American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White The Birth of The "It" Girl and The Crime of the Century " by Paula Uruburu

American Eve Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White The Birth of The "It" Girl & The Crime of the Century by Paula Uruburu
400 pages
Published April 2009 by Penguin Books
Source: bought it after hearing about it on NPR

Florence Evelyn Nesbit was born into the upper middle class. Unfortunately, when her father died it was discovered that he had been quite a bad businessman who left his widow, daughter and son, Howard in dire circumstances. Mrs. Nesbit proved to be hopeless when it came time to provide her children. Before long the trio was shuffling from rundown boardinghouse to rundown boardinghouse until the day Evelyn is literally "discovered" on the street by an artist who wanted to paint her picture.

Soon the beautiful young girl was earning enough as a popular artist's model to support her family and they were lured to New York where Evelyn quickly became the muse of artists and photographer's alike. Her likeness appeared on sheet music, in advertisements and even in the paintings hung in churches.

When Evelyn's dreams took her to the stage, her life changed even more rapidly. Young and old, rich and poor - men began sending her love letters, flowers and begging for her time. She had very little interest in any of them, although her dear mama was more than willing to allow some of the wealthy, older gentlemen to fawn over her sixteen-year-old daughter.

Enter Stanford White, leading architect and notorious consumer of young girls. For months White showered Evelyn, her mother and her brother with his largess, moving them into better lodgings, paying for young Howard's education, and providing Evelyn with all manner of diversions. One horrible night, White finally showed his true colors; he drugged Evelyn and raped her. For some time afterward she shunned him but she had so loved him that before long she forgave him. The two began an affair that lasted until Evelyn began to suspect White of having other girls as well. She sought out the attention of Jack Barrymore (who would come to prominence as actor John Barrymore), initially to make White jealous but eventually she grew very fond of him. In fact, the two became engaged until Mama Nesbit and Stanford White stepped in to put an end to it.

The void left room for a third man who had had his eye on Evelyn for some time, Harry K. Thaw of Pittsburgh. Thaw was by turns an evangelical and a rounder with a brutal streak. He spent more than a year wining over Evelyn and convincing her to marry him which she finally did despite his having beaten and raped her on a trip to Europe.

Thaw had another obsession that would be the downfall of both himself and Evelyn - he abhorred Stanford White and was incessant in his belief that he must make White pay for his sinful ways. When he found out what White had done to Evelyn, he became more enraged than ever. When other methods proved inadequate, Thaw took matters into his own hands. One night, in front of hundreds of witnesses, Thaw shot White to death on the rooftop theater of White's own Madison Square Garden.

Thousands gathered daily as the trial of the century commenced. Crowds gathered on the streets below the so-called Bridge of Sighs, a walkway between the jail and the courthouse hoping to catch a glimpse of Thaw as he made his way to first one and then a second trial. Mother Thaw's vast resources managed to keep Harry out of jail but they couldn't keep him out of the insane asylum. Poor Evelyn was forced during both trials to testify as to what White had done to her and, although the public initially took pity on her, her life was never the same. At the age of twenty-one, the once rising star was a divorcee with a young son. She lived another sixty-five years but life was hard for the woman who had once been the face of a new century.

I was drawn to this book because Evelyn, Thaw and White were all characters in E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, a book I adored.

"To anyone familiar with E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime, the name Evelyn Nesbit may evoke the mauve-tinted crucible of the sentimentality inclined and cynically named Gilded Age. To others, it may signify passion and perversion, murder and scandal, "love, hate, villainy, perfidy, and outraged innocence." The extinction of an era. And a red velvet swing."

I have always wondered about Evelyn Nesbit and when I heard about this book I knew it was one for me. Uruburu did not disappoint. The book is well-researched and works on many levels, as a fine piece of story telling, recounting of historical and a look a society as the country was caught between one way of live and another.

The March by E. L. Doctorow

The March by E. L. Doctorow
384 pages
Published September 2005 by Random House Publishing Group
Source: purchased

In 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman and his sixty thousand troops have just marched into Georgia and burned Atlanta. Now they are making their way to the coast and then up into the Carolinas as Sherman attempts to finish off the Confederacy.

Along the way, the troops will pick up thousands of freed slaves and refugees and the march will become something much more than just a military maneuver, it will become a study in humanity...and inhumanity.

