This week’s Bookshelf brings you four new nonfiction titles you might want to add to your to-be-read stack this fall.
Correcting history. November is National Native American Indian Month, so the announcement of the Cundill History Prize winner is particularly timely. The annual Canadian book prize for English writing on history goes to Kathleen DuVal’s “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America” (Penguin Random House, $38). The award comes with a cash prize of $75,000.
DuVal is a history professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and no stranger to writing about marginalized voices. Her previous book, “Independence Lost,” takes a fresh look at the Revolutionary War through the eyes of those outside of Colonial society.
Her latest, “Native Nations,” is a sweeping examination of the history of Indigenous people mostly in the United States and to a lesser degree, Canada and Mexico. The book is divided into two parts: The first section encompasses the 1000s to 1750, before Colonialism, and the second section 1750 to modern times. In large part, “Native Nations” serves to debunk much of the mythology we grew up believing about Indigenous cultures and illustrates how reality defies our flawed conventional wisdom.
For starters, “books and classes about Native Americans have often portrayed them as people only of the past,” DuVal observes in her foreword. In fact, she notes, there are now 500 Native nations in the United States.
“American Indians are still here, as individuals and as nations, and they have had a renaissance in the late 20th and 21st centuries,” she writes. “Even as Native communities continue to struggle with poverty, health care crises and the weight of historical loss, they are reinvigorating language and traditions and exercising new political and cultural power.”
Instead of dwelling on histories that have been chronicled countless times and focus on the victimization of Native Americans — like the Trail of Tears or Jamestown’s defeat of Pocahontas’ people — DuVal examines histories of Indigenous people in power, with a focus on one Native nation at a time as she presents “examples and trends of Native North American sovereignty, politics, economics, diplomacy and war …”
The Wall Street Journal deemed “Native Nations” “an essential American history.”
Trembling Earth. Native Americans also figure in Marie Lather’s new book, “The Okefenokee Swamp: A Natural and Cultural History” (The History Press, $24.99). A liberal arts professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, Lather grew up in Maryland but spent summers visiting the swamp with her grandmother, who lived in Waycross. The name of the swamp comes from the Muscogee, who the English called Creeks.
Lather takes a broad view of the Okefenokee in her book, encompassing the history, flora, fauna, commerce and inhabitants of the half-million acres of blackwater wetlands located where Florida and Georgia meet. There’s also a chapter on movies inspired by the swamp and the 1945 opening of the Okefenokee Swamp Park, which made it more accessible to visitors.
In addition to dozens of black-and-white photos embedded throughout the text, there are 16 pages of color photographs at the end that capture the beauty and wonder of the swamp.
Cold case solved. Also from The History Press is a very different kind of a story about closure in a gruesome cold case murder. “Solving the Murder of Vieng Phovixay: Evil Dwells in west Georgia” ($24.99) is by cold case investigator Clay Bryant, who tells the story of a Newnan High School graduate and immigrant from Vietnam who was murdered in 1987. The case remained unsolved until 2005 when Bryant, along with the aid of the GBI and the district attorney’s office, was able identify Charles Travis Manley as the culprit and collect enough evidence to secure a conviction.
Right side of history. Considered an unsung hero of the Civil War, Gen. George Henry Thomas defied his Southern heritage as a native of Virginia to join Union forces. He was celebrated for holding his position in the Battle of Chickamauga, despite the Union’s loss.
Thomas is the subject of a new historical novel by Conrad Bibens, a veteran journalist who worked 28 years at the Houston Chronicle. “The Best General in the Civil War” (Stoney Creek Publishing, $21.95) is fashioned as Thomas’ long-lost memoir recently come to light.
Bibens states in the afterword that some liberties were taken in fictionalizing Thomas’ story, but many of the general’s quotes are taken directly from official documents and his military record received no embellishment.
Suzanne Van Atten is a book critic and contributing editor to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She may be contacted at Suzanne.VanAtten@ajc.com.
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