For the second time ever, I’m reviewing a book that was a recent “#1 New York Times Best Seller”. That’s two more than I anticipated when I started doing reviews on this blog. This one, like the other one (The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles), will be pretty shallow. There are plenty of reviews out there from high-profile professionals and an author with two Pulitzers to his credit does not really need a lot of praise from me. McCullough’s forte was (he died Aug 7, 2022) biographies (his Pulitzer winners were Truman and John Adams), and The Pioneers tells the story of the white man’s take over of Ohio through streamlined biographies of the men who led it. They are not household names like Truman or Adams. A few, such as Putnam and Cutler, might be household names in select Ohio households, but most would be recognized only by fairly serious students of regional history. The book is not organized around individual biographies. The tale of early Northwest Territory settlement is told chronologically with the lives of key figures smoothly embedded and expanded forward or backward or both without much interference with the flow of time.

The Pioneers was recommended to me by multiple sources both in print and in person. The personal recommendations were made by people familiar with my interest in “local” history. The book is centered on Marietta, the first settlement in the territory. Despite it being on the far side of Ohio from where I live, it is a place I have visited many times. I recognized the names Putnam and Cutler and a few others but I knew just the basics about any of them. Instead of writing what I’ve already noted is unneeded praise, I’m just going to identify a few of the things this book taught me about my own extended neighborhood. 

I knew that Marietta had been named after Queen Marie Antoinette but I did not know why. From McCullough, I learned that the Revolutionary War veterans who named the town felt that she was more influential than anyone in getting France to support the revolutionaries.

In 1800, a square-rigged brig sailed from Marietta down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans. Less than a dozen years later, in 1811, the first steamboat on the river traveled from Pittsburgh to New  Orleans, with a stop in Marietta, in an astonishing fourteen days.

Even though the ordinance establishing the Northwest Territory seemed to rule it out, there was a proposal during the writing of the Ohio Constitution to permit slavery up to 35 years of age for males and 25 years of age for females. It failed by one vote.

There are many more, of course, and I believe that almost everything in The Pioneers is true. I had to slip that “almost” in there because I did discover one goof in the book. McCullough correctly writes that the Shawnee chief Tecumseh was killed in October 1813 by forces commanded by William Henry Harrison. He incorrectly states that this occurred “in Ohio’s northwestern corner”. The correct location is Ontario, Canada, at the Battle of the Thames.

I certainly don’t want to end this on a negative tone so I guess I’ll offer some praise after all. Anyone claiming to know anything at all about Cincinnati history should be able to tell how Mount Ida was changed to Mount Adams to honor John Quincy Adams following his trip to the city to dedicate the observatory there. McCullough tells of that trip and of Adams’ stop in Marietta during his return to Washington. A few residents of Marietta, including Ephraim Cutler, accompanied the former president from there to Pittsburgh. McCullough’s reporting provides a warm and personal view of Adams that I quite appreciated.

The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, David McCullough, Simon & Schuster (May 5, 2020), 6 x 9.25 inches, 452 pages, ISBN 978-1501168703
Available through Amazon.

The year Kevin Patrick spent “connecting with White’s Woods” may have been, as a blurb on the back of Near Woods says “In the spirit of Walden” but the resulting products are not the same. Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond was an experiment in self-sufficiency and the book he wrote some years later documented its success. His observations of nature and seasons were generally used to support some aspect of his minimalist lifestyle and not to educate the reader. I suppose some of Patrick’s observations are also made to reinforce some philosophical viewpoint, but he is a lot more subtle and he helps the reader share the raw observation as near as possible. Exactly one-half of this book’s pages are filled with some excellent photographs.

The word “spirit” also appears early in the book’s text. There Patrick says it is written in the spirit of other nature books and mentions, in addition to Thoreau, Emerson, Muir, Cousteau, and others. I believe what he means is the sharing of observations as accurately as possible and in a manner that promotes a real appreciation of what is being observed.

I’m not all that familiar with many of the authors named but did find myself making some comparisons with an author and book Patrick does not mention. In PrairieErth, William Least Heat Moon makes a deep dive into a single county in Kansas. In some sense, Patrick’s deep dive into the 250-acre White’s Woods is closer to Moon’s product than to Thoreau’s but that comparison is also far from perfect. By trying to look at that county from every possible angle, PrairieErth can sometimes seem like a writing class exercise. Near Woods looks at its subject from a lot of angles but not, I think, every angle. Just the interesting ones.