Emily Thompson's father succumbs to death just as Sherman's troops storm through her town. When she goes in search of the doctor, she finds, instead, Wrede Sartorius, Union surgeon. Emily is so taken by Sartorius' gentlemanly ways and handling of the surgery that she makes the decisions, as the troops pull out, to follow along and help with the wounded and dying.

Pearl, a freed slave and daughter of her master, is nearly white and captures the hearts of one Union soldier after another. In this way, she is not only kept safe but finds herself also at work in Wrede Sartorius's unit. Her sole goal is to deliver a letter to the family of the soldier who first saved her.

Wrede Sartorius, the doctor who at first appeared to be so kindhearted, is first and foremost, a physician interested in advancing science even when it means that one man will ride with the troops for days with a spike sticking from his head so that the doctor could observe the decline of the patient for himself.

Arly and Will are Southern soldiers who find themselves in prison together early on, only to be liberated when they promise to fight to save a city. But Arly is always looking for the way to save his own skin and the two almost immediately desert, finding themselves on the Union side of the line.

Doctorow has a way of telling a sweeping saga at an intimate level that is almost unparalleled in storytelling. In The March is also able to make the reader see both the good and the bad in the actions of both sides of the conflict. More than once, I found myself hoping that the Union soldiers would "get theirs." As I did with Doctorow's Ragtime, I learned a lot from this book because Doctorow is also incomparable at mixing historical figures and actions in his fiction.

My one complaint with this book was that I spent most of it expecting the same kind of drawing together of storylines that I had so enjoyed in Ragtime which did not happen. Instead, some of the stories wrapped up early, some of them just ended; only a couple wound their way through the entire book. Which is probably more realistic, just not what I was expecting. So many people have cited this book as one of their all-time favorites and my expectations were high. While this, the last book I read in 2011, was one of my favorite books of the year, it still did not come close to captivating me in the way that Ragtime did.

A Separate Country

A Separate Country by Robert Hicks
432 pages
Published September 2009 by Grand Central Publishing
Source: I won it in a drawing

Eli Griffin has been left a task by a dying man, a man he had tried to kill years earlier. Major General John Bell Hood, late of the Confederate army, knows that he can make Griffin feel obliged to discharge an obligation to make up for that attempt and in his dying hours sets Griffin to a task that will bring him into contact with characters that could not populate any city except New Orleans.

John Hood left the war with an arm he could not use and a leg that had been amputated yet the wounds that most profoundly marked him were the wounds that couldn't be seen. Hood was bitter and conflicted about what he had done in his years in the army and deeply disappointed with the legacy that he had left. He spent much of the rest of his life writing a book attempting to set the record straight. On his death bed, however, he tells Griffin that he wants that book destroyed and a more recent accounting of his life published. This is the story of his life with Anna Marie Hennen, a New Orleans beauty who was inexplicably drawn to the shattered man, who gave birth to his eleven children and who introduced him to people who could only have lived in New Orleans.

Griffin is left to deal with these people as he attempts to retrieve the original book from from Confederate General Beauregarde and to find a killer who Hood says must approve the publication of the second book. Along the way Griffin is drawn more deeply into the world that Hood has inhabited since he first met Anna Marie, a world that includes the dwarf, Rintrah, a priest without a church, Father Mike, and the memory of a beloved man whose legacy seems to contradict what Griffin learns about him.

Hicks moves the story of Griffin's task back and forth between the writings that both Hood and Anna Marie have left and Griffin's own search for the truth in a way that keeps the story moving along and never seems to become confusing (as can so often happen when authors choose this method of story telling). The story moves back and forth in time, slowly revealing new surprises along the way. Hicks does a marvelous job of creating multi-layered characters - in even the most hardened characters there is a soft place reserved for loved ones and old hurts. The city of New Orleans comes alive in Hicks' hands as does the time period immediately following the American Civil War.

Unfortunately, the book fell flat for me in the end. The story became too complex and implausible for me and a character that was introduced late in the story and seemed to be somewhat pivotal was never fully explained to my satisfaction. Still I enjoyed the book overall and I would recommend it for lovers of historical fiction, particularly those who enjoy stories revolving around the American Civil War.

I read this book for the War Through The Generations Challenge.

