimately turns out to have very little staying power, being essentially a linear, straightforward account of the events contained in John Smith's autobiography, leavened with a peculiar brand of political correctness also swiped from McCarthy ( he admits the Indians are savage and unknowable, but still treats them as sacred for that very reason. )

Book Description

Illus. in full color. Filled with suspense, romance, and historical details, here's a very young biography of the Powhatan Indian princess who played a vital role in early Colonial and Native American relations.

Customer Reviews:

A Kids Movie But an Interesting Adult Book.......2002-06-17

An amazing story about an Indian who's land is being invaded by Englishmen. A life story with good detail and ''never heard of parts''. If you saw the movie and enjoyed it then you would love the book even though the book is different from the movie you would still like it. I think even if you did'nt enjoy the movie I still think you would like the book. Once you start you never stop. It plays a movie while you move more and more deeper into the book. A little romance mixed with alot of adventure and detail. You find out what really did happen. The end is a big suprise. Read it you'll enjoy it.

A Kids Movie But an Interesting Adult Book.......2002-06-17

The True Story Of Pocahontas.......2002-04-04

This book is about a girl named Pocahontas. She was a brave and beautiful Indian Princess. She saved an English man from a fight. She gets kidnapped and has to leave her home and family for a strange new life. Read the book if you want to know more.

Very informative.......2000-07-02

Finally someone comes along and writes the true story of Pocahontas. My children thought that Pocahontas was just a thing of Disney's imagination until I bought this book. They learned all about the real John Smith and the true feelings of the early couple. A great book.

DK Readers: The Story of Pocahontas (Level 2: Beginning to Read Alone)

Average customer rating:

Playful Pocahontas Seeks Peace

DK Readers: The Story of Pocahontas (Level 2: Beginning to Read Alone)
DK Publishing
Manufacturer: DK CHILDREN
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Ages 4-8 | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

DK Readers: The Story of Christopher Columbus (Level 2: Beginning to Read Alone)
George Washington -- Soldier, Hero, President (DK Readers, Level 3: Reading Alone)
DK Readers: Journey of a Humpback Whale (Level 2: Beginning to Read Alone)
DK Readers: Abraham Lincoln -- Lawyer, Leader, Legend (Level 3: Reading Alone)
DK Readers: The Secret Life of Trees (Level 2: Beginning to Read Alone)

ASIN: 0789466376

Book Description

This Level 2 book is perfect for children who are beginning to read alone.

In this book, children learn the story of Pocahontas. Famous for helping maintain peace between the English colonists and Native Americans, this brave Indian woman befriended the settlers at Jamestown, saving the life of their leader, Captain John Smith, whom she later married. Longer sentences and an expanded vocabulary make this series of 48-page books slightly more challenging: Level 2 is appropriate for children who have started to read but still need help. Information boxes full of background information will stimulate inquisitive minds. These books contain between 700 and 850 words, and they are approximately 70 percent pictures and 30 percent text. The Dorling Kindersley Readers combine an enticing visual layout with high-interest, easy-to-read stories to captivate and delight young bookworms who are just getting started. Written by leading children's authors and compiled in consultation with literacy experts, these engaging books build reader confidence along with a lifelong appreciation for nonfiction, classic stories, and biographies. There is a DK Reader to interest every child at every level, from preschool to grade 4.

Customer Reviews:

Playful Pocahontas Seeks Peace.......2002-06-06

This book is sure to capture a young child's interest. The life of Pocahontas is beautifully illustrated with art and full-color photographs. This is an easy-to-read story for children who are beginning to read alone. It will help your child develop their reading skills, general knowledge and love of reading.

In Level Two: There are information boxes filled with fun facts, an index and longer sentences with increased vocabulary.

So, what did I learn?

That Pocahontas was given the English name Rebecca!
Pocahontas is a nickname that means "playful" and her real name was Matoaka

What children might not enjoy learning?

That she didn't marry John Smith, yet there is a surprise ending.

Customer Reviews:

Disney Favorites.......2001-06-11

If your children like books and Disney, they will love this collection! We received this as a gift. These are workmanlike adaptations of, or excerpts from the movie of the title: just the right length. My kids enjoyed ( and still enjoy) them, whether or not they actually saw the animated film.

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