Druids - Anne Ross

   1999; 211 pages.  Full Title: “Druids: Preachers of Immortality”.  New Author?  : Yes.  Genres : Archaeology; European History; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating: 8*/10.

 

    Druids.  What part of Europe did they spring up from?  What parts of Europe did they flourish in?  What roles did they play in ancient Celtic society?

 

    What did the Greeks and Romans have to say about them, and how accurately were their views?  How did the upstart Christian church respond to them, and how successful was that endeavor?

 

    What were the Druids’ key beliefs and how did they practice them?  What were their religious festivals?

 

    You can find answers to all those topics in Anne Ross’s book Druids.

 

What’s To Like...

    Druids is divided up into 12 sections, namely:

00a. Foreword

    The two branches of the Celtic language.

00b. Introduction

    Druids, Prophets, and Bards: the 3 groups of “Men of Learning”.

01. Druidic Origins

    Are Druids from Eastern Europe or Western Ireland?

02. The Classic Commentators

    Greek and Roman writers, Ogam writing.

03. Questionable Death and Unusual Burial

    Human Sacrifices, Bog Burials, and “Foundation Sacrifices”.

04. The Symbolic Head

    Decapitation and Drinking from a Skull.

05. The Vernacular Literatures

    St. Brigit, the Red Branch, and other ancient Irish texts.

06. Druids and Fenians

    Rival warrior castes, or allies?

07. Assemblies and Calendar Festivals

    Samain, Imbolc, Beltain, and Lughnasa

08. Unity and Diversity

    Druids and the Early Church; St. Patrick

09. Folklore and Festival

    Druidic Traditions, Rituals that survived to modern times.

Epilogue

    Druidism: where did it come from and where is it heading?

 

    The book is written in what I call “scholarly style”.  Anne Ross (b. 1925; d. 2012) was both an archaeologist and a scholar, and spoke fluent Gaelic, which I’m sure helped in her research for this tome.  This is a short book; the text is just barely over 200 pages and that includes lots of maps, drawings and photographs.  It is written in English, not American, although I didn't find that a distraction.

 

    As might be expected, the text is packed with fascinating details.  Lots of my heroes—Taliesin, Simon Magus, the Morrigan, the Tuatha De Danann—get mentioned, as well as an ancient Celtic board game called “fidchell”, which is said to resemble chess.   I learned the etymology of the word “Ireland”, and got some tips on how the read omens to tell whether it’s going to be an auspicious or inauspicious day.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 3.9*/5, based on 21 ratings and 5 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.55*/5, based on 60 ratings and 10 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Apotropaic (adj.) : supposedly having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck.

Others: Janiform (adj.); Outwith (conj.); Turves (n.)

 

Excerpts...

    The oral tradition amongst the Celts was deliberately fostered, as we learn from the classical commentators on the Celts.  This custom would seem to have arisen in order that the sacred learning and details of ritual practice should be kept away from the uninitiated.  Writing was used for business purposes in Gaul, and Caesar remarks that Greek letters were used for this purpose.  He also comments how, when some noble person was being cremated, people would throw letters onto the funeral pyre for him to give to dead relatives and friends in the Otherworld.  (pg. 87)

 

    The men of Ulster regularly held a great festival at Samain, Hallowe’en, 31 October, i.e. November Eve.  A huge feast was made by the king, Conchobor, in Emain Macha.  They kept the feast for three days before Samain, for three days after Samain, and on the day itself.  It was one of the most important calendar festivals of the whole year, and still survives in the folk memory down to the present time.  This period was devoted to sportive occupations: horse racing and other sports; drinking — which often caused quarrels — and the recitation by each man present of his victories over powerful opponents.  (pg. 152)

 

“They also invite strangers to their banquets, and only after the meal do they ask who they are and of what they stand in need.  (pg. 185)

    There is absolutely zero profanity in Druids, which is a rarity, even when reading non-fiction.  The book was a slow read for me, but that was mostly because I was fixated by the archaeological details and Gaelic lore.

 

        The inherent problem with any discussion of Druidism is that there just isn’t a lot of reference material to work with.  As the first excerpt mentions, Druid religious and historical records were done via oral tradition, and Greek, Roman, and Christian commentators have questionable reliability.  Julius Caesar is a particularly dubious source, although I was impressed with Anne Ross’s objectivity about his commentary.

 

    One review criticized the author’s writing style, feeling that it was written “to the layman”, but I thought the book's tone was just right, neither too technical nor too prosaic.  My only beef was with the maps: there were quite a few of them, and they would only be useful if one lived close to the geographical areas cited.  I don’t.