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
368 pages
Published January 2009 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Source: bought this one after hearing about it on NPR

I grew up with an unusual awareness of the American Civil War, particularly for someone who lives so far removed from the where the bulk of  the action occurred. But then I lived in an unusual household. My father, an American History teacher, had a particular fondness for the American Civil War. That fondness meant that many of our summer vacation trips included stops at Civil War battlefields. I even took my dad's Civil War course when I was in high school; the number of people that died in this war was not news to me. Yet, when I heard about this book on NPR, it made me stop and think about that number more closely. Just how did both the North and the South deal with numbers of dead that large? And how did this war change the war American felt about death and the way the country dealt with their military dead?

Gilpin Faust breaks This Republic of Suffering into nine chapters, each exploring a different aspect of what was learned about dying from 1861-1865: Dying, Killing, Burying, Naming, Realizing, Believing and Doubting, Accounting, Numbering, and Surviving. In "Dying" she wrote:

"Sudden death represented a profound threat to fundamental assumption about the correct way to die, and its frequency on the battlefield comprised one of the most important ways that Civil War death departed from the "ordinary death" of the prewar period."

Prior to the war, the mostly Christian people of the United States believed in the "good death," a death surrounded by family which giving the dying person time to show their faith in God. Letters to the family of the deceased often mentioned how the dying had accepted God in their final moments or died well. The war also brought up a conflict between duty to God and duty to country that had to be resolved.

Killing on that scale had never been seen before, particularly when the combatants were very much alike. As one soldier said the killing demanded "the harder courage."

"..Civil War killing...required work --intellectual and psychological effort to address religious and emotional constraints, as well as adaptation to the ways this particular war's technologies, tactics, and logistics shaped the experience of combat."

The killing was not the only thing that required work on a scale never before seen. Dealing with the dead on the battlefield, traditionally the duty of the victor, often had to be postponed and matter of who was responsible was never entirely clear. Thousands of bodies were buried without identification or in remote places, thousands more were buried in mass burial pits. Industries sprung up: business to help find loved ones (both the missing and the dead), services to bring bodies home, coffin makers and embalmers. Not only did these people show up in droves after a battle but family members of those involved also flocked to the sites, hoping to find their loved ones (barring that, to bring home their bodies).

Eventually the nation had to come to terms with the reality of so many dead and wounded and it weighed heavily and the faith of many. Finally the government began to step up and acknowledge that the dead now belonged to the nation. The long and difficult job of identifying the dead and reburying them in national cemeteries went on for decades after the war ended. And during all of this time, the counting continued. There will never be a definite count on the number of men, women and children killed in the war, in combat, through accidents and illness, and through the deprivations that were a part of the war.

Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University, as penned a work that even the most widely-read of Civil War buffs can learn from. It literally took me months to read this one, there was only so much new information I could digest at a time. This Republic of Suffering is one of the best researched book I've ever read, although I sometimes felt that there may have been too much information, too many examples and details. Never the less, I highly recommend it for those with a strong interest in the American Civil War and those who have an interest in how wars impact entire nations.

First Family: Abigail and John Adams by Joseph Ellis

First Family: Abigail and John Adams by Joseph Ellis
320 pages
Published: 2010 by Vintage Books
Source: my mom's copy was a gift from my dad

Guest Review From My Mom:

For some time I have said that the woman I most admire, without a doubt, had to be Abigail Adams.  So it was with absolute delight that I opened my birthday present from my husband and found this small paperback book about my favorite lady and her family.

There have been many books written about the Adams.  Separate books have been written for each of them; but, of course, both play prominently in the other’s book.  My husband suggested that I might not find anything new in this book, but it was worth a try.  And I did find new things–and new ways of interpreting things I already knew.

The author sets out to relate the 1200 letters that John and Abigail shared through their lives to the events that were going on in the country and the world.  John could be a cantankerous man, but he had the foresight to realize how much history was being created, and he wanted to make sure others knew–perhaps because he was vain and wanted to be remembered most prominently.  Thus he made copies and asked Abigail to make copies of all of the letters they wrote.  In those days mail often was lost and stolen but the copies still exist.

    “The happiness of our family,” Abigail noted in 1788, “seems ever to have
    been so interwoven with the politics of our country as to be in a great degree
    dependent upon them.”