Of course, Near Woods is better looking than either Walden or PrairieErth. To some degree, that’s just something that color photographs do for a book. But these high-quality and well-chosen photos do more than make the book pretty. They are the “raw observations” mentioned in the first paragraph of this article. The book’s design incorporates the photos wonderfully and helps make reading the book a pleasure. Every lefthand page contains one or more photographs. Righthand pages are all text. Captions are in the extra wide inner margins of the text pages. It didn’t take me terribly long to recognize the beauty of this. Every page turn resulted in a new image that could be studied as quickly or slowly as desired before tackling a new page of text.

Sometimes there is a direct connection between text and photo and sometimes the connection is loose or non-existent. At one point a loose connection led me to believe that Kevin had cheated me or at least made a major goof. One of the more interesting finds in White’s Woods is a quad-trunk tulip tree. I really wanted to see this oddity as I read about it but the pictures next to the text were of something else entirely. A photo of the tulip tree in winter appears a page or two later and I realized that this is the image on the book’s back cover. The front cover shows this extraordinary tree in summer. I wasn’t cheated and the goof was all mine. Doh!

Photographs show the woods through one year of its life and the four seasons are used to organize the book. The woods’ history and possible future are mixed into the reporting of seasonal changes to provide some very pleasant lessons in natural and human history, horticulture, geography, and geology.

Near Woods: A Year in an Allegheny Forest, Kevin Patrick, Stackpole Books (May 1, 2023), 8.5 x 11 inches, 258 pages, ISBN 978-0811772211
Available through Amazon.

In the prologue of Philippines, Palau, and Guam, Matt Cohen says he considered but discarded the idea of organizing the book along the lines of the Philipines’ four ‘B’s — basketball, beauty contests, boxing, and beaches. I guess that was on my mind as I scanned it for the first time and found myself registering three ‘C’s — color, culture, and composition.

That last ‘C’, composition, is an obvious element of all photographs. Sometimes composing a photograph really means physically posing the subjects and I don’t doubt that there was some of that employed here. But I believe that most of Cohen’s composing consisted of positioning the camera and framing subjects he had limited, if any, control over. Mountains and buildings never move in response to a photographer’s instructions and the same is often true of people. In some cases, composing continues after the shutter clicks with selective cropping and such and Cohen seems to be adept at this as well. Given the book’s title, it is probably also obvious that culture has a big role. One of the attractions of these islands is the fact that their culture is different than that of mainland USA and one of Cohen’s goals was to document those differences. The bulk of his photos contain some aspect of island culture. That island culture is filled with color is pretty obvious too. The most common sources are brightly colored food and clothing but bright splashes are frequently supplied by the land itself.

Although it is not presented as such, the book really is a travelogue of sorts. Most if not all of the travel photos were taken during a single extended trip taken by the author and his wife in early 2023. After deciding not to use the four ‘B’s as organizing tools, Cohen went with a fairly straightforward geographical organization. The Philippines gets three chapters covering the three areas where they spent the most time. These are Manila, North Luzon, and Cebu/Bohol. Palau and Guam each get their own chapter. Each chapter begins with an actual postcard that the Cohens mailed to themselves from the region covered by the chapter accompanied by a brief description of the region. A map, with locations of interest marked, follows.

The chapters are then filled with pictures of people, places, and things accompanied by text ranging from a few words to a few paragraphs. Most questions I had when first encountering a photo were answered in nearby text. The places pictured range from mountains to markets. Things range from colorful new balloons offered for sale to an abandoned Japanese tank slowly being claimed by foliage. People include unnamed workers, islanders in native dress, a mayor, a governor, a president, and a would-be bride left at the altar.

Had I really wanted to include a fourth ‘C’ in my list of components, I guess I could have used cockfighting. I was surprised and maybe even a little shocked to come across two photos of fighting cocks in the book. The photos are not particularly graphic but they nonetheless gave me pause. At the end of that pause, I accepted them as part of the documentation of a culture and a reminder that not every aspect of every culture — most definitely including our own — is pleasant.

Philippines, Palau, and Guam includes an appendix where Cohen provides more technical information on the photos and even shares the itinerary of the trip that produced them. The book is self-published and at present the best way to learn how to acquire it is to contact the author through his website at MattCohenTravelPhotography.com. I will update this review when other information becomes available.

I know Terri Ryburn as the owner of historic Sprague’s Super Service in Normal, Illinois, and as a key ingredient in the Miles of Possibility Route 66 Conferences. I know the picture on the cover of the book from a copy hanging on the wall of the former gas station that Ryburn has turned into a Route 66 information center, gift shop, and photo op. I knew that was Terri seated on the fender with her dad and older brothers standing beside her because she told me when I spotted the photo on the wall. She may have told me that the photo contained only half of her total family but if she did I forgot. From reading No Crybabies Allowed I learned (or maybe relearned) that, while Terri was the youngest family member in this particular photo, she would be in the elder half of eight children after two more brothers and two sisters came along. None were crybabies.

