Sunday, March 02, 2008

thirteen moons by Charles Frazier

A business colleague suggested that I read thirteen moons by Charles Frazier. I have just finished reading the book. It was a great read. While it is fiction, it details how our mountains likely existed prior to the massive human habitation.

Will Cooper was sent away by his family at the age of 12, with a horse, a map and a key. He grew up fast and was accepted into the Indian family, as a bound boy. He had many great adventures and was loyal to the end to the "family" that accepted him. While you experience his life from the age of 12 until the end of his like, the book itself is a good read.

I am not a huge fiction reader, the only fiction that I am loyal to has been John Grisham and now Vince Flynn. I am an active non-fiction reader, typically reading a minimum of two books a month while using my many trips south to read 5 - 6 books over the course of a week or two.

My business colleague had recommended "The Kite Runner", which I read over the summer and now thirteen moons. I believe that when he recommends more titles in the future, I will listen because both of his recommendations have been most excellent.


There were a couple of