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This is William Bradford's point of view, and the information in it is amazing. If you are into history, then it doesn't get any better than this. Its not very often that you have the opportunity to see events through someone elses eyes, and this does it.
Bradford is an engaging writer whose prose isn't hard to understand. In places his understatement about the death and hardship faced almost constantly is even amusing. Nothing of the kind of challenges that the Leyden pilgrims faced in Massachusetts will seem familiar to a modern reader. Just the same, the fact that it all happened is fascinating. One can almost imagine being there, looking over the decks of the Mayflower and facing all that December gray and wilderness and wondering what you were doing coming here. Told in first person it reads like an adventure as much as a history.
The pilgrims here are also quite human and not at all the diorama characters of a first graders Thanksgiving craft project. They face social challenges and the horrors of death and disease. Attacks by natives actually occured on occasion. The dream of a sort of providence is one that proves difficult in the real world. Bradford mourns the loss of these ideals and the people who imported them. There's something a little sad in his later passages, whether it be age or a truly lost paradise one never really knows. But what Bradford imagined as a sort of religious nirvana clearly doesn't pan out in the end. Nevertheless it is well worth the journey. I highly recommend a read of this American classic.
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looked up the novel. I think the movie might be a little better,
but the book is definitely worth reading. It's not very long and actually can be read in one sitting. It's funny, sometimes obscene, sometimes cynical, wise, and realistic. The main character is a "dog robber" during World World II; he is a general's aide, and is supposed to get the general everything he wants. Hence, he supposedly would rob everyone he could, including dogs. He is a detached and somewhat cynical man, who, while stationed in England, meets and falls in love with the Emily of the title ("Americanization" is not such a noble thing; it refers to deprived English girls, made poor by the war, who do what they must to survive. This means attaching themselves to the much richer Americans.) Mostly the book is about war and love. It has a very cynical view of war and soldiering. It's message: only love can conquer the horrible. A book that is half comedy and half horror, but wholly entertaining.
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The other subject of Mud on the Stars was racism, but a racism defined in multicolored, economic terms. That too was part of the education of the generation which fought a great war and eventually presided over the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1950's and '60s.
Huie drew on his experiences as a j! ! ournalist, particularly in the South, but his observations about government, corporations, and race were universal. For present, at least until I am proven wrong, I'd say it is timeless; well worth a quick reading.
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