Vanora Bennett: five favorite historical novels

Vanora Bennett is the author of two works of nonfiction, Crying Wolf: The Return of War to Chechnya and The Taste of Dreams: An Obsession with Russia and Caviar, and the novels Portrait of an Unknown Woman, Figures in Silk, and The Queen's Lover.

She discussed five favorite historical novels with Erin Yardley at FiveBooks, including:

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

This one is really complicated – maybe I just like them complicated. Pears is also a really intelligent man and has oscillated between writing fiction for entertainment and academics. He’s lived in Italy and he’s a professor and this book sort of speaks to all of those things. On the face of it, it’s about a murder in 17th-century Oxford, but quite amazing things are going on that are creepy yet fascinating. There were things I hadn’t thought about before like body-stealing to learn dissections and anatomy. There is a lot about this rudimentary science, well, rudimentary to us but very exciting and magical to them. The first part of the book is told by one character and you feel you’ve learned the story. You get to the next part and it’s one of the other characters telling the same story but from his point of view and it’s really different. There are four characters who each tell it and each time you learn something new. Then you’re thinking it’s a clever game, but with the final story it suddenly becomes something different. I don’t want to give the story away but it’s a very moving and strange story with these religious overtones and it’s just amazing. It really blows you away.

As a reader you tend to trust your narrator, so how does having four affect the way you’re reading the story?

I think it is reinforcing the way that the boundaries were being shifted at the time and that knowledge was expanding. You’re looking at the cadaver from different points of view and then looking at the story from different points of view too. It all fits together very beautifully. Then there’s the shock of something else.

Read about another book on Bennett's list.

An Instance of the Fingerpost is one of Val McDermid's top 10 Oxford novels.

Learn more about the author and her work at Vanora Bennett's website.

The Page 69 Test: Figures in Silk.

The Page 69 Test: The Queen's Lover.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Sarahlee Lawrence reading?

The current feature at Writers Read: Sarahlee Lawrence, author of River House.

Her entry begins:

I read only non-fiction, mostly first-person memoir or the like. I am a slow reader and enjoy poetic prose from the late Ellen Meloy in Anthropology of Turquoise, Terry Tempest Williams’ in Red, or Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire.

The book on my bed stand is Harriet Fasenfest’s Householder’s Guide to the Universe. She’s...[read on]

Read an excerpt from River House and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Among the praise for River House:

"Handy with tools and rafts, a good neighbor, and a mighty fine horsewoman, Lawrence is also adept with language, writing with arresting lucidity and a driving need to understand her father, her legacy, the land, community, work, and herself. A true adventure story of rare dimension."
—Booklist, starred review

"With her keen eye and talent for writing about the natural world, Lawrence pays homage to the American West... Lawrence is one of those remarkable young women spawned by the American West who are adept at running wild rivers, operating heavy equipment, and building a log home, all evocatively told in this informative book."
—Publishers Weekly

"It's messy, this building of houses and relationships, but the experiences give this memoir an existential grace."
—Kirkus Reviews

Sarahlee Lawrence was born and raised on her family ranch in Terrebonne, Oregon. After a decade spent studying, traveling, river rafting, and earning an MS in Environmental Science and Writing from the University of Montana, she returned to the ranch, where she owns and operates an organic vegetable farm.

Writers Read: Sarahlee Lawrence.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jeri Westerson's "The Demon's Parchment"

This weekend's feature at the Page 69 Test: The Demon's Parchment by Jeri Westerson.

About the book, from the publisher:

In fourteenth century London, Crispin Guest is a disgraced knight convicted of treason and stripped of his land, title and his honor. He has become known as the “Tracker”—a man who can find anything, can solve any puzzle and, with the help of his apprentice, Jack Tucker, an orphaned street urchin with a thief's touch—will do so for a price. But this time, even Crispin is wary of taking on his most recent client. Jacob of Provencal is a Jewish physician at the King’s court, even though all Jews were expelled from England nearly a century before. Jacob wants Crispin to find stolen parchments that might be behind the recent, ongoing, gruesome murders of young boys, parchments that someone might have used to bring forth a demon which now stalks the streets and alleys of London.

