Recommended Reading

Books I've enjoyed recently reading.

On May 24, 1869, ten men in four boats pushed off from Green River Station in Wyoming.  Ninety eight days later, after battling their way down the Green and Colorado Rivers, six men and two boats emerged from the Grand Canyon.  In Down The Great Unknown (2001), Edward Dolnick tells the story of the voyage of one-armed John Wesley Powell and his expedition as they became the first men known to have traveled by water through the entire Grand Canyon.

The book works as a combination adventure tale, character study, interspersed with clear explanations of geology and the technical aspects of shooting rapids.  Dolnick conveys the audacity of Powell's plan; none of the crew members had significant experience on the water, their boats unsuitable for the task, and no foreknowledge of what they would encounter.  All they knew was the elevation difference between their start and end points was 6,000 feet, but they didn't know if the descent was gradual or whether around a corner in a canyon they would plunge over the equivalent of Niagara Falls.  This book is a page turner.

An expedition three centuries earlier, also in the desert southwest, is the subject of Richard Flint's No Settlement, No Conquest (2013), an account of Francisco Vazquez de Coronado's exploration of 1539 to 1542, which included 500 Spaniards and several thousand Indian allies from Mexico, was not looking for natural resources to exploit, or land for settlement like the English and Scots who came to America's east coast in the 17th and 18th century.

Rather they were looking for already prosperous Indian societies which they could exploit, making their fortunes if the King via his Viceroy in Mexico City were to grant them encomiendas which would allow them to treat Indians as virtual serfs.  The startling wealth found by Spaniards in central Mexico and a few years later in the Inca Empire became their inspiration.  The Coronado expedition wandered through modern Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, and even onto the Staked Plains of west Texas in a vain search for the rumored Seven Cities of Gold.  By far the best, and best written, account I know of.

There's a lot of badly written historical fiction out there which is why, when I discovered Harry Sidebottom's novels of ancient Rome, most set in the third century AD, I devoured them.  His latest, The Lost Ten, is the tale of a team of Roman soldiers and spies sent undercover into the Sassanid Empire to free a captive Persian prince from a castle near the Caspian Sea and bring him to Rome.  It's all in the service of conflicting internal Roman intrigues.  Sidebottom knows how to combine plot, character development, intertwined with accurate settings and historical background into a thrilling ride.

I avoid Gothic tales, particularly those with a hint of the supernatural so I was a bit reluctant to read The Shadow Of The Wind by Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafon even when it was recommended by a friend.   It took a little while but the book pulled me in and I've now read the second book in his Cemetery of Forgotten Books series.  The books, set in Barcelona, in periods from the First World War into the Franco regime, are logically implausible but irresistibly enthralling.

Zafon reminds me of one of my favorite authors who also happens to be Spanish - Arturo Perez-Reverte.  I've read all of his 20 or so novels.  Start with The Queen of the South and then move to The Nautical Chart, The Flanders Panel and The Painter of Battles.  He's also written six historical fiction novels, the Captain Alatriste series set in early 17th century Spain.