I didn’t care much for the book’s title when I first saw it. I may have liked it even less after encountering it in the text for the first time. Terri’s brothers started a “boys only” club which she, of course, wanted to join. When being told that girls were not allowed brought on tears, they told her that there were no crybabies allowed either. I was still calibrating the book in my mind at that point and I seriously feared that I was in for many pages of the boys driving their sister to tears then laughing at her or her refusing to let tears actually form to prove she was no crybaby. By then I’d read enough to know better but I guess I just didn’t.

But it wasn’t long before an entirely different view of the title started to form. The Ryburns were poor. Often very poor. Often very very poor. They lived in an apartment when Terri was born but were soon living in a tent and carrying water from a neighboring house. It was quite a step up when her father built “a windowless 10′ x 16′ tarpaper shack”. I’ve read more than a few tales of people living in poverty. It often seems like the writers make lots of comparisons and toss around adjectives to stress just how poor someone is. That is infrequently the case here. Situations are described in enough detail that comparisons can easily be made but they are not forced. I don’t believe there is a single instance of “we were so poor that…”. I began to think of the book’s title as Terri’s instruction to herself. Tell your story accurately but don’t whine about it.

The family’s financial situation was not helped by Ray Ryburn’s wanderlust. Their frequent moves over the western two-thirds of the country were always instigated by Terri’s father, sometimes with apparent justification and sometimes not. A typical move had them downsizing their already meager belongings to fit into whatever timeworn vehicle was in their possession at the time then cramming themselves into what space was left while Hazel Ryburn counted her offspring as they boarded to make sure none were left behind. That seems a little like the Joads and I don’t doubt that there were times when the Ryburns in transit resembled people fleeing the dust bowl a couple of decades earlier.

No Crybabies Allowed is autobiographical. It covers the first dozen years of Terri Ryburn’s life in chronological order. However, it is done with anecdotes that, in many cases, could stand alone as short stories of life in the 1950s or of being a child in any decade. Some, like the neighborhood prayer meeting, are hilarious. Others are about as far from funny as it is possible to be.

While the Ryburns are living in San Francisco, a very young Terri is invited to a prayer meeting by a Spanish-speaking neighbor. As the adult women pray loudly with hands in the air, a non-Spanish-speaking Terri joins them. For the most part, she relies on copying the other voices with a syllable or so lag but she also tosses in a few phrases of her own (e.g., caballero dog) that she learned by watching Zorro on TV. Some of the emotional women had begun to cry but the tears stopped as they opened their eyes to look at the enthusiastic visitor. Ending the crying, she decided, was proof that her prayers were working.

For an example of something at the other end of the scale, the bonfire scene as they prepare to leave Illinois for California is one that sticks in my mind. The bonfire is the final step in downsizing. Useless furniture and other items not making the trip go into the fire. The boys make a game of tossing their few toy cars and trucks into the fire. The same fate has been decreed for Linda, Terri’s doll. Terri at first refuses but eventually tosses the doll into the flames while tears flow. Linda has been through some rough times including the brothers using her head for a ball just a few pages earlier. She’s in pretty bad shape and somehow considering the doll’s sorry condition makes the toss acceptable. Maybe it’s just rationalizing the inevitable but that’s not a bad skill to master when dealing with the inevitable crops up so often. Ryburn didn’t write the following and maybe she didn’t even think it but I did. Sobbing over a doll does not make you a crybaby.

Terri (actually Theressa, I learned) Ryburn and I are about the same age so some of her childhood experiences parallel my own. I remember learning to read with Dick and Jane and I remember ordering books from the Scholastic Book Club. I remember weak Kool-Aid and peanut butter sandwiches. I suppose the familiar bits that brought back my own memories are one reason I enjoyed this book. But Ryburn and I don’t remember these things exactly the same way. I don’t recall ever having a problem getting a few quarters for my Scholastic Book Club order and our Kool-Aid almost always had some sugar in it. And we never moved beyond a few miles and not at all during my school years. Maybe — and I feel a tiny tinge of guilt saying this — I enjoyed the book because it made me appreciate the circumstances of my childhood even more.

The book can be purchased from Amazon via the link at the end but a better way would be to get an autographed copy direct from Terri at Ryburn Place, 305 Pine St, Normal, IL. Terri would also be happy to mail copies. Call (309-585-4103) or email (ryburnplace66@gmail.com) to arrange.

No Crybabies Allowed: The Past as Told by Me, Dr. Terri Ryborn, Independently published (December 9, 2019), 7 x 10 inches, 405 pages, ISBN 978-1093973686
Available through Amazon.