Read an excerpt from The Demon's Parchment, and learn more about the book and author at Jeri Westerson's website, her "Getting Medieval" blog, and the Crispin Guest Medieval Noir blog.

Westerson wrote about Crispin Guest's place among fictional detectives for The Rap Sheet.

The Page 69 Test: Veil of Lies.

The Page 69 Test: Serpent in the Thorns.

The Page 69 Test: The Demon's Parchment.

--Marshal Zeringue

The fifty best winter reads

The Independent lined up a panel to select the fifty best winter reads.

One title to make the grade:

Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town by Mary Beard

'The author elegantly brings to life the town under the shadow of the volcano with scholarly wit and a deep knowledge,' says David [Miller, director of literary agency Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd]. The reader is transported to the Roman town where the streets, baths and shops teem with character.

Read about another book on the list.

Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (US title: The Fires of Vesuvius) also appears among Jamie Merrill's ten best history books.

The Page 99 Test: The Fires of Vesuvius.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Tim Brookes' "Endangered Alphabets"

This weekend's feature at the Page 99 Test: Endangered Alphabets by Tim Brookes.

About the book:

The goal of Endangered Alphabets, the book, is to act as a catalogue to the exhibition, but to go farther and raise questions about writing itself: how it develops, what it expresses beyond straightforward meaning, how it is being affected by all the rapid changes in technology.

In his Introduction to Endangered Alphabets, David Crystal, author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, writes:

“This is an unusual book, combining elements of linguistics, aesthetics, biography, and travelogue. The vocabularies of art and linguistic science become bedfellows, and each seems comfortable with the other. Its honest account of the trials and tribulations of a woodcarver will be a revelation to anyone who has not thought about how such things come to be. The dispassionate observation of a script, seen through the carver’s eye, adds a fresh dimension to our understanding of how a writing system emerges.

“But ‘dispassionate’ is wrong, for one of the main features of this book is the way it conveys its author-carver’s fascination with his subject. Endangered Alphabets is one of a growing genre of accounts of work which is steadily humanizing linguistics, exploring the motivation of those who study languages and those who are the subjects of study. Our appreciation of the character of written language has been greatly increased by Tim Brookes’ sculptural odyssey.”

Visit the Endangered Alphabets Project website and blog.

The Page 99 Test: Endangered Alphabets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Miles Corwin's "Kind of Blue," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Kind of Blue by Miles Corwin.

His entry begins:

My main character, Ash Levine, is a Jewish LAPD homicide detective. The actor would not have to be Jewish, but I think I might help if he was Jewish or part-Jewish. I liked the English movie, An Education, and Peter Sarsgaard is a terrific actor. But he simply wasn’t convincing as a Jewish character. He couldn’t pull it off.

Ben Stiller or David Schwimmer might work as Ash Levine. A young Paul Newman would be wonderful.

The guy I’d like to direct the movie is...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Miles Corwin's website.

Writers Read: Miles Corwin.

The Page 69 Test: Kind of Blue.

My Book, The Movie: Kind of Blue.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 crime locations

The crime fiction expert and novelist Maxim Jakubowski named his top ten crime locations for the Guardian.

One entry on the list:

Los Angeles in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939)

Although Michael Connelly is fast becoming the bard of modern Los Angeles, Chandler remains the pioneer whose iconic Philip Marlowe novels define the city's mean streets and sprawl. From rich mansions to backstreet dives, shady bookstores and cheap hotel rooms, Chandler captures the essence of a city in flux between affluence and despair with tarnished knight Marlowe at the helm.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Big Sleep also appears on Barry Forshaw's critic's chart of six American noir masters, David Nicholls' list of favorite film adaptations, Greil Marcus' list of book recommendations, and the Guardian's list of ten of the best smokes in literature.

Read more about Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction, a volume of 21 essays about cities and other places in the world that are closely associated with famous fictional sleuths, edited by

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Signe Pike reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Signe Pike, author of Faery Tale: One Woman's Search for Enchantment in a Modern World.

Her entry begins:

Perhaps it's my background as a book editor, but it seems I'm seldom able to just read one book at a time! Because editors are so busy reading and working on their author's manuscripts, we joke about never having time to read. Then I went straight from the editing world to researching my own book project, which required a lot of translated old texts, etc. so now that my own book is done, I am only just now getting the opportunity to read just for the fun of it... and I have a lot of catching up to do.

