News of the World

This is a departure from my usual reading fare both in terms of content and setting. I am so happy that I tried something different. The story is very interesting and evocative and the writing strikes just the right balance of descriptive and sparse. I had one initial quibble with the writing, but I soon got over it. The author elects to not use quotation marks. At first, I could not figure out who was speaking or if I was even reading dialogue at all. It is the mark of a great story teller that after a couple of chapters I was not aware of the missing quotation marks. I fell into the rhythm and the story and followed along just fine. News of the World takes place in post-civil war Texas beginning in 1870. Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, veteran of two wars, is in his early 70's and is a widow. He travels around Texas reading the news from various papers. He is offered a $50 gold piece to return a 10 year old girl to her aunt and uncle in San Antonio. Four years prior, some Kiowa Indians killed her family, kidnapped her, and raised her as their own. Johanna is of German heritage but does not initially remember any German or English. She knows only her Kiowa family and their ways. Captain Kidd needs the money and reluctantly agrees to help. The story follows their harrowing journey from Wichita Falls to San Antonio. They deal with various threats, including some men who want to buy Johanna and make her a prostitute. The Captain also tries to teach her English and more civilized ways so that she will fit in when she returns home. In addition, he struggles with the morality of returning her to "family" she does not know when she clearly wants to be Kiowa. Johanna comes to respect and love the Captain and refers to him as grandpa in her Kiowa language. This story is so sad and beautiful. I was pulled in and really cared about what happened to Johanna and the Captain. I would not be surprised if this is made into a movie, though I think that people should just read the book! In addition to enjoying a gorgeous story, I learned a lot about Texas and the western United States after the Civil War. I was most interested to learn that children were captured and adopted by various Native American tribes. The author states that they appeared to become completely Indian and that they did not readjust when returned to family. There were often tragic consequences. This piques my interest to learn more. News of the World provides the three main things I look for in a great book: interesting story, skilled writing, and exposure to new information.

This was a very detailed step-back-in-time story about the relationship between a former captain and a young captive, newly freed from the Kiowa tribe. I absolutely felt like I was present in the time period. I'm Texan, and the author did a wonderful job painting the scenes, relating the various cultures, and even developing the various villains the pair encountered. Both main characters were very well fleshed out. I liked her writing style, as well. It was difficult to get into the story. Even though I liked the characters, I had a hard time wanting to read every single word. A lot of it was a telling of just what they were doing. I really enjoyed the tidbits revealed from the newspapers he carried and read to the townsfolk in the towns they traveled to. Very cool. It's a decent book that, for me, had a very satisfying ending.

Texas 1870. Seventy-one year old Civil War vet, Captain Kidd, agrees to return Johanna, a 10 year old girl and captive of the Kiowas for the past four years, to her relatives living near San Antonio. The money is good, though there are some negatives. The journey will be 400 miles and will take 3-4 weeks, the route is extremely dangerous, and the girl wants to return to her Kiowa family. And she no longer understands nor speaks English. There is another upside though. The Captain will have opportunities along the way to do his normal work - reading the news to townspeople. Not from local newspapers, so nothing about bake sales, births, deaths, or worst of all, Texas politics. No, the Captain's niche is world news: "News all the way from France. Nobody knew anything about the Franco-Prussian @War but all were jointly amazed by information that had come across the Atlantic to them, here in North Texas, alongside the flooding Red River. They had no idea how it had got here, through what strange lands it had traveled......He read from the Philadelphia Inquirer of Dr. Schliemann's search for windy Troy in Turkey. He read of the telegraph wires from Britain to India, an article in the Calcutta Times forwarded to the London Daily Telegraph....he read of the unfortunate Hansa crushed on the pack ice of the North Pole....This was proving the most popular as he could see by the small gestures of the audience; they bent forward, they fixed their eyes upon him to hear of undiscovered lands in the kingdoms of ice, fabulous beasts, perils overcome, snow people in furry suits." On the trail the Captain and Johanna have rather casual eating arrangements. One night, over barbecue, the Captain notices that she has sauce up to her wrists. Realizing that they will make stops in small towns like Dallas along the way and that they will be eating in a restaurant, the Captain begins lessons on the proper use of knife and fork. Johanna proves to be more clumsy than expected but the Captain feels some progress was made - until Johanna turns and throws her fork into a box stall. A funny scene but author Paulette Jiles morphs it into something else in the very next paragraph. "The Captain's shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch under his black formal coat. He was suddenly overwhelmed with pity for her. Torn from her parents, adopted by a strange culture, given new parents, then sold for a few blankets and some old silverware, now sent to stranger after stranger, crushed into peculiar clothing, surrounded by people of an unknown language and an unknown culture, and now she could not even eat her food without having to use outlandish instruments....He saw her look down at her stained hands and there were tears on her cheeks." There are so many great scenes like the ones mentioned above. It is heart-warming for the reader to witness how the bond between these two slowly develops. But this is 1870's Texas and violence can erupt anywhere, anytime. And so there is a good deal of tension woven throughout the story. Of course, Johanna runs away once or twice, and in the early days the Captain is hesitant to turn his back on her. The tension really amps up though on the trail when coming upon others - the possibilities are endless - outlaws, fellow travelers, soldiers, raiders, vigilantes, Comanche, Kiowa. Such encounters are infrequent but any one of them could have a fatal ending. The girl, the horses, even the Captain can sense, and sometimes smell, the unseen presence of others hidden only a few miles away..... It's a great story, expertly told. A book to be treasured and re-read. This is my first Jiles, and before I had finished it, I added three others by her to my reading list. "News of the World" is short-listed (five books are finalists) for this year's National Book Award which will be announced in November 2016. Highly recommended.