 

    Overall, I found Druids: Preachers of Immortality both enlightening and entertaining.  It kept me turning the pages although in fairness, Druidism and Archaeology are two subjects I am always very interested in.  Amazon only offers one other book by Anne Ross, Folklore of Wales, which means I'll have to hit the used-book stores to read more books by her.

 

    8 Stars.  One last thing.  On page 48, I ran into the verb “whelmed”.  I’m familiar with “overwhelmed” of course, and have occasionally seen “underwhelmed”, usually used in a tongue-in-cheek fashion.  But this is the first time I’ve encountered “whelmed” used in a serious context.  Awesome!

Murder in the Queen's Armes - Aaron Elkins

   1985; 260 pages.  Book 3 (out of 18) in the “Gideon Oliver Mysteries” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres : International Mystery & Crime; England; Whodunit; Forensic Anthropology.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

 

    Hooray!  Gideon and Julie are newlyweds!  It’s time for their honeymoon!

 

    And a mighty fine honeymoon it’s going to be for the American couple.  They’re heading for a beautiful part of Great Britain called Dorset.  Right on the scenic coast of the English Channel.  How delightfully romantic!

 

    There will be two little side-trips for Gideon.   First, a trip to the Greater Dorchester Museum of History to see a skull fragment affectionately called “Pummy”.  Then to a nearby archaeological site, where a former classmate of Gideon’s, Dr. Nate Marcus, is supervising an excavation.  Both visits will be short; neither one is anything major.

 

    Well actually, Nate claims he is onto something major.  He says he’s uncovered proof that the ancient Mycenaeans visited early Britain and ushered the locals into the Bronze Age!

 

    Ho hum.  I guess you’d have to be a fellow archaeologist to get excited about that, and Gideon’s an anthropologist.  I certainly can't see that any of this is worth killing somebody over, right?

 

What’s To Like...

    Murder in the Queen’s Armes is the third book in this 18-volume series, and the second one I’ve read and which is reviewed here.  The title references the inn where Gideon and Julie are staying.  As expected, complications quickly arise that intrude into the couple’s honeymoon, including several mysteries that have need of Gideon’s technical expertise as the renowned “skeleton detective”.

 

    I thought the mysteries in the storyline were well-crafted.  To give details would entail spoilers, but let’s just say that neither Gideon nor the reader should discard any discovery, no matter how minor it may seem at the time.

 

    I loved the setting: a picturesque area along the southern coast of England.  I have a Facebook friend who lives nearby, and she’s posted pictures of Dorset in bloom.  I want to go there!

 

    The technical aspect of the story also fascinated me.  Gideon is called upon twice to do a skeletal analysis, and I was amazed at how much can be deduced from an ancient bone, no matter whether “ancient” means a couple millennia or a couple million years.  I was delighted that my favorite indigenous paleo-British group, the “Beaker People”, figure into the plotline, and enjoyed learning a number of Yiddish phrases, since one of the main characters was Jewish, such as doppes, nu, ungepotchket, farpotchket, and tzimiss.

 

    The ending is good, although the key break in the investigation doesn't happen until late in the story.  So even though this is a whodunit, and even though there are clues aplenty along the way, don’t be upset if you can’t solve the crime before Gideon does.  The fun comes with “connecting the dots” from a series of clues.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Oleaginously (adv.) : obsequiously; in an exaggerated and distastefully complimentary manner.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 1,134 ratings and 102 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.98*/5, based on 1,842 ratings and 112 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “I can’t say I find the Bronze Age all that fascinating myself.  Too recent.”

    “Seventeen hundred b.c. is recent?”

    “Sure, to an anthropologist.  Didn’t you ever hear what Agatha Christie said about being married to one?”

    “I didn’t know she was.”

    “Yes, a famous one: Max Mallowan.  She said it was wonderful—the older she got, the more interesting he found her.”  (loc. 272)

 

    “He was pretty well soused when I left him an hour ago.”

    “Nate?”

    “Yes, indeed.  He’s sleeping it off, I think.”

    Abe made a decisive little nod.  “When we’re finished here, I’ll go down and fix him up.  I’ll make him take a guggle-muggle.”

    “Come again?”

    “An old remedy.  You mix whiskey, hot tea, molasses, and raw eggs, and swallow it in one gulp.”

    Gideon made a face.  “It sounds terrible.”

