No comments about Venetian Adventurer: Being An Account Of The Life And Times And Of The Book Of Marco Polo.

No comments about At the end of the rainbow, or promise and fulfillment.

1 comments about Frigid Women.

1. I wrote this book, with my daughter. It is about a life changing six week adventure, and we want to share our experiences with you, the reader. Imagine the most beautiful place on earth, an unspoilt wilderness, then experience the fear, the vulnerability, the isolation and an overwhelming feeling of insignificance - welcome to the North Pole. In a world of vividly contrasting blues and whites, of every moving ice, two miles above the ocean bed, priorities change. To have your daughter with you makes it an incredible experience. We both hope we will inspire other people to do something unexpected. I was the oldest woman on the expedition and had just recovered from breast cancer, if I can do it, you can. So please read Frigid Women, enjoy it and know that nothing can stop you achieving a long held dream. PS. Why Frigid Women? Well, it caught your attention, didn't it?

5 comments about Desert wife,.

1. This is an account of a woman's journey from the wilds of Oregon to the wilds of Arizona around the turn of the century. These are honest and simply told tales of life on the frontier told with an innocence and freshness that captures the reader. This is a western classic.



2. I couldn't put this book down. I felt as though i was alongside the wagon on it's way from Oregon towards the "Four Corners", and with Hilda & Ken through life at their trading post. Early 1900's life on Navajo Land was anything but simple. Hilda's writings carry you with her through suspense, joys, dancing, humour, births, sickness, deaths, everything we experience now, but as a white woman in an Indian world in a time when life was much more basic, survival was difficult & and instant gratification didn't exist...I loved it!



3. Hilda Faunce Wetherill uses pseudonyms for some people and sites in this book and the editor does not call that to our attention. The name of the trading post she describes as 'Covered Water Trading Post' is actually Black Mountain Trading Post about 20 miles west of Chinle, Arizona. She refers to Lorenzo Hubbell Sr. as 'Mr Taylor' and his daughter, Barbard Hubbell Goodman, as 'Mrs. Gray.' She also refers to the Hubbell Trading Post at Ganado, Arizona, as 'lugontale.' (See pages 125-126 and 144-145, "Indian Trader- The Life and Times of J. L. Hubbell", Martha Blue,2000. Walnut, California: Kiva Publishing Company).
   
   She mentions that her husband bought the trading post but, in fact, she and her husband managed the Black Mountain Trading Post for Lorenzo Hubbell Sr. who bought the post in 1914. The Hubbell family continued to own the post after Lorenzo Hubbell's death in 1930 and they operated it until 1937. (see page 284, Appendix Two, "Indian Trader - The Life and Times of J. L. Hubbell", Martha Blue, 2000. Walnut, California: Kiva Publishing Company)



4. The third installment of Living Voices of the Past is another wonderful history lesson!

   Hilda Faunce leaves her comfortable Seattle, Washington, home to journey to the Southwest and the Navajo reservation with her husband in 1914. While one may think that everybody had cars back then, the Faunce's made their way in the manner of the original pioneers: by wagon.

   Hilda's journey is not so much a journal of her trip as it is her life on the reservation between 1914 and 1918. Hilda's writings are indeed an historical eye-opener.

   First, there is the problem with the language; then the protocol; and the normal daily variances of two races trying to live side-by-side. Cultural diversity may be a late-twentieth-century term, but the fact is that many in America were already experiencing this phenomenon.

   The entire journal is mesmerizing; Hilda uses very descriptive language to convey the sights and sounds of the unusual customs and landscapes that she encounters that transfers the listener to reservation life during the second decade of the twentieth century.

   Two aspects were particularly telling of a different culture: contending with a white-man initiated illness and the onset of World War I.

   The Navajo's were forced to face and contend with small pox, a deadly disease they had never known until the white man arrived. Many of Hilda's new friends died, devastating the young woman.

   Newspapers were a rarity and treat on the reservation, so Hilda did not know much of what was going on outside her and her husband's little trading post. While the world was trying to blow itself to smithereens, the Faunce's and the Indians were trying to make a living by mainly trading...especially furs and foods.

