She Treads Softly: Blood and Treasure

Sunday, March 28, 2021

Blood and Treasure

Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America's First Frontier by Bob Drury, Tom Clavin
4/20/21; 400 pages
St. Martin's Publishing Group

Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America's First Frontier by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin is a highly recommended account of the life of the legendary Daniel Boone.

Drury and Clavin present a detailed and well written narrative that is both a history of the times and a biography of Daniel Boone. This was a different time and place from the world we know today. It is the mid-eighteenth century in Colonial America. There are wars between the French, English, and Native tribes. All of this affected the lives of settlers, including the Boone family. This history focuses on the settlement of North America's first frontier and the Boone families migration from New England to settle the Carolinas and across the Appalachians to Kentucky.

It is clearly presented why Daniel Boone is such a legendary, larger-than-life, amazing historical figure. This is a well-written, accurate, well-researched, and unbiased account that is placed firmly in the context of the times, so it can be violent. It is told through the people who were there, experiencing the events depicted. Once the narrative starts, it is full of fast-paced, non-stop action. Drury and Clavin include footnotes to document the chronicle of events in Boone's life and times. The narrative covers a lot of territory, covering areas ranging from Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Florida, and Illinois.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of St. Martin's Publishing Group in exchange for my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.