    “That’s why you got to drink it one gulp.  You call it a guggle-muggle because that’s what it sounds like when it goes down: Guggle, muggle.  Believe me, by seven o’clock he’ll be fine.”  (loc. 2760)

 

Kindle Details…

    Murder in the Queen’s Armes sells for $7.99 right now at Amazon.  The other books in the series cost anywhere from $1.99 to $8.99.  There are also two "bundles", both priced at $16.99, one with Books 1-4, the other with Books 5-7.

 

“He’s glick and he’s slib, that’s all he is.”  (loc. 2576)

    There’s not much in Murder in the Queen’s Armes to whine about.  The cussing is moderate, 17 instances in the first 20%, but I didn’t feel that it was overused, and I don’t recall any f-bombs.  There is some romantic banter between our newlyweds, but nothing salacious.

 

    There were a couple of typos: be/he, chinthursting/chinthrusting, farfetched/far-fetched, and one (out of six) “house-keeping” variant of the correct “housekeeping”, but overall the editing was pretty clean.  There were also several instances unintended breaks in paragraphs, but I blame the Amazon conversion program for that, since I’ve seen that in other e-books.   More annoying were a couple of scene switches without any signal, although this too could be the Amazon program’s fault.

 

    Overall, I enjoyed Murder in the Queen’s Armes.  It was a fast-paced, quick, easy read.  I loved the setting, and all the genre components—mystery, archaeology, anthropology, intrigue, and even romance—were nicely blended.  I’ve got a couple more e-books from this series sitting on my Kindle, and I have a feeling I’m going to enjoy getting better acquainted with Gideon Oliver.

 

    8 Stars.  One last “Kewlest New Word” for your vocabulary enhancement: the aforementioned hangover cure called guggle-muggle.  I’d never heard of it, and thought at first it was something Aaron Elkins made up.  But Wikipedia has a post about a milder variation of it, a dessert, and with several variant spellings including gogle-mogle, gogol-mogol, and kogel mogel.  Wiki it.  It is not likely to be added to my dessert list anytime soon.

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed - Eric H. Cline

   2021; 189 pages.  Book 6 (out of 2) in the “Turning Points in Ancient History” series.  New Author?  : Yes.  Genres : Archaeology; Ancient History; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating: 8*/10.

 

    From the Author’s Preface to the Revised and Updated Edition:

 

    “…1177 BC was a pivotal moment in the history of civilization—a turning point for the ancient world.  By that time, the Bronze Age in the Aegean, Egypt, and the Near East had lasted nearly two thousand years, from approximately 3000 BC to just after 1200 BC.

 

    When the end came, as it did after centuries of cultural and technological evolution, most of the civilized and international world of the Mediterranean regions came to a dramatic halt in a vast area stretching from what is now Italy to Afghanistan and from Turkey down to Egypt.

 

    Large empires and small kingdoms, which had taken centuries to evolve, collapsed rapidly, from the Mycenaeans and Minoans to the Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Mitannians, Cypriots, Canaanites, and even Egyptians.”  (loc. 138)

 

    That’s as good of a way to introduce this book as any.

 

What’s To Like...

    1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed is detailed examination of the events taking place, for the most part in the eastern Mediterranean Sea area from the 15^th century BCE through the 12^th century BCE as the local powers make the unsettling transition from the Late Bronze Age into the Iron Age.

 

    Eric H. Cline gives the reader a close look at the archaeological findings that have been reported over the past 50 years or so, and I was amazed at just how much new and surprising discoveries that entailed.  Admittedly, it helps that when I was a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist when I grew up, and here I especially liked the way the author shows how archaeologists can reconstruct the ancient history of a site just from what kind of relics were, and were not, found there.

 

    I was impressed with the approach that Eric H. Cline used to present the material.  Each of the first four chapters covers a discrete century—which kingdoms were the most powerful at the time, which were the most civilized, and most importantly, who was doing commercial trading with whom.  It was fascinating to watch various kingdoms rise and fall and, thanks to translatable cuneiform messages carved into clay tablets, discover the wide variety of goods that were being imported and exported around the region.

 

    After Chapter 4 chronicles the collapse of a bunch of local powers in the decades around 1177 BCE, Chapter 5 takes a look at who or what might have caused all that destruction.  Historically, a group that Egyptians records enigmatically dub “The Sea People”, has been given most of the blame, but based on recent archaeological reports, Eric H. Cline opines that it’s overly simplistic to attribute just one cause to all the mayhem.