John and Abigail spent incredible amounts of time separated while John went off to forge independence, peace with England, treaties with the Dutch, and later to serve as both Vice President (a job he hated) and President of our young country.  And through almost all of this, Abigail stayed behind raising the four children and running the farm, making huge decisions including inoculation for small pox.  And they both wrote letters–lots and lots of letters.

Other Founding Fathers had good marriages and are well-remembered today.  But none of them left a legacy as rich as the Adams with all of their letters.  And Ellis does a masterful job of weaving the letters and history into delightful reading and understanding.

I came away even more fond of this “saucy” lady and her strength.  She was a woman well ahead of her time.  She was well read, educated, and extremely capable.  And how she had to suffer while her husband and young son traveled the Atlantic and lived in Europe with no quick means of communication.  She carried and lost a stillborn child alone while John did what he thought of as his duty in Philadelphia. 

Ellis, a Pulitzer prize-winning author, quotes freely from these letters and has documented his work very thoroughly.  At times you want to shake John and tell him to quit thinking of himself and then you see him through Abigail’s eyes and through what he is doing for the country.  The book is well crafted, an easy read, and you do not have to know a lot of history to enjoy this little book.  I believe you will come away as an Abigail fan after reading letters and notes from their courtship until they both have lived out their lives.

Thanks, Mom - another great review!

Camp Nine by Vivienne Schiffer

Camp Nine by Vivienne Schiffer
198 pages
Published The University of Arkansas Press October 2011
Source: TLC Book Tours and the publisher

Twelve-year-old Chess Morton lives in Rook, Arkansas, a speck of a town in the Black Bayou, with her widowed mother. Despite living deep in the south in the early 1940's, Chess lives her life largely oblivious to the world around her. Until her grandfather sells a piece of land that Chess inherited from her father to the U.S. Government. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the government relocated thousands of Japanese Americans to camp throughout the U.S. Camp Nine, one of these camps, sprang from the land that had been Chess' and would serve to change her life.

Chess' mother offers to teach art lessons to the prisoners of Camp Nine, befriending many of the families, particularly the Matsuis. Although reluctant to have anything to do with the camp at first, Chess is soon fast friends with both of the Matsui boys. Her relationship with each of them will enrich and enlighten her but it will be many years later before David Matsui finally teaches Chess exactly what it was that she was protected from as she was growing up in the bayou.

This is one of those books that made me glad that I've always been willing to take a chance with books I've never heard of; thanks to TLC Book Tours for always bringing them to my attention. Schiffer's debut is lovely and charming in a way that is utterly unexpected given the very tough subjects that it tackles. She immerses her reader deep into the Mississippi delta and an area of open racism and brings to life the divide between black and white, rich and poor. Chess brings to mind an older Scout Finch as she comes to terms with the reality of the relationships between herself and those around her. Just as Scout came to view her father as a complete person, Chess comes to see her mother as someone more than just a mother.

"She never voiced her frustration about it to me, but I realize she could have picked up and left with me then, gone to another state, and fought him [Chess' grandfather]. But she understood that my place was on the plantation, whatever it might mean to her personal freedom. I wish I'd understood then all of the choices she made to preserve my interests over her own."

 Readers will undoubtedly recall Jamie Ford's The Hotel On The Corner of Bitter and Sweet when reading Camp Nine, as both deal with the Japanese interment camps. But where Hotel dealt strictly with the situation from the Japanese point of view, Camp Nine details how the impact the camps may have had on the areas surrounding them as well as bringing to light life in these "camps."

Camp Nine would make a wonderful book club selection with much to discuss and a book to enjoy. For more opinions on this book, check out the full tour at TLC Book Tours.

Vivienne Schiffer

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow
Published October 2010 by Penguin Group
Source: the publisher and TLC Book Tours

Usually I start a book review with a synopsis, but it hardly seems necessary in the case of this book.  It's a biography so it almost goes without saying that the book begins at approximately the time of George Washington's birth and ends at approximately the time of Washington's death (although Chernow does explore Washington's legacy after his death briefly).  The highlights of what happened in between those two events are largely known as well: Washington married the widow Martha Custis, he served as the Commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and was the first president of the newly formed union.

But this book is 817 pages long so you know there is much more here than the basic details of Washington's life.  Chernow has drawn extensively from Washington's own papers and correspondence, as well as other biographies and the writings of other important players of the time, to craft an incredibly detailed look into Washington's life, thoughts, and motives.  It's my custom to take notes as I read, but inside of 200 pages I realized that I would never get through this book if I continued to do that--there is just too much information that was new to me in this book.  In fact, all of that information made it almost impossible to get through the book; I could only realistically absorb 15-20 pages at a sitting.