   Desert Wife is an important historical document that from which we can all learn tolerance and the need to just get along!




5. Ably narrated by Jane Merrifield-Beecher, Desert Wife is the story of Hilda Faunce and her life as a trader's wife on the Navajo reservation before the outbreak of World War I. Hilda faced challenging experiences as she came from Seattle, Washington to live in the bleakness of the southwest desert, learning the Navajo language, and acclimating to an alien territory and a strange new world. Hilda presents the interaction between Navajos and whites in their trading practices and how the Navajo coped with sicknesses transmitted from the white man. She touches on the sweetness of Navajo singing, the misconception of war when they had to register at For Defiance, and a great deal more. Desert Wife is the product of Hilda's four years of reservation life and learning to appreciate the cultural differences between the Navajo world and her own background. Desert Wife is highly recommended listening for students of Native American studies, the twentieth century American west, and Women's studies.

No comments about Charles Masson of Afghanistan (Central Asian Studies).

No comments about Siberian Odyssey: The Immigrants Part Two.

1 comments about Seven Leagues to Paradise.

1. Tregaskis was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
   
   After I graduated from college in May, 1971, Oberlin College,
   A.B., then spent some time at Vanderbilt. In 1972 I hung out
   as a hippie on Mt. Adams in Cincinnati, then my father
   got me another job working for my uncle at MacPerth Knitwear
   downtown Cincinnati... then another job in Elizabeth
   working for Wilson Freight Company loading and unloading
   trucks. I was in Elizabeth the Fall of 1972. I drove
   a tow motor, what they called fork lifts.. Cardboard
   drums of yellow cake came through there and telephone exchange
   mainframes.. One of the truck berths was to Montauk.
   
   I came home to Cincinnati in December of 72 then worked
   as a dishwasher for 10 days before Christmas at Frisch's.
   
   Then started back at University of Cincinnati in math
   and biology. I had a breakdown and went to Enoch Sheppard
   Pratt Hospital in Baltimore for 8 months, while in the hospital
   earning a real estate license. I left the hospital to
   sell real estate, working for Professional Real Estate
   and Coldwell Banker Grempler... while working for Grempler
   I was also working in a bacteriophage genetics lab at
   Johns Hopkins.. I left Baltimore in the spring of '75 to
   take the Big Trip, seeing the country. I ended up in
   San Francisco and was hospitalized twice. The second
   time, I was there at Napa for 3 months... A young man
   on the ward's locker was filled with books. I bought two
   of them for 10 dollars. One was an entire book on
   Ohm's law, or electronics.. The other, Seven Leagues.
   
   My father picked me up and we flew back to Cincinnati.
   After a month home I took the Navy officer's test, a math
   test, getting 58/60 where 60 was passing.
   
   Next year I took a year of electronics at Ohio College
   of Applied Science - Ohio Mechanic's Institute.
   
   Seven Leagues is the frustration Tregaskis feels, discontents
   where ever he lived even finally home.

1 comments about Soddie Bride.

1. Ruth Schooley Hall really gave an easily read portrait of life on the High Plains of Colorado in the early 1900's. I am from Haxtun,Colorado and know the area well. It reinforced my opinion that you had to be hardy and a risk taker to have lived at that time in that place. I truly loved the story.

1 comments about Ichthyology and Otoliths.

1. Fascinating--a great read combining adventure with insight into a job, lifestyle, and cultures that are so different from my own. Despite the title, this book is about people and relationships much more than it is about fish. I highly recommend reading this book.

1 comments about Wild Man (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies).

1. Toby Schneebaum has recently been media-blitzed because of the recent documentary about his life, "Keep the River on Your Right." WILD MAN explores some of the same incendiary themes of that film (and the book it's based on). This wonderfully warm man writes provocatively about what many have felt, but few expressed: that each of us longs for the primal. To read WILD MAN is to glimpse the savage desire within us all.