Missouri history book wins award

Earlier this year I blogged about an interesting new book on Missouri history, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness, by Leland and Crystal Payton of Lens and Pen Press. This is a fascinating account of an Irish Catholic community founded in the Ozarks that mysteriously disappeared during the Civil War. It's solidly researched and filled with the beautiful photos for which the Pyatons have become well known in Missouri.

Well, their hard work has finally paid off, and they've won a gold medal at the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best Regional Non-Fiction.

Congratulations Leland and Crystal. You deserved it!

Interesting New Book On Missouri History

I've written three books on Missouri history and I'm still amazed at how many interesting stories there are still to be told about this state's fascinating past. One of them is the tale of a dedicated Irish priest who set up a colony for Irish immigrants in the rough hill country of the Ozarks. Mystery of the Irish Wilderness by Leland and Crystal Payton is the latest release from Lens & Pen Press. The Paytons are well known for their beautiful photographs of the Ozark region, and like their earlier books this volume is filled with them. The text is interesting too, telling of Father John Joseph Hogan's efforts to develop and serve two different colonies in widely separated regions of Missouri, one in the northern prairie, and the other in the Ozarks near the southern edge of the state. The first colony prospered, but the other disappeared during the chaos of the Civil War.


The Paytons meticulously reconstruct what could have happened to the colonists, and found that at least some seemed to have returned to the region after the fighting stopped. Most, however, moved away to parts unknown, so an enduring air of mystery still surrounds Hogan's Ozark colony. To complete the story, the book covers Hogan's rise to become the first bishop of Kansas City and St. Joseph's, and the successful fight by twentieth century preservationists to get the "Irish Wilderness" declared National Forest.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Missouri, Irish-American, or Catholic history. I also enjoyed the Paytons' book See the Ozarks, also from Lens & Pen Press, about the development and reinvention of the rural region into a major holiday center. It's full of images of vintage postcards, a hobby of mine, so it was an easy sell for me!

Book Review: A Journey into Michelangelo's Rome

For travelers who like art, there's a new series out from Roaring Forties Press called ArtPlace, which looks at popular destinations through the eyes of their greatest artists. A couple of days ago on my other blog, Midlist Writer, I interviewed Angela K. Nickerson about how she landed a job writing A Journey into Michelangelo's Rome. Today I'm reviewing the book itself.

First off, the book is beautiful. There are high-quality color photos on every page, many being the talented work of Nickerson herself, and the layout is clean, well-presented, and friendly to the eye. The whole project shows the typical love of the book you get from the small press. There are also readable maps showing all the major sites where you can see Michelangelo's art in Florence and Rome.

The text is well-written, lively without being pat, informative without being burdensome, and at 163 pages, it's easily readable on the plane as you head to Italy. It is not a comprehensive guide to Rome, but rather a supplementary book for a visitor who already has a guidebook but would like to know more.

There were a couple of rocky bits in the first chapter, where Nickerson is talking about the world into which Michelangelo was born. Christopher Columbus did not land on the coast of North America, but on various Caribbean islands and the coasts of South and Central America. The Portuguese, not Spain, conquered Brazil. But once she gets to her main topic Nickerson hits her stride. She leads us through the master's early work in Florence, to his first commissions in Rome. She's especially good at putting him in the political and religious context of the time, where popes and powerful merchants tried to prove their worth through patronizing art. Sidebars fill us in on such things as Renaissance manners, some of Michelangelo's sonnets, and the Bella Figura of the Italian woman.

Even avid history readers will discover something new here. I had no idea the ruinous cost of expanding St. Peters was a major cause in the selling of indulgences (forgiveness for sins), which in turn was an important impetus for the Reformation.

In all, A Journey into Michelangelo's Rome is a worthy addition to your luggage.

Cover shot courtesy of Roaring Forties Press. Other images courtesy Angela K. Nickerson.

Faking Divorce for the Sake of the Children

I mentioned my son's new school a couple of posts back ("The Religion Room") but didn't talk about how fierce the competition is for getting a place in public schools, which can vary widely in quality. Spaniards are are happy to falsify applications in order to get their kids in their chosen school: faking addresses, lowering incomes, creating illnesses, and now, apparently, they're faking divorces.

A kid from a single-parent home gets more points on their application, so according to a recent BBC article Spaniards are now pretending to get divorced, or sometimes really going through with it, to get their kid in the best school. The divorce rate goes up during application time, and many of these separations are miraculously patched up after the school year starts.

A long history of dictatorship followed by a succession of scandal-ridden governments has made Spaniards the most politically cynical people I've ever met in a democratic country. Many have no problems lying to a government that lies to them, and if it helps their child's education, why not? In a country where divorce wasn't even legal until 1981, the culture has now embraced separations of convenience.

Yet when the Pope died there were Catholic flags everywhere.

The Religion Room

Yesterday Almudena and I took Julián to see the school he'll be going to next year. I'd never gotten a good look at a Spanish public school before and I have to say I was impressed. The classrooms were well stocked, everything was clean, and they had some amazing computerized blackboards that immediately hypnotized all the toddlers on the tour.

One room they didn't show us was the classroom for religion. The topic is optional, although the conservative party wants to change that, and about half the parents opt for their child to have an hour of reading instead.

I'll be one of those parents. We passed by the religion class on the tour and I poked my head in. Virtually everything was Christian--posters on the life of Jesus, the Ten Commandments, a crucifix at the front of the class, etc. At the back of the class there was one poster on the "Religions of the World" that listed Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. There are a few more than that, folks!

I told this to Almudena and she just shrugged, saying "Religion class in Spain is Catholicism."

OK, fair enough. The vast majority of Spaniards are at least nominally Catholic, but I want my kid to have a well-rounded religious education. I'm an agnostic, but I think it's important.

It'll be easy enough. We know Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, Pagans, Bahai, and Zoroastrians. I even know one amusing little atheist who insists that his "knowing" there is no god is somehow less dogmatic than religious people "knowing" there is.

Between all these people and our well-stocked library I think we can educate him about all types of belief, not just the dominant one in his culture. Education isn't just about teaching kids the familiar, it's about exposing them to the different.