 

    In Chapter 6, he offers as a conclusion that a “Complexity Theory” is a better answer, which in short proposes that when a bunch of kingdoms are interconnected militarily, culturally, and economically, when one of them collapses, all the others are in danger of falling as well.  Things close with a short Epilogue, wherein the author suggests that there are lessons about "interconnectivity" that might apply to our present-day world as well.

 

    1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed is a short, but slow-yet-interesting read.  The text ends at page 189, but the Amazon blurb says it’s 290 pages in length due to the extras in the back: Acknowledgments (pg. 189), Dramatis Personae (pg. 191), Notes (pg. 197), Works Cited (pg. 223), and Index (pg. 267).  The book is written in what I call “scholarly style”, which some reviewers found to be wordy and dry, but I liked it.  Pleasantly and unsurprisingly, there are no cusswords or adult situations in the text.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 1,041 ratings and 103 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.72*/5, based on 7,893 ratings and 1,033 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Steatopygous (adj.) : having a fleshy abdomen and massive—usually protruding—thighs and buttocks.

 

Excerpts...

    One tablet, for instance, is concerned with the ice that Zimri-Lim was using in his summer drinks, which included wine, beer, and fermented barley-based drinks flavored with either pomegranate juice or licorice-like aniseed. (...)

    (T)he use of ice in drinks was not new to the region, even though one king had to remind his son to have servants wash and clean the ice before actually putting it in the drinks.  “Make them collect the ice!” he said.  “Let them wash it free of twigs and dung and dirt.”  (loc. 563)

 

    We are told at one point that a Hittite king named Mursili I, grandson and successor of the above-named Hattusili I, marched his army all the way to Mesopotamia, a journey of over one thousand miles, and attacked the city of Babylon in 1595 BC, burning it to the ground and ending the two-hundred-year-old dynasty made famous by Hammurabi “the Law-Giver.”  Then, instead of occupying the city, he simply turned the Hittite army around and headed for home, thus effectively conducting the longest drive-by shooting in history.  (loc. 890)

 

“If anyone bites off the nose of a free person, he shall pay 40 shekels of silver.”  (loc. 890)

    My quibbles with 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed are minor.  The book’s title is a bit misleading: the Bronze Age civilization didn’t collapse within a single year, even the author admits that.  The Sea People may have greatly weakened the Egyptian Empire to where a dynasty change occurred, but Egypt as an empire didn’t cease to exist for another millennium.

 

    The ending was anticlimactic.  Yes, a bunch of traditional powers in the area were replaced, but most of those took place gradually, and there was no common cause.  Indeed, the mysterious Sea People may well have been a large but ragtag bunch, fleeing some other collapsed local kingdom, and just looking for a new place to put down roots.  Eric H. Cline offers many possibilities for things that contributed to the regional upheaval—earthquakes, internal rebellion, external invaders, decentralization, private merchants, disease, and climate change in the form of drought and famine—but there is no conclusive evidence as to which combination of those factors helped collapse which segment of civilization.

 

    That’s not to say this wasn’t a good read.  Most people, including me, know next to nothing about the Eastern Mediterranean civilization in 1500-1100 BCE, so I learned a lot from reading this.  And as a wannabe archaeologist, I was astounded at how much one can learn from digging up a site where there is the presence of weapons in the ruins (or absence thereof), the presence of bodies beneath collapsed walls (or absence thereof), the presence of pottery shards (or absence thereof), and the presence of burned-out buildings (or just the royal and government buildings destroyed).

    Bottom Line: If you read 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed to find out why that year was such a disaster for so many people in the Eastern Mesopotamian region, you'll probably be disappointed.  But if you read it to learn more about that area from 1600 BCE to 1100 BCE, you'll find it to be a fascinating book.  I did.

 

    8 Stars.  1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed is the first book in a 2-book series titled “Turning Points in Ancient History”.  You’d think those two tomes would be labeled “Books 1 and 2”, but they’re not.  This one is actually Book 6, and the other one, titled Rome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire that Ended a Dynasty, is Book 9.  Either counting is not the long suit of those who created this series, or else there are a bunch of authors who are delinquent in getting their manuscripts to the publisher.

Babylon - Paul Kriwaczek

   2010; 283 pages.  Full Title: Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilisation (sic).  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Mesopotamia; History; Ancient History; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

   Without a doubt, my favorite class in 7^th grade was History, more specifically, World History, Part One.  The details are hazy, it’s been a few decades, but I do remember learning bits and pieces about a place called Mesopotamia, aka “The Cradle of Civilization”, the land in Asia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.  Here’s what I recall.

