4,284 words
You know you’re reading a great novel when you effectively stop your life in order to finish it. This is what happened to me when I picked up and devoured Franz Werfel’s 1933 novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. The elevator pitch is exciting enough. Several thousand Armenian villagers hole up in a mountain during the First World War in order to escape deportation and genocide from the Turks. (more…)
2,002 words
Brian Moore’s 1985 novel Black Robe thankfully slipped through the cracks of political correctness. It tells the story of French missionary Paul Laforgue, who travels to the Canadian wilderness in the early seventeenth century to bring Christianity to the indigenous Savages of North America. Yes, Moore capitalizes that term when describing the Indians because, according to his research, this is the very term (les Sauvages) the French used back then. Moore explains this in his author’s note, along with the circuitous manner in which he stumbled upon this fascinating subject (more…)
1,807 words
Thomas Nelson Page
Bred in the Bone
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904
Bred in the Bone, a 1904 novella by Thomas Nelson Page, epitomizes race realism through the proxy of horses and horse racing. It also embodies the author’s characteristic nostalgia for the aristocratic white supremacy of the antebellum South. (more…)