Word: parkman
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...JOURNALS OF FRANCIS PARKMAN (718 pp.)-Edited by Mason Wade-Harper...
According to a Harvard classmate, Historian Francis Parkman suffered from "Injuns on the brain." Even on a tour of Switzerland, he sat on a rock "fancying myself again in the American woods with an Indian companion." His ailment, if such it was, gave strength and color to some of the most readable history written by any U.S. scholar (The Oregon Trail, The Conspiracy of Pontiac). Parkman was born a Boston Brahmin, but spent much of his life covering, on foot and on horseback, the wild Western ground he was to write about. His journals, in some respects more valuable than...
...Parkman was a puritan with a romantic streak, a social snob, a mentally and physically sick man who exalted the strenuous life and cracked under it. The Journals, which cover trips to New England, Canada, Florida, the Northwest and Europe, are as remarkable for what Parkman missed as they are for the precocious talent with which he described what interested him. He was only 17 when he made his first entries, but he had already decided to become an historian. At 23 he made his tour of the Oregon Trail, wrote his most famous (but far from his best) book...
...politically stormy period 1848-56. Five more volumes are to come. Bernard De Voto's Across the Wide Missouri covered another brief period, 1833-38, dealt lovingly, almost lyrically, with the American fur trade, the Rocky Mountain trappers and their breath-taking country. Mason Wade, biographer of Francis Parkman, did a good job in finding, and carefully editing, the historian's missing Journals...
Another chapter, entitled "Harvard and its Clubs," is successful through its collection of interesting material, but it suffers from Amory's common sin of omission: not probing deep enough. Through the book, and even in the murder story, the author fails to tell "why." We may know all about Parkman's slaying, but nothing is said of the reasons why Boston was so shaken. But the old anecdotes bear repetition, and the new ones are often as good; so the book is generally a success, if taken as a collection of interesting memorabilia...