 

    First there were the Sumerians.  Who got conquered by the Akkadians.  Who got conquered by the Babylonians, followed by the Assyrians.  Or maybe vice versa. Or maybe both.  Then the Persians conquered everybody.  Then Alexander the Great kicked the Persians' butts, and that was the end of the Mesopotamian empires.

 

    They wrote on clay tablets in something called cuneiform, a strange writing consisting of grooves.  One of the kings was named Hammurabi, who wrote some famous laws.  “An eye for an eye” and all that.  They built terraced pyramid-like things called ziggurats.  A king named Nebuchadnezzar figures in there somewhere, and they liked to use a “bas-relief” style in their architecture.  Don’t ask me why I remember that last bit.

 

    That’s about it, which is kind of embarrassing since I consider myself a history buff, with emphasis on the ancient stuff.  That's why I decided to read Paul Kriwaczek’s book, Babylon.

 

What’s To Like...

    The book is divided into ten chapters, the first of which gives an introductory overview.  Chapter 2 is devoted to “Before 4000 BC”, with each subsequent chapter moving straightforwardly up the timeline, culminating with chapter 10, dealing with “After 700 BC”.   Paul Kriwaczek considers the Persian conquest to be the end of the story.  To me the “European” triumph by Alexander the Great seems a more logical stopping point, but hey, that’s splitting hairs.

 

    The writing style is what I call “scholarly”, with long sentences and big words, and I liked that.  The text is written mostly in English, but sometimes in American, kind of like somebody made half an effort to accommodate us Yanks.  So you have an extra “u” in “colours”, but the “z” spelling of “recognize”.  Weirdly, it’s “civilization” throughout the text EXCEPT for the cover page (see above) where it’s “civilisation”.  Go figure.

 

    Paul Kriwaczek mostly presents what we know about each era based on the available archaeological evidence.  He points out that we’ve barely scratched the surface in this regard: most of the known archaeological sites have not yet been excavated, and only fraction of the million or so cuneiform documents have been studied and translated.  It is a tremendous asset that we can decipher cuneiform, but apparently many of the glyphs can have multiple meanings, which muddies the translating.

 

    Cuneiform tablets have one major advantage over writing on papyrus: the latter disintegrates with time when it’s buried in desert sands, but clay tablets don’t degrade at all.  So there are a surprising number of cuneiform documents still around (albeit, often in pieces), with all sorts of topics to read about, such as:

    Chemistry: how to artificially make lapis lazuli

    Mathematics: how to calculate in a base-60 numbering system (wowza!)

    Agriculture: the best way to grow crops (kind of a Farmer’s Almanac)

    Baking: recipes for making pastries

    Beer: some Babylonian drinking songs (really!)

 

    Babylon added depth to my Mesopotamian history knowledge.  For instance, Sumer and Akkad both had a much more profound and long-lasting impact on the area's culture than I thought.  They had a well-developed sewage-disposal system early on, told elaborate stories on vases, and believed the entire world floated on a huge freshwater lake.  Now I can’t wait to teach my drinking buddies some Babylonian booze songs.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 365 ratings.

    Goodreads: 3.94/5 based on 1,421 ratings and 166 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Numinous (adj.) : having a strong religious or spiritual quality.

Others: Fossicking (v.); Caesura (n.); Dirigiste (adj.); Laissez-Passer (n.); Chowkidar (n.); Entrepot (n.); Clowder (n.).

 

Excerpts...

    This elite class could not appear in society while stone technology was still the mainstream.  Stone is an egalitarian material.  Even the special varieties needed for tool-making are found widely distributed, and by long tradition going back to the beginning of the genus Homo, each household made its own tools.  There were always, no doubt, specialists who excelled at the manufacture of particular items, but in the main, making stone tools was seen as a private, domestic activity.

    The introduction of metal-working changed all that.  (loc. 2023)

 

    Though fallacious, the belief in omens tells us something important about the Babylonians’ outlook.  They saw the world as based on laws and rules: if this occurs, then that is likely to follow.  To them events did not take place, as some religious believers hold even now, because God or the gods arbitrarily decreed from moment to moment that they should.  Babylonians did not think, as even modern Kabbalists do, that the world only exists from day to day by a miracle.  Rather they noted that there was an underlying order and logic to the universe, which careful observation had the power to disclose.  Today we call that science.  (loc. 3435)

 

Kindle Details…

    Babylon sells for $11.99 at Amazon.  Paul Kriwaczek has three other e-books books, two of which are also history-oriented, the third being about how to make a film documentary.  These range in price from $6.99 to $63.99.  That high-end price is for the documentary book.

