What to read when you're on the road?

I've been nattering on about my upcoming trip to Ethiopia for some time now, but with less than a week to go, I'm busy getting sorted. One vital bit of travel gear requires serious thought--what to read?

Since I'm writing a book on the Battle of Adwa for Osprey Publishing, I'll be bringing a map of the battlefield and photocopies from Berkeley's excellent but sadly out-of-print 1935 volume The campaign of Adowa and the rise of Menelik, as well Marcus's A History of Ethiopia. These are essential for work, but what do I bring for pleasure?

The ideal travel novel should be compact, mass market size rather than trade paperback, thick so that it will last a while, engaging but not too dense. It should be a classic or current bestseller so that I can ditch it with the confidence that I can get another copy ten years from now if I want to.

After much searching through the chaos that is my personal library I've settled on The Reprieve by Jean-Paul Sartre. It's a mass market paperback (check), 345 pages of small print (check), intellectual but not obtuse (check), and since it's by Sartre I'll never have trouble finding another copy (check).

Now I need to find a hotel in Addis Ababa. . .

Image of Adwa tapestry courtesy Joshua Sherurcij via Wikimedia Commons.

The oldest book I ever held

I just got back from five weeks of research in Missouri, where I was working on a couple of articles and my next Civil War book. I also did some research for Handgonnes: The First Black Powder Infantry Weapons, a book I'm doing for for Osprey Publishing. In the process of doing that I delved into the rare books owned by the University of Missouri library, including some reproductions of 15th century Swiss chronicles with drawings of early handgonners.

A librarian at the Rare Book room asked if I had looked at the Nuremburg Chronicle, published in 1493 and a masterpiece of early printing filled with woodcuts.

"That's OK," I said. "I don't think there are any images of guns in there."

A slow smile crept across the librarian's face.

"We have an original, not a facsimile edition," she said.

"Oh, in that case I'll look at it!" I said.

One bibliophile can sense another.

So she brings out a heavy tome and I open it up, and am immediately caught up by the detailed illustrations of saints, cities, and historic episodes. The book is a seven-part history from Creation to Armageddon, with a history of the world in between. My Latin is pretty rusty and the Gothic script was hard to read but I struggled through a couple of pages just for the thrill of it. Many of the pages had marginal notes and even doodles written by a few different hands.

Getting to hold a 500 year-old book was an amazing experience. It is almost a century older than the second oldest book I've ever held, The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in 1589. To read passages that had been read by people in the Renaissance gave a real connection with the past and a sense of how different their thinking could be. I liked how the author left a few pages blank between the end of history and the description of Armageddon, allowing later writers to fill in the details. He only left eight pages so I guess he didn't think the world had much time left!
A couple of hours later I was even rewarded with something practical--what is perhaps the earliest example of someone shooting at a target. I could have easily missed it, a tiny little figure on the lower right hand corner of a vast cityscape. There isn't much detail, but it's clear he's firing an arquebus, the first gun to resemble a modern rifle, although still at a primitive stage of development. The target is seven of his body lengths away, so perhaps 35 feet, not a bad range for such an early gun. A lucky and perhaps important find from an unlikely source. It was the only image of a gun in the whole chronicle, and I wouldn't have found it if it wasn't for a fellow book lover. You'll see the image in my book once it gets published late next year.

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!

A book a week

Fellow blogger and Missouri writer Donna Volkenannt, who describes herself as "a full-time grandmother and part-time writer, editor, and reviewer", has started a new blog where she discusses a new book every week. Every Monday she will review a book she's read.

The first book she's looking at is Secret Keepers by Mindy Friddle. This sounds like an interesting regional tale set in South Carolina in the Eighties. I won't steal Donna's thunder by repeating much here, just go over to her A Book A Week blog and check it out for yourself!

Getting Interviewed On Radio

If you're in the St. Louis area, you can hear me on "John Brown's Mindset" at about 1:30 p.m. local time Tuesday, January 27, on KTRS 550 AM, St. Louis. I'll be talking about Missouri history, writing, and my latest book, It Happened In Missouri. Hope you'll tune in!

A Classic Novel from Ghana

I just finished reading All the Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born, by Ayi Kwei Armah. It's an excellent read and the second-best book I read all year, after Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. Armah wrote this novel in 1968, only eleven years after Ghana got its independnece, and he is often considered to be from the "second generation" of African writers. The first generation wrote around the time of independence and was filled with optimism. Things went bad quickly, though, as Armah's book shows.

The story follows an unnamed man who works in a railway office. He refuses to take bribes or be in any way involved in the corruption that's enriching his friends and destroying his nation. He knows his stance is pointless, because the corruption will continue with or without him, but he stands on his principles. It's a relentlessly pessimistic book, although the writing is beautiful and one corrupt official gets a hilarious comeuppance near the end. I highly recommend it, but not if you're in a good mood.

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!

Reading A Book Twice By Accident

Over the holidays I started reading Gorillas Were My Neighbors by Fred C. Merfield, a big game hunter in the French Cameroons during the first half of the twentieth century. It's a fun little book from a different era, when hunters led huge safaris through the little-known jungle blasting away at animals with gleeful abandon.

As I started reading it I recognized a couple of the stories he told, but I figured they were common tales from Africa and I had read them somewhere before. It took until I was a third of the way through the book before I realized that I had read them before, in this very book. It had been sitting on my shelf since I bought it at a library sale twelve years ago, and for some reason I'd forgotten I'd read it. I guess this means my library is getting out of control. I've met people who have bought the same book twice because they forgot they already had a copy, or they simply couldn't find it on the shelves!

Remarkably, Merfield was a bit of a preservationist, calling for limits on hunting seventy years ago. He also had a lot of respect for the local cultures, although he also pointed out any flaws he saw. This is a refreshing change from modern political correctness, which sees only the good, and traditional (and modern) racism, which only sees the bad. Merfield spent most of his life in Africa, and unlike a lot of colonial officials he worked and lived with Africans. This book is well worth a read for its engaging style, exciting anecdotes, and insights into traditional cultures. Affordable used copies can easily be found at all the usual online outlets.

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.

Mobile phones on planes? No thanks!

I'm so happy I could puke. It was just announced today that mobile phones (cell phones to you Yanks) have just been approved for flights within Europe. New technology means they won't interfere with navigation systems. They'll be available on Air France as early as next month, with Ryanair soon to follow.

Great. Now I can be surrounded by yakking idiots on the plane too. I used to enjoy flights because it was one of the rare times I could get some quiet reading done. Now I have to tolerate people screaming into their mobiles. Time to invest in a pair of ear plugs.