Dorothy Allred Solomon: Predators, Prey and Other Kin

This book has been on my list for quite a while, due to my personal acquanitance with the author. I respect her enormously, and was not not dissapointed by either the content or the style of the book. Unlike most memoirs I have read, this book does not follow a chronological pattern, but instead jumps around in the author's personal timeline. The reader gets a feeling of being told the story orally, with details related as they occur to the teller instead of in order. The result is a very comfortable, engaging setting and a nice, easy read.

Joseph J. Ellis: Founding Brothers

This book has been on my "to read" list for years, and now that I've finally gotten around to it, I question whether it was worth the effort. It just goes to show that the Pulitzer doesn't always go to a work of genius. This is not to say that the book was poorly written. On the contrary, Ellis has a winning style and an enjoyable way with sentences. It is simply a shame that he does not seem to have had anything to say with them.

I suppose an argument could be made that Ellis is trying to use anecdotes from early American history to make a point about the nature of history in general. He seems to have some bone to pick with the common practice of reading history retroactively, of attributing our knowledge of how something turned out to the people who, at the time, had no clue. But the book does little to create any sort of cohesive argument to this effect; it simply drops the idea in from time to time as a reminder. What the reader is left with, then, is a sampling of situations and anecdotes from the period between the revolutionary war and the deaths of Adams and Jefferson, none of which would be terribly interesting or revealing were it not for Ellis' knack for narrative. In short, I didn't learn anything from the book, but at least it wasn't painful to read.