The first book I tackled was The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Safon. I was browsing the tables at a local bookstore when a customer saw it in my hands and and enthused, "You have to read that book." It's a stunning and gorgeously written gothic saga that takes place in 1950's Barcelona, and while it took me a good 50 pages to get truly sucked in, after that, I couldn't put it down. Safon does things with perspective and voice that most novelists would be hard pressed to pull off, and he does it with such an honest flourish - it's a story that stays with you long after you've turned the last page.

Now I'm caught between Little, Big by John Crowley and...[read on]

Among the early praise for Faery Tale:

“Pike writes of her various encounters with faery-believers and faery lands, from New York to Mexico to Ireland to Scotland, in a winning voice that roams freely from melancholy to mirth, incredulity to bright surprise.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“It’s hard to decide what is more enchanting, Signe Pike’s charming writing or the magical world she uncovers. This is a book for hopeful skeptics and believers alike. Proceed with caution, because Faery Tale may cast a spell that transforms the way you see the world forever.”
—Jillian Lauren, New York Times bestselling author of Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

“Finding happiness is an adventure that everyone should take and Faery Tale inspires you to go on that journey.”
–Lucy Danziger, Editor-in-Chief of SELF Magazine and author of New York Times bestseller The Nine Rooms of Happiness

“Faery Tale is enchanting. I don’t believe in tiny magical creatures, but I do believe in a good story, and Signe Pike has given us one of those.”
–A.J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically

Read an excerpt from Faery Tale, and learn more about the book and author at Signe Pike's website, blog, and Facebook page.

Writers Read: Signe Pike.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Toby Huff's "Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective by Toby E. Huff.

About the book, from the publisher:

Seventeenth-century Europe witnessed an extraordinary flowering of discoveries and innovations. This study, beginning with the Dutch-invented telescope of 1608, casts Galileo's discoveries into a global framework. Although the telescope was soon transmitted to China, Mughal India, and the Ottoman Empire, those civilizations did not respond as Europeans did to the new instrument. In Europe, there was an extraordinary burst of innovations in microscopy, human anatomy, optics, pneumatics, electrical studies, and the science of mechanics. Nearly all of those aided the emergence of Newton's revolutionary grand synthesis, which unified terrestrial and celestial physics under the law of universal gravitation. That achievement had immense implications for all aspects of modern science, technology, and economic development. The economic implications are set out in the concluding epilogue. All these unique developments suggest why the West experienced a singular scientific and economic ascendancy of at least four centuries.

Learn more about Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution at the Cambridge University Press website.

Toby E. Huff is Research Associate in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University (and Chancellor Professor Emeritus in the Department of Policy Studies at UMass Dartmouth.).

The Page 99 Test: Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books about who terrorists are

Jessica Stern is the author of Denial: A Memoir of Terror, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, and The Ultimate Terrorists.

With Daisy Banks at FiveBooks, Stern discussed five books about who terrorists are, including:

A Human Being Died That Night by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Your next book, A Human Being Died That Night by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, takes us to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.

This is a complicated and moving book about the nature of good and evil. Pumla is a South African psychologist who spent a lot of time in prison interviewing people like Eugene de Kock, the commanding officer of state-sanctioned apartheid death squads. He is currently serving 212 years in jail for crimes against humanity. He directed ‘the blood, the bodies and the killing’ against apartheid’s enemies. She walks us through her recognition, ‘that good and evil exist in our lives and that evil, like good, is always a possibility’. Anybody can say this but because she exposes us to what happens to her as she is interviewing de Kock, we come to a more visceral understanding of this capacity for evil. She explains how she ends up really empathising with him, and possibly even sympathising with him.

De Kock oversaw the killing of innocent people and it is incredible that this black South African psychologist was able to sit down with him and physically touch him. She recognised a side of him, a capacity for good, that unfortunately never evolved. He was responsible for truly horrific crimes. And yet she came to empathise with him. It’s extremely uncomfortable for her, and for the reader, to recognise the capacity for good in persons whose actions we condemn as evil.

What about you – when you have met with terrorists have you felt something similar?