 

When, perhaps sooner, perhaps later, our civilization finally lies dying in the gutter, some of us will still be looking, as the ancient Mesopotamians taught us to do, at the stars.  (loc. 4879, and the closing sentence of the book)

    My quibbles mostly concern some technical shortcomings in the e-book version.

 

    There’s a detailed index in the back of the book, but since there aren’t any links or page numbers, it’s totally useless.  There’s also a list of 20 photographic illustrations, which sadly were not included in the e-book version.  Last and least, I didn’t expect to find any cusswords in a book about history and archaeology, so the one exception here: the f-bomb, took me by surprise.

 

    Other reviewers were not so enamored.  The full title of this book: Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilisation should be noted.  One person was shocked that the book doesn't mention the (titular) city of Babylon until halfway through.

 

    More creditably, several reviewers didn’t like the author's tie-ins of ancient history to current world affairs.  True, those can be distracting if used too often or in a preachy tone.  But here, I felt they were done effectively, giving the readers food for thought.  See below.

 

    Overall, Babylon was both an entertaining and enlightening read for me: just the right length, just the right depth, just the right balance of archaeology and history.  Perhaps this will spur me to read some other history books that and languishing on my Kindle and TBR shelf.

 

    9½ Stars.  One example of a modern-day tie-in:  At the very beginning, the author points out that both Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush claimed that God had personally spoken to them about going to war in the region; Hussein when he decided to invade Kuwait, Bush when he decided to invade Iraq.  Direct quotes are given for both proclamations.  It worked out better for Dubya.  Deities are a fickle lot.

Old Bones - Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

   2019; 369 pages.  New Authors? : No.  Genre : Archaeology; Action-Intrigue; Historical Mystery.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

    The ill-fated Donner expedition achieved dubious but lasting fame when they became stranded in the high Sierra Nevada mountains during the brutal winter of 1846-47 and had to resort to cannibalism to keep from starving.

    Based on information supplied by a direct descendant of one of those pioneers, archaeologist Dr. Nora Kelly has applied for a grant to search for the campsite of a small group of the Donner party that splintered off.  Grants are generally hard to get, but Nora is optimistic since there are  rumors that one of the settlers was carrying a chest of gold coins on the trip, with a present-day worth of twenty million dollars.  Greed creates grant money.

    Meanwhile, newly-graduated FBI Agent Corrie Swanson grows weary of her agency apprenticeship, and has finally been given an investigation of her own to pursue.  Someone has dug up an old historical grave and made off with the upper half of the corpse.  The graveyard is on Federal land, and that means the FBI has jurisdiction.

    Nora and Corrie don’t know it, but they’ve both worked in the past with another FBI guy – Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast.  That might be an ice-breaker when the two of them cross paths in the Sierra Nevada wilderness and are forced to team up.

    But both have headstrong personalities and they might find each other to be uncooperative and arrogant. I wonder how Aloysius would handle this.

What’s To Like...

    Both Nora Kelly and Corrie Swanson have previously been protagonists in Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child novels, Nora in Thunderhead (reviewed here), and Corrie in White Fire (reviewed here).  In Old Bones they now seem to be “promoted” to a series of their own, one that will presumably have a heavy emphasis on archaeology, which I count as a plus.  It will be interesting to see how Preston and Child come up with enough old ruins and baddies to keep our two protagonists busy.

    There's a bunch of mysteries and intrigue here to keep your interest.  Will the “Lost Camp” of the Donner party be found?  Was there really a chest of gold, and if so, will it be found?  What does a murder in Paris in the prologue have to do with anything?  Who’s stealing the corpses, and why?  And finally, why are people in Nora’s archaeological expedition turning up dead?

    I like the initial interplay between Nora and Corrie when they meet.  You’d expect them to be palsy-walsy right away, and that isn’t the case.  Neither one of them “plays well with others”, especially with their underlings and overlings.  Yet I felt that Old Bones portrays both characters at their best (so far), and I’m guessing they both will be learning tact and finesse as the series progresses.  

    The mention of New Hampshire’s “The Old Man of the Mountain” brought back pleasant childhood memories.  It’s a shame that it has since fallen down.  You'll l;earn a little bit of French from the story, including a cuss phrase.  There’s even a small amount of the patented Preston-&-Child motif “is it natural or supernatural?”  No one does that better than those guys.