I loved this book. I bought 4 copies of this book as gifts before I read it, all just based on word-of-mouth. Now that I have read the book, I am very happy to have bought those books. The book is well written in a style that is a bit different but well-suited to the story. The time is the years after the Civil War and during reconstruction. The place is Texas. We have only two main characters: Captain Kydd and Johanna. Captain Kydd is in his 60’s and a character that I will remember. He is a widowed war veteran who travels through smaller towns in north and central Texas. Traveling in Texas at that time was dangerous and hard. He purchases newspapers from far-away places like New York, London, Chicago and Philadelphia and reads articles to audiences for a dime a piece. The set-up was fascinating and well described. (I loved how he had to assess his audiences to decide which articles to read. The image of an audience in frontier Texas listening to a newspaper article about people in Philadelphia ice skating is surprising to me, but believable in this author’s hands.) The story begins when Captain Kydd agrees to transport a young girl from north Texas to a small town near San Antonio. Johanna had been kidnapped by the Kiowa Indians who killed the rest of her immediate family in the raid. If you have read about Cynthia Parker or other such kidnapped children, you already know that the return of these children is difficult. Ms. Jiles does a very fine job of integrating those issues into her story. There are villains and heroes. Good people and bad people and people in between. Ms. Jiles never sacrifices the authenticity of her story to situations that feel overly contrived or caricatures of bad guys instead of real villains. Because the story has drama instead of melodrama, it retains an aura of truth that makes the reader care about it. This is a book group book. This is a book that will stay with me. I cared about the people and the story.

This is a fairly brief and quite simple narrative of an elderly man who in the late nineteenth century agrees to return a ten-year-old girl who had been a captive of the Kiowa for six years to the remnants of her family after she had been redeemed by the Indian Agent. And, please, I do not mean "simple" as a pejorative. "Simple" can be beautiful when it is handled as skillfully as it is here. I was not at all surprised to learn that the novelist was also a poet. The Captain, the elderly man, has led a full life. He has taken part in wars, run a business, had a happy marriage, and raised two daughters. Now he spends his time and supports himself by traveling from town to frontier town in Texas reading aloud excerpts from national and foreign newspapers to townspeople, farmers, homesteaders, etc. hungry for some larger view of the world than their circumscribed existence provides. Above all else he is honorable. The girl Johanna, on the other hand, has known just two very limited existences: for four years she was a part of one of those incredibly hard-working farms and then for six she led the nomadic existence of the Kiowa, who owned nothing, desired nothing but the now, and truly valued only bravery. And whether it is innate or learned from the Kiowa, Johanna is brave--brave enough to lose all that she knew (twice) and still to go on. So this is the story of their journey together through all of the hazards of the frontier. He has given his word to return her; she would rather die than go back. There are no startling twists and turns to this narrative. There is just the story of their facing repeated dangers together, their clashes because of their differing goals, and their coming each to respect and value the other. This is a kind of story that would be easy to under-value (simple story, short book, etc.) If you think about it a bit, however, I believe you would agree that it is a richer story than you might at first believe. This book will probably not change the way you view the world. It might not be earth-shaking, but it is beautifully written, and reading it is an enriching experience. I do recommend it to all.