Yes. There were a few terrorists I talked to who seemed to have become truly evil. They seemed to have lost their capacity for empathy. You get this feeling that the hairs are standing up on the back of your neck. But that wasn’t the case for the majority of terrorists I spoke with. In many cases I felt that they were caught in a web of lies, that they were vulnerable boys who had been manipulated by leaders to do terrible and terrifying things.

Read about another of Stern's five books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Rachel Aaron's "The Spirit Thief"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Spirit Thief by Rachel Aaron.

About the book, from the publisher:

Eli Monpress is talented. He's charming. And he's a thief.

But not just any thief. He's the greatest thief of the age - and he's also a wizard. And with the help of his partners - a swordsman with the most powerful magic sword in the world but no magical ability of his own, and a demonseed who can step through shadows and punch through walls - he's going to put his plan into effect.

The first step is to increase the size of the bounty on his head, so he'll need to steal some big things. But he'll start small for now. He'll just steal something that no one will miss - at least for a while.

Like a king.

Read the first two chapters of The Spirit Thief, Book 1 in the Legend of Eli Monpress, at Rachel Aaron's website. Book 2, The Spirit Rebellion, is out now from Orbit books, and Book 3, The Spirit Eater, launches December 1st.

Rachel Aaron is the author of The Spirit Thief and all the other Eli books forthcoming from Orbit. She lives in Athens, GA, (which, she always stresses, is not really Georgia, but a small island nation all its own adrift in the vast sea of East Georgia farmland) in a seventies house of the future with her husband, her son, and Lettie, a small, brown dog.

The Page 69 Test: The Spirit Thief.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Louise Shelley's "Human Trafficking"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective by Louise Shelley.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book examines all forms of human trafficking globally, revealing the operations of the trafficking business and the nature of the traffickers themselves. Using a historical and comparative perspective, it demonstrates that there is more than one business model of human trafficking and that there are enormous variations in human trafficking in different regions of the world. Drawing on a wide body of academic research – actual prosecuted cases, diverse reports, and field work and interviews conducted by the author over the last sixteen years in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the former socialist countries – Louise Shelley concludes that human trafficking will grow in the twenty-first century as a result of economic and demographic inequalities in the world, the rise of conflicts, and possibly global climate change. Coordinated efforts of government, civil society, the business community, multilateral organizations, and the media are needed to stem its growth.

Read an excerpt from Human Trafficking, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

Louise Shelley is Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University.

The Page 99 Test: Human Trafficking.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best novels on friendship

Lan Samantha Chang is the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her latest novel is All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost.

For the Wall Street Journal, she named a five best list of novels on friendship.

One title on the list:

The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing (1962)

'The two women were alone in the London flat." Thus opens a series of unflinching scenes from two years in the lives of Anna Wulf and Molly Jacobs. These key characters in Doris Lessing's novel—a work blisteringly truthful about money, love, politics and sex—became friends as members of the British Communist Party. Each is divorced and raising a child. Molly is preoccupied with the direction life is taking for her 20-year-old son, Tommy, while the talented Anna, the author of a best seller, suffers from writer's block. The narrative unfolds in excerpts from Anna's journals, ultimately becoming a record of her struggle against emotional breakdown. "The Golden Notebook" has been variously judged a feminist treatise, a commentary on the end of Stalinism and a cornerstone of postmodernism. All valid readings, but the book is, for this reader, brilliant above all in its portrayal of the subtle facets of friendship, love and self-deception—and as a portrait of a complexly lived inner life.

Read about another novel on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Ken Harmon reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Ken Harmon, author of The Fat Man.

The entry begins:

I am not one of those readers that can read multiple books at once. Confusion is not the concern, but it always feels like an illicit affair, like the other book knows it is being ignored and that the characters in the story are plotting their revenge. But this article is not about my insanity. Presently, I am reading The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, the first book in Edmund Morris’ trilogy. Last summer, I read, Candice Millard’s The River of Doubt about Roosevelt’s nearly fatal trip to the Amazon. I became curious about the man that would make such a trip.

