Two interesting reads — owls and Indians

I finished two fairly interesting books recently.

The first, I actually listened to as an audiobook. I spend a little over an hour a day commuting to and from work. Local radio is so bad, so usually have an audiobook going. The local library here near my work has a pretty good collection and rents them for 40 cents per day. It’s money well spent.

The audiobook was “Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl” by Stacey O’ Brien.

The title pretty much tells you the story. This is a first-person account of the author’s experience raising and caring for an injured barn owl from infancy to his eventual death at 19 years of age.

I think maybe I was expecting an avian version of “Dewey” the library cat, a fairly light, amusing story of an unusual pet.

Stacey and Wesley

However, O’Brien’s experience raising a wild owl was much more intense. O’Brien and Wesley developed an intimate bond, far beyond what you would expect in a typical human-pet relationship.  O’Brien didn’t just adopt a pet. She entered into a very close relationship in which Wesley viewed her as his life-long mate.

Their story is extremely interesting. Although some of the details of their interaction might make you squirm a little.  I’m glad I read/listened to it and would recommend it highly.

More information on Stacey and Wesley can be found here.

The second book is also non-fiction  – “The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance In Early America” by Scott Weidensaul. The book focuses on the various interactions between Native Americans and the early British settlers from the founding of Jamestown to the French and Indian War. This is not a subject that has received a lot of attention in popular historical literature. I was only partially familiar with much of the material.

The book is well-written and interesting. It was especially fascinating to read the accounts of the colonists and Native Americans in areas where I have lived.

Weidensaul provides a particularly good insight into the lives and thought processes of the Native Americans and the way they attempted to deal with the Europeans. It is vastly different from the popular image of blood-thirsty savages raiding, killing and scalping  that seemed so prevalent on TV and in the movies when I was a child..

My only criticism, if I have one, would be that Weidensaul focuses almost exclusively on the developments in the early English colonies. He glosses over the Spanish. However, the Spanish had been active in Florida and the rest of the Southeast US for a century before John Smith showed up at Jamestown.

That shortcoming aside, I found it to be a very interesting account of a usually-neglected part of American History. It is definitely worth the time and effort.

Wedding pictures, a good bit of history and an old acquaintence

It’s been a busy, if not particularly interesting or exciting week.

Aside from running a few errands, I spent most all of Saturday and Sunday working on my niece’s wedding pictures and wedding album. The wedding was last September, so I don’t think I am rushing things any. I took more than a thousand photos, which I narrowed down to around 450 I cropped and touched-up all 450 and posted them on Snapfish.com. Then I created an album through Snapfish.com with about 200 of them. It was fun, but very time consuming.

Earlier this week, I got a call from the boss (who was out of town) that I needed to make a quick overnight trip to Atlanta to sit in for him in a legislative committee hearing. The trip was uneventful and I wasn’t called on to answer any questions, which is a good thing. The best part was an audio book I picked up at the library and listened to for the drive — “A Voyage Long and Strange” by Tony Horowitz. (Fortunately, the title did not also describe my drive.) I love most history anyway, so this was a no-brainer for me. Horowitz examines the “lost century” most Americans never learn much about in school, from Columbus’s discovery in 1492 to the founding of Jamestown in 1607. He tells of the various Spanish explorers who visited America long before the English showed up.  He tells the tales of Columbus’s ill-fated later voyages, Coronado’s expedition through the American Southwest, DeSoto’s “burnt earth” march through the Southeast, and more.

For the second non-fiction read in a row, I encountered someone I know, or knew, or at least met once. Michael Gannon was the Catholic chaplain at the University of Florida when I was a student there. I was not a very good practicing Catholic at the time, but then-Father Gannon was a very prominent character on campus. I remember being very impressed by Gannon celebrating a very well attended outdoor Mass  in the spring of my senior year. To this day, I cannot hear the Youngbloods’ song,”Get Together” (“Come on people, now, smile on your brother…) without thinking of the Mass on the Grass.

From Florida Trend Magazine

Since then, Gannon retired from the priesthood and settled down as a historian and history professor at UF. His books on the World War II U-boat war, “Operation Drumbeat” and “Black May” are both outstanding. In this book he is profiled as “The Grinch Who Stole Thanksgiving.” In the 1980s, he was quoted in a newspaper article describing a Thanksgiving-style meal between the Spaniards at St Augustine and the local Native Americans that preceded the Pilgrim’s feast by something like 50 years.

In any case, if you have any interest in some well written American history that is missing from most texts, this book is worth the effort.