A page turner. Historical fiction is my thing. I want to be transported, and Jiles' descriptions of life on the roads of America after the Civil War (traveling by wagon from Missouri to So. Texas) is captivating. I am no authority, but Jiles' brings together a sense of time and place that makes the geography, topology, economics, and the fractured elements of what it is to be an America after the Civil War come alive. I must give her extra credit that she was able to build such a believable and compelling story, while at the same time, with subtly and the necessity born of the story, to seamlessly weave an intricate tapestry that reminded and revealed the complex and far reaching diversity upon which our nation has been woven. We meet Black (-African-American), White, Scottish, German, Dutch, Spanish, Mexican, plus all the many tribes and traditions of the Native Americans, on the playing field of a raw, wide country less than 100 years young, and Jiles is able to integrate all of it and make it come alive in this short novel. She writes with confidence as she captures a wide variety of regional languages and their various degrees of education, as well as the ability and skill to describe behavior, technology, politics, ideologies, behavior and mannerism, along with the commerce of the day, through her own vivid, rich and transporting prose. (At times her writing made me think of Annie Proulx). I must admit just a few, tiny distractions: The fact that her protagonist was named Captain Kidd was a distraction, because this is not the famous Captain Kidd, the mariner who was executed for Piracy, but a man named Kidd who happened to rise to the status of Captain in the Civil War. However, using this name made me look for links to the pirate that I do not think were intentional. I also thought she gave short shrift to the "rescue" (trying not to give too much away): it seemed just a bit to easy. And, finally, I was very surprised at how expensive his readings were: $0.10 cents in 1870, seems like a lot when you think that 60+ years later, in 1930-35 (granted these are the years of the Great Depression, but), you could see a "moving picture" at the cinema for between $0.10- $0.25cents. She did so much research on this book, that I am sure this was based on fact too-- but it would have helped to give this price a greater context (e.g. I would have thought it would cost a few pennies or a nickle -- or how much did a newspaper, a book, a beer at a saloon cost? What was the price of his reading relative to other forms of entertainment? ) NEVERTHELESS, n the end, those 3 distractions did not derail me from the visceral enjoyment and high quality of her writing, including the detailed descriptions of the fully believable 10 year old freed-captive, Johanna, and the inner world of the Captain's thinking: from his small gestures towards his small companion, to the way he walked in the world with a conflicted sense of integrity, irritability and compassion. This was my first time reading Ms. Jiles' writing, and I am about to purchase her book, The COLOR OF LIGHTNING. FYI: I kept seeing Jeff Bridges as the Captain (Paulette, you must send him the book? Surely he will see this as a great role, and option it for a film!!!).

In writing a mediocre review, I realize I'm spitting in the wind, but I'm a bit taken aback by all the glowing reviews this book has received from both literary (i.e., The New York Times) and popular (i.e., Amazon reviews) critics alike. I suspect that the praise results from the book's gratifying conclusion. However, I found most of the book flat and a bit tedious, and it was only as the book approached its conclusion that it really began to hold my attention. Much of it described Texas geography (yawn) and the political situation there in the aftermath of the Civil War. While the latter topic was of some interest, it assumed some knowledge that I utterly lack. Moreover, while the topic may be of interest to some people, the writing style was extremely (and, I believe, intentionally) flat, which made it rough or even slow going. The conclusion actually made the book worth it, but it's really little more than a short story (OK, a long short story or perhaps a "novella", but a short story nonetheless). Perhaps more important, I was taken aback by the fact that this book contained two GLARING errors that once again demonstrate how so few books are edited, particularly when they are written by an established author like Ms. Jiles. At the very beginning of the book, a chapter starts with all capital letters in which the hero -- known mostly as "The Captain" -- is referred to as "THE CAPTION". I read it twice before I realized it was a typo. Later on in the book, The Captain makes a reference to Malaysia, which puzzled me because I was under the impression that Malaysia didn't exist until the 20th Century. I looked it up and I was right -- the 1960s, to be precise. I really don't go looking for errors in books; as I age, I am a much less careful reader, at least when it's for pleasure. However, these two errors jumped off the page and whacked me upside the head, and it's appalling. As I've said before, no publisher can guarantee that I'll enjoy a book, but it should at least take reasonable steps to make it correct.

I was entranced by the life & times Paulette Jiles writes about in News of the World... . First, coz I know next to nothing re: Texas after the War Between the States (Civil); at the last bell of the Indian Wars; how those little towns a day's ride from each other were populated; nothing of East Texas landscape nor native tribes & the many children captured & reclaimed. This is a tender tale of a man long in years, with an upright reputation, one of the few who not only can read, he knows how to read aloud & capture an audience's attention, which is how he earns his keep: putting up posters when he first gets into town after securing a public room for an evening's entertainment when he will read from what various newspapers he can purchase along the way, charging a dime a person, in a mostly illiterate world. Captain Kydd once was a soldier in the 1812 War, then married with children & now a bereft widower with grandchildren far away, once a newspaper man now forbidden to print by the state government, & that is why he reads the news of the world to the people in his world, which can sometimes turn angry so raw are the post-War feelings. Into his itinerant life comes a 10 year old girl whose parents were slaughtered by a roving band of Kiowas who took her to raise for 4 long years until a roving band of white men captured her back some 200 miles northwest of where her last remaining relatives were known to live. Capt. Kydd is charged with transporting this feral child back to her unsuspecting kin, & News of the World is the odyssey of these unlikely travelers getting used to each other, saving each other's hide & finally making it to the farm of a couple who were unfit to raise a pig. Paulette Jiles' writing voice takes a little getting used to -- no quotation marks -- yet once you've slowed down enough from our racing jive of today, you'll start hearing cadence & character with enough rustle & hustle to break your heart as often as it warms, adding flavor to a fine yarn. I can see why News of the World was a Finalist for a National Book Award; not why it wasn't chosen! Engaging, enlightening & engrossing, I feel as if I too have trekked that long ago & far away adventure with Capt. Kydd & Johanna, Fancy the roan packhorse pulling the Curative Waters spring wagon & Pasha the bay saddlehorse amid the passing bandits & militiamen, Kiowas & federal army units, all along that long & winding trail, carrying the News of the World with them. Quite simply an exquisite read.