Before I started the Morris trilogy, I read...[read on]

Among the early praise for The Fat Man:

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean...and who wears jingle bells on his curly-toed shoes and stands about two-foot three. A man who is, in other words, an elf. But don't let the green tights and stocking cap fool you: Gumdrop Coal is the roughest, toughest punisher of the naughty since Mike Hammer, even if he does smell like peppermint and fresh-baked cookies."
-New York Times bestselling author Steve Hockensmith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls)

"Noir and Christmas go together like Santa and his reindeer in this stylish elf fable by Ken Harmon, a newcomer who knows noir like he apprenticed with Hammett. An excellent stocking stuffer for the mystery lover in your family."
-New York Times bestselling author John Lescroart

"This is one of those wonderful books where I hit my forehead and cry, "Why didn't I think of that?". As I read I kept hoping it wasn't as brilliant as I feared - but it is. It's the "Naughty List" for you, if you don't buy this book for Christmas!"
-Louise Penny, New York Times bestselling author of A Brutal Telling

Visit Ken Harmon's website.

Writers Read: Ken Harmon.

The Page 69 Test: The Fat Man.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Grossman's" The Sleepwalkers," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: The Sleepwalkers by Paul Grossman.

His entry begins:

The Sleepwalkers would make an extremely exciting but very big budget movie. The setting--Berlin in the early 1930s--is such an integral part of the story. Potsdammerplatz, throbbing with traffic. Alexanderplatz, swarming with crowds. A chase scene through the Tietz Department Store alone would make a real thrill ride through one of the great emporiums of prewar Europe.

I’m not sure about a director...[read on]

Visit Paul Grossman's website.

Writers Read: Paul Grossman.

The Page 69 Test: The Sleepwalkers.

My Book, The Movie: The Sleepwalkers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Harold Schechter's "Killer Colt"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Killer Colt: Murder, Disgrace, and the Making of an American Legend by Harold Schechter.

About the book, from the publisher:

With such acclaimed works as The Devil’s Gentleman, Harold Schechter has earned renown as the dean of true-crime historians. Now, in this gripping account of driving ambition, doomed love, and brutal murder in an iconic American family, Schechter again casts his gaze into the sinister shadows of gaslit nineteenth-century New York City.

In September 1841, a grisly discovery is made aboard a merchant ship docked in lower Manhattan: Deep in the cargo hold, bound with rope and covered with savage head wounds, lies a man’s naked corpse. While a murderer has taken pains to conceal his victim’s identity, it takes little time to determine that the dead man is Samuel Adams, proprietor of a local printing firm. And in less time still, witnesses and a bloody trail of clues lead investigators to the doorstep of the enigmatic John Colt.

The scion of a prosperous Connecticut family, Colt has defied his parents’ efforts to mold him into a gentleman—preferring to flout authority and pursue excitement. Ironically, it is the ordered science of accountancy that for a time lends him respectability. But now John Colt’s ghastly crime and the subsequent sensational murder trial bring infamy to his surname—even after it becomes synonymous with his visionary younger brother’s groundbreaking invention.

The embodiment of American success, Sam Colt has risen from poor huckster to industrious inventor. His greatest achievement, the revolver, will bring him untold millions even as it transforms the American West. In John’s hour of need, Sam rushes to his brother’s side—perhaps because of the secret they share.

In Gilded Age New York, a city awash with treacherous schemers, lurid dime-museum curiosities, and the tawdry excesses of penny-press journalism, the Colt-Adams affair inspires tabloid headlines of startling and gruesome hyperbole, which in turn drive legions of thrill-seekers to John Colt’s trial. The dramatic legal proceedings will fire the imagination of pioneering crime writer Edgar Allan Poe and fuel the righteous outrage of journalist Walt Whitman.

Killer Colt interweaves the intriguing stories of brooding, brilliant John and imaginative, enterprising Sam—sharp-witted and fascinating brothers on vastly divergent journeys, bound by an abiding mutual devotion and a mystery they will conceal to the end. Harold Schechter has mined the darkly macabre vein of a bygone era and brought forth a mother lode of storytelling gold.

Read an excerpt from Killer Colt, and learn more about the book and author at Harold Schechter's website.

Writers Read: Harold Schechter.

The Page 99 Test: Killer Colt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six book recommendations from Greil Marcus

Greil Marcus is a rock critic and co-editor of A New Literary History of America. His new book is an anthology of writings on Bob Dylan.