George Washington was not raised as a pampered child.  In fact, his mother, Mary, drilled habits of thrift and industry into young George, particularly after his father died.  She was a hard woman and Chernow says that there was always a "cool, quiet antagonism between Washington and his mother."  Chernow believes that Martha's treatment of young George created a man who was "overly sensitive to criticism and suffered from a lifelong need for approval" and that "George became an overly controlled personality and learned to master his temper and curb his tongue."

It was interesting to me to watch Washington, who liked his aristocratic airs and fine things, went from being a wealthy planter, interested primarily in accruing wealth and deeply attached to the British way of life, become a leader in a revolution.  His disillusion with with colonial rule began with his military service.  Because he lived in the colonies, he was never able to become a regular with the British army which rankled him.  He became further frustrated by his reliance on British brokers to purchase goods on his behalf and to sell his own.crops.  He became convinced that he was inferior goods were purchased for him and that he was not getting full price on his crops.  But much of this reliance on British brokers was the planters own fault; they relied heavily on the brokers for credit and Washington was no exception, frequently running up enormous debts while continuing to order extravagant goods.  Reading this was like reading about current events--clearly we didn't learn a lesson regarding credit from our forefathers  Curiously, the very war that had brought Washington so much fame (the French and Indian War) and also resulted in massive debt for the British, a burden the leaders decided to shift to their North American subjects which would eventually result in the "historic anomaly of a revolution inaugurated by affluent, conservative leaders."

Washington's dealings with his slaves and his feelings about slavery were also interesting.  On the one hand, he was a better than most slaveholder--he trained a lot of his slaves for trades, allowed them to fish, have gardens and keep their families together.  On the other hand, many of them lived under horrific conditions, he was strongly opposed to allowing blacks into the army during the revolution and he didn't free his own slaves until after Martha's death.  Washington, an exceedingly hard worker, grew frustrated with his slaves because he couldn't get them to work as hard as he thought they should.  The fact that there was no incentive for them to work harder during the long hours that they were working seemed to escape him.

The view I had of Washington being a great soldier was certainly altered by this book.  His first ever foray as the leader of a group of soldiers resulted in a massacre and, to be honest, a great many of his Revolutionary War decisions were even worse decisions.  And yet, Washington frequently made brilliant decisions and made excellent use of the spy network he developed.  He was also fearless in battle--never a leader to sit at the back of the battle and observe, Washington always rode straight into the fray, something that his soldiers found inspiring.  As a leader, Washington was often criticized during the war by his own officers and aides, members of Congress and the general populace.  To be fair, Washington was sometimes indecisive but he was also hampered throughout the war with undisciplined troops and a Congress that was unwilling to give Washington the necessary support.

 Fortunately for Washington, he was an even better politician than he was soldier.  He was masterful at getting what he wanted, often without even appearing to have worked to effect change, and he was not above stooping to less than scrupulous means to come out on top.  In that way, politics of the time were not much different that they are today.  When we think back on the founding fathers, we generally think of them as being of a like mind, which the single goal of creating this country.  But there were just as many differences of opinion, just as much backstabbing and just as much in-fighting 250 years ago as there is now.  Thomas Jefferson, for example, was not at all a fan of Washington's and even stayed away from Washington's memorial service after his death. 


I'm not one to keep a lot of the books that I have read - the classics, the books I truly loved, and the books I feel I'll refer back to in the future being the exception.  This is one of those.  I can't wait to pass it along to my dad and get his opinions.  Having been an American History teacher for 38 years, he may not have as much to learn from this one but I'm sure he'll enjoy it.  And now that I've read this one, I'm eager to pick up other biographies by Chernow.  Thanks TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour!

Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Wait Until Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin
272 pages
Published June 1998 by Simon Schuster Adult
Source: My dad loaned this one to me

Doris Kearns Goodwin grew up in a suburb of New York City in the years immediately following World War II. Unlike so many suburbs that sprouted up after the war, Rockville Centre had been incorporated more than 100 years earlier, giving it a feel that those rapidly rising suburbs could never hope to have. The houses in Kearns Goodwin’s neighborhood were “so close to one another that they functioned almost as a single home.”