    The ending is somewhat predictable yet suitably exciting.  There were a couple of plot twists to keep me on my toes, and I was only half-right about who the perp was.  Aloysius Pendergast only has a small cameo appearance, and it isn’t until the epilogue.  His main purpose seems to be toquickly and cerebrally solve the remaining unresolved puzzles.

Excerpts...

    “How is it possible,” he asked, “that a man as experienced in the wilderness as Peel would fall off a cliff like this?”

    “Late at night,” Wiggett replied.  “The moon had set.  He’s collecting rocks for his grave.  He’s agitated, upset, not thinking clearly.”

    “Maybe even had a drink or two,” Clive added.

    “Peel didn’t drink.”  (pg. 226)

    He raised his head and cleared his throat.  “Samantha Carvilleae ossua heic.  Fortuna spondet multa multis, preastat nemini, vive in dies et horas, nam proprium est nihil.”

    Corrie looked at Pendergast.  “What exactly does that mean?”

    “Here lie the bones of Samantha Carville.  Fortune makes promises to many, keeps them to none.  Live for each day, live for the hours, since nothing is forever yours.”

    “That’s rather dark,” said Corrie.

    “It’s a favorite quote of my ward, Constance.  Besides, the graveside is no place for pleasantries.”  (pg. 362)

“You grow up thinking everything’s fine and bad things happen to other people, and then, out of the blue, life drops a piano on you.”  (pg. 147 )

    There are a couple of things to nitpick about.  There’s some cussing in any Preston & Child novel, but here it felt excessive, especially in the early chapters.  I didn’t feel like it added much to the book’s “feel”, and I'm wondering if the authors are trying to establish a "tone" for the series.

    Also, it seemed like it took a while for the storyline to get going.  The archaeology doesn’t start until page 143, and the first small bit of gold isn’t found until several pages after that.  But perhaps this is inevitable when starting a new series.  Characters need to introduced, their backstories need to be recounted, and settings need to be described.  But in any event, after the first gold coin is found, everything picks up nicely.

    I also would’ve appreciated a “what’s real and what’s fiction” section at the end of the book.  There is a short “Note To The Reader” section included, but in a nutshell, it says some of this is true, some of this is made-up, go look it up yourself.  Which I did.

    Overall, I think Old Bones is a solid start to new series by these two writers.  It won't outshine their Agent Pendergast series, but it's better than their Gideon Crew tales.  If you can make it through the first 150 pages of requisite world-building, you'll find the rest of the story to be of vintage Preston & Child quality.

    7½ Stars.  If you’re not familiar with it, the “Donner history” is given in chapter 4.  I was surprised to learn that there were quite a few survivors.  The Wikipedia article (the link is here) says 48 out of 87 lived through it.  So while some cannibalism certainly occurred, it never got down to a “just the two of us left, and one of us needs to eat the other” dilemma.  Too bad.  That might have made for a fascinating story.

Dragon Teeth - Michael Crichton

   2017 (1974, actually); 333 pages.  New Author? : Of course not.  Genre : Coming-of-Age; Action; Western Adventure; Archaeology.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

    William Johnson has it made.  He’s 18 years old, from a well-to-do family, and a freshman at prestigious Yale University.  Like most freshmen, he is shy around girls, and prone to doing stupid things in his spare time, such as making idle bets with other, equally well-off students.

    Othniel Charles Marsh is a professor at Yale and a leading expert in the new field of paleontology.  Dinosaurs, or to be more exact, dinosaur bones, are a recent discovery and are all the rage in archaeology right now.  Marsh’s hobby during summer break is to fund a trek by a select group of Yale students out into the wild and untamed west in search of dinosaur bones.

     Johnson has no interest in joining in on such an adventure.  His goal for summer break is to lay around the mansion.  But a thousand-dollar bet with a rival classmate over whether he’s too chicken to go along on Marsh’s expedition changes things.  That’s a lot of money, even for a spoiled rich kid.

    Which is why, William Johnson, writing in his journal, remarks that, “I realized that, through no fault of my own, I would now spend the entire summer in some ghastly hot desert in the company of a known lunatic, digging up old bones.”

What’s To Like...

    Dragon Teeth was published in 2017, nine years after Michael Crichton died.  This may seem preposterous, but he actually wrote it in 1974, and it languished as an early effort that he chose not to have published.  Sixteen years after penning this tale, Jurassic Park was published, and I'm pretty sure Crichton forgot all about this manuscript.