He recommended six books to the readers of The Week magazine, including:

Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta

Inside its 1970s-radicals-gone-underground plot, this novel hides a gleeful, infinitely detailed picture of just how smart a 15-year-old boy can be, especially when he’s obsessed with 1960s music.

Read about another book on Marcus' list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Charles Elton's "Mr. Toppit"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Mr. Toppit by Charles Elton.

About the book, from the publisher:

When Arthur Hayman, an unsuccessful screenwriter turned children’s book author, is accidentally hit by a cement truck in London, his dying moments are spent with a passing American tourist, Laurie Clow, who is fated to bring posthumous fame to his obscure series, The Hayseed Chronicles, and the enigmatic and sinister Mr. Toppit who is at the center of the books. While Arthur doesn’t live to reap the benefits of his books’ success, his legacy falls to his widow, Martha, and their children—the fragile Rachel, and Luke, reluctantly immortalized as the fictional Luke Hayseed, hero of his father’s books. But others want their share of the Hayseed phenomenon, particularly Laurie, who has a mysterious agenda of her own that changes all of their lives as Martha, Rachel, and Luke begin to crumble under the heavy burden of their inheritance.

Spanning several decades, from the heyday of the postwar British film industry to today’s cutthroat world of show business in Los Angeles, Mr. Toppit is a riveting debut novel that captures an extraordinary family and their tragic brush with fame to wonderfully funny and painful effect.

Read an excerpt from Mr. Toppit, and learn more about the novel at the publisher's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mr. Toppit.

--Marshal Zeringue

Curtis Sittenfeld's favorite books of 2010

The Observer polled a number of writers and public figures about their favorite books of 2010, including:

Curtis Sittenfeld
Novelist

I fell in love with two American first novels. Stiltsville by Susanna Daniel (Harper) is the gorgeously written story of a marriage over several decades, and it takes place in Miami, Florida, a place so vividly depicted you feel like you've travelled there while reading. If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous (HarperPerennial) is about a college graduate who goes to teach English in Japan, thinking she'll end up in Tokyo and instead landing in a rural nuclear power plant town. It's funny in a sharp, dark, painfully true way.

Read about the other picks at the Observer.

The Page 69 Test: Stiltsville by Susanna Daniel.

The Page 69 Test: If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: A. J. Langguth's "Driven West"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Driven West: Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears to the Civil War by A.J. Langguth.

About the book, from the publisher:

After the War of 1812, President Andrew Jackson and his successors led the country to its manifest destiny across the continent. But that expansion unleashed new regional hostilities that led inexorably to Civil War. The earliest victims were the Cherokees and other tribes of the southeast who had lived and prospered for centuries on land that became Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.

Jackson, who had first gained fame as an Indian fighter, decreed that the Cherokees be forcibly removed from their rich cotton fields to make way for an exploding white population. His policy set off angry debates in Congress and protests from such celebrated Northern writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Southern slave owners saw that defense of the Cherokees as linked to a growing abolitionist movement. They understood that the protests would not end with protecting a few Indian tribes.

Langguth tells the dramatic story of the desperate fate of the Cherokees as they were driven out of Georgia at bayonet point by U.S. Army forces led by General Winfield Scott. At the center of the story are the American statesmen of the day—Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun—and those Cherokee leaders who tried to save their people—Major Ridge, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, and John Ross.

Driven West presents wrenching firsthand accounts of the forced march across the Mississippi along a path of misery and death that the Cherokees called the Trail of Tears. Survivors reached the distant Oklahoma territory that Jackson had marked out for them, only to find that the bloodiest days of their ordeal still awaited them.

In time, the fierce national collision set off by Jackson's Indian policy would encompass the Mexican War, the bloody frontier wars over the expansion of slavery, the doctrines of nullification and secession, and, finally, the Civil War itself.

In his masterly narrative of this saga, Langguth captures the idealism and betrayals of headstrong leaders as they steered a raw and vibrant nation in the rush to its destiny.

A. J. Langguth is professor emeritus of journalism in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. His books include Union: 1812, Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution, and Our Vietnam: The War, 1954-1975.

Learn more about Driven West at the Simon & Schuster website, and visit A.J. Langguth's website.

The Page 99 Test: Driven West.

--Marshal Zeringue