 On the corner of the residential area lay a group of stores the likes of which is extraordinarily rare these days. There was a drugstore, a butcher shop, a soda shop, a delicatessen, and a barber shop/beauty parlor. Kearns Goodwin writes “the shopkeepers were as much a part of my daily life as the families who lived on my street.” The families didn’t just hand down clothes and toys from their own older children to the younger ones, they passed them from house to house.

New York, in those days, boasted three major league baseball teams. As they were throughout the city, team loyalties were divided in Kearns Goodwin’s neighborhood, loyalties that families carried with them from their boroughs of origin with the Bronx being the home of the Yankees, Manhattan the home of the Giants and Brooklyn being the home of the Dodgers. These loyalties were passed from generation to generation and Kearns Goodwin’s father passed to her his passion for the Dodgers, even teaching her to keep a score book when she was only six years old. She would spend her afternoons listening to the games on the family’s Philco radio and keeping score so that she could replay the entire game for her father after dinner that evening.

Kearns Goodwin intermingles the histories of the teams and players with stories of life in the suburbs from the late 1940’s through the 1950’s when life began to change—the corner stores were driven out of business and the neighbors began moving away. Kearns Goodwin writes of growing up watching the color barrier being broken in baseball when her beloved Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers, watching the McCarthy hearings on television, learning what to do in case of a nuclear attack, becoming aware of the growing civil rights movement, and of watching both the Dodgers and the Giants leave New York.

Kearns Goodwin writes beautifully. I felt as though I were sitting with her listening to her tell me of that long ago time. The book wasn’t entirely what I expected. I had imagined the book to have even more to do with her love of the Dodgers and her father and less to do with the rest of her life. Although she has included detailed accounts of many games, which I often skimmed over, overall Kearns Goodwin does a marvelous job of combining American history, baseball, and her own personal memoir in a book that is charming and nostalgic.

Okay, Mom--I know you're out there, lurking! You and Dad should really send me your impressions so I can let everyone know what you thought of this as well.

Hearts West: True Stories of Mail-Order Brides on the Frontier by Chris Enss

Hearts West: True Stories of Mail-Order Brides on the Frontier by Chris Enss
128 pages
Published by The Globe Pequot Press June 2005
Source: my mom bought it

I think I've mentioned this before--my parents are smart people. Both of them are always looking to expand their knowledge and are just as likely to pick up a work of non-fiction as a work of fiction. "Hearts West" is my mom's most recent read and she's been kind enough to send her review of this book.


If you need a change of pace from your regular reading, and if you are interested in learning just how strong women can be, I recommend HEARTS WEST--TRUE STORIES OF MAIL-ORDER BRIDES ON THE FRONTIER by Chris Enss (The Globe Pequot Press). The lure of gold in California and the lumber industry in Oregon and Washington had lured many men to the West. This, plus the Civil War casualties, left many women on the Eastern coast faced with the possibility of becoming spinsters. So when the papers became filled with ads such as "Wanted: A girl who will love, honest, true and not sour; a nice little cooing dove, and willing to work in flour" appeared in the papers, many young women responded. And many of the women also placed ads looking for a man. As the non-fiction book will show, not all of the matches were successful but many women left security to go to California and the Pacific area to help bring civility to the region. Men realized how much they need the woman's touch to provide gentility. The journey was not an easy one: either they traveled by stage across the country or they went by boat around the tip of South America. This was not for the "faint of heart:." But the West was settled and women provided the finishing touch. Some women landed in pleasant surroundings but often those who ended in Montana found life almost unbearably difficult. It is a very short book--just over 100 pages--but it will give you a respect for pioneer women and makes us realize how far we have come.

Reader Views has this to say about "Hearts West":
“Hearts West” provides a good mix of humor, disaster, sweetness, and sadness to give an overall picture of what our American ancestors went through, all for the sake of love and survival.

And Laurie, of Laurie's Wild West says: "I was hoping for a more in-depth history with a cohesive narrative. I wanted something with a little more substance. But if you're looking for a pleasant read that's a good introduction to how and why women would do such an insane thing as to agree to marry someone sight unseen and 3000 miles away from home, this is a good book to start with."

Thanks, Mom! I know this one is coming home with me when I visit this weekend!