    Genre-wise, this is first and foremost a coming-of-age tale.  Johnson starts out as a spoiled brat, and comes back a mature man.  Wikipedia calls it a “forerunner to Jurassic Park”, but if you read it in hopes that velociraptors will go stomping around, chomping on puny humans, you are going to be sore disappointed. Instead, it is a tale of an adventure out West, with some paleontology thrown in as an added bonus.

    This may be a rookie effort, but Michael Crichton’s writing skills are already evident.  You get a nice “feel” for frontier life in the 1870’s, and his descriptions are blended smoothly with his research about the wild West, digging for dinosaur fossils, and boom towns springing up anywhere that gold was found.  The Sioux are still on the warpath, and Custer is about to be made aware of that fact.

    The chapters are short, of James Patterson-ish length.  They are neither numbered nor listed in the front, but each one has a descriptive title to clue you in as to what’s about to occur.  There’s a map at the front of the book, which helped me keep track of where the fossil-hunters were traipsing around, although its resolution is poor.  There are a couple cusswords, but that’s about it for R-rated stuff.  Both Johnson and I enjoyed meeting Emily Williams, or whatever her name really was.

    I really liked the photography sections of the story.  There was no such thing as film, a store nearby that would develop your pictures, or digital cameras.  My father had his own darkroom, and I used to assist him in developing film into slides.  My grandfather had some ancient photographs, on old sepia-colored glass plates, which are referenced here.  This brought back some great memories for me.

    Michael Crichton weaves his insights about some subtle topics into the storyline, most notably some thoughts about Science-vs-Religion (pgs 132-35), and blind faith (pgs 174-5).  And if you're a dyed-in-the-wool anarchist, Deadwood Gulch is your kind of town.  Imagine living in a place where there are no rules, laws, and/or enforcement agencies.  Surely, this is Anarchist Paradise.

    The ending is satisfying, albeit not overly exciting.  Appended to the story are a couple neat extra sections:  a Postscript, in which Crichton tells you what happened to some of the real-life figures encounters in the story; an Author’s Note, where he separates fact from fiction, and a touching Afterword from his widowed wife, giving some background about Michael and this book, and leaving a lump in my throat.

Kewlest New Word ...

Nymphs du pave (n.; phrase) : a streetwalker; a prostitute who solicits in the street.  (French for “nymph of the pavement”)

Excerpts...

    “You are saying this Neander skull is human?” Morton said.

    “I don’t know,” Cope said.  “But I do not see how one can believe that dinosaurs evolved, and reptiles evolved, and mammals such as the horse evolved, but that man sprang fully developed without antecedents.”

    “Aren’t you a Quaker, Professor Cope?” (…)

    “I may not be,” Cope said.  Religion explains what man cannot explain.  But when I see something before my eyes, and my religion hastens to assure me that I am mistaken, that I do not see at all … No, I may no longer be a Quaker, after all.”  (pg. 169)

    “And me?”

    “You’re different,” she said.  “You’re brave, but you are also refined.  I bet you kiss real refined, too.”

    She was waiting.

    “I learned,” Johnson wrote in his journal, “one immediate lesson, which was the unwisdom of kissing aboard a bucking stagecoach.  My lip was deeply bitten and the blood flowed freely, which inhibited, but did not stop, further explorations of this nature.”  (pg. 303)

I still regard three months in the West in much the same way I would three months forced attendance at the German Opera.  (pg. 20 )

    The quibbles are minor.  The thrills and spills don’t really start until about halfway through the book, so after a hundred pages or so, I was beginning to wonder if all we were going to do was ride around the countryside and dig up fossils.  Yet Michael Crichton can make even that interesting, whic is no small feat.

    The pacing is moderate, which is okay for a coming-of-age story.  And a glaring deus ex machina popped up when our protagonist, having lost all his photographic equipment and having no useful skills with which to earn some money in Deadwood Gulch, has the good fortune to learn that a previous resident, also a photographer, had perished in the wilds, but miraculously left all of his equipment behind in the town.  The townspeople, who rob and steal and loan-shark without a second thought, have conveniently left all those photographic plates and chemicals untouched, and now give them to Johnson for fre.

    But I pick at nits.  Dragon Teeth was an extremely quick and easy read, with a catchy plotline and a well-researched setting.  It may not be Crichton at his best (that wouldn’t happen for another 16 years), but it was still a delightful read.

    7½ Stars.  I rarely read Westerns, but if it's written by Michael Crichton, I'll make an exception.