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First Published:
Oct 2006, 432 pages
Paperback:
Jun 2007, 422 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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At the age of twelve, Will Cooper is given a horse, a key, and a map and is sent to run a remote Indian trading post. There he is adopted by a Cherokee chief, and falls in love with a girl he won in a card game.
Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons is the story of one
man’s remarkable life, spanning a century of relentless change. At the
age of twelve, an orphan named Will Cooper is given a horse, a key, and
a map and is sent on a journey through the wilderness to the edge of
the Cherokee Nation, the uncharted white space on the map. Will is a
bound boy, obliged to run a remote Indian trading post. As he fulfills
his lonesome duty, Will finds a father in Bear, a Cherokee chief, and
is adopted by him and his people, developing relationships that
ultimately forge Will’s character. All the while, his love of Claire,
the enigmatic and captivating charge of volatile and powerful
Featherstone, will forever rule Will’s heart.
In a distinct voice
filled with both humor and yearning, Will tells of a lifelong search
for home, the hunger for fortune and adventure, the rebuilding of a
trampled culture, and above all an enduring pursuit of passion. As he
comes to realize, “When all else is lost and gone forever, there is
yearning. One of the few welcome lessons age teaches is that only
desire trumps time."
Will Cooper, in the hands of Charles
Frazier, becomes a classic American soul: a man devoted to a place and
its people, a woman, and a way of life, all of which are forever just
beyond his reach. Thirteen Moons takes us from the
uncharted wilderness of an unspoiled continent, across the South, up
and down the Mississippi, and to the urban clamor of a raw Washington
City. Throughout, Will is swept along as the wild beauty of the
nineteenth century gives way to the telephones, automobiles, and
encroaching railways of the twentieth. Steeped in history, rich in
insight, and filled with moments of sudden beauty, Thirteen Moons is an unforgettable work of fiction by an American master.
PART ONE
...
bone moon
1
There
is no scatheless rapture. love and time put me in this condition. I am
leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals
yearn to travel. We’re called to it. I feel it pulling at me, same as
everyone else. It is the last unmapped country, and a dark way getting
there. A sorrowful path. And maybe not exactly Paradise at the end. The
belief I’ve acquired over a generous and nevertheless inadequate time
on earth is that we arrive in the afterlife as broken as when we
departed from the world. But, on the other hand, I’ve always enjoyed a
journey.
Cloudy days, I sit by the fire and talk nothing but
Cherokee. Or else I sit silent with pen and paper, rendering the
language into Sequoyah’s syllabary, the characters forming under my
hand like hen- scratch hieroglyphs. On sunny days, I usually rock on
the porch wrapped in a blanket and read and admire the vista. Many
decades ago, when I built my ...
After a strong start, my interest waned during the second half of the book, when things started to bog down - I turned the pages faster and faster, not because it was such a gripping read, but simply in the hope of finding something that would grip!..continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
In the early 1800s, the US felt threatened by England and Spain, who held land in the western part of the North American continent (See
map: Oregon Country was British owned, while Mexico was obviously Spanish). Meanwhile, American settlers on the East Coast clamored for more land. So Jefferson proposed the creation of a buffer zone down the middle of the country, to be populated by Eastern American Indians - allowing for US expansion West, and presumably designed to slow down European expansion East.
In his 1829 inaugural address, President Andrew Jackson set a policy to relocate eastern Indians which was endorsed in 1830 when Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. Between 1830 and 1850 American Indians living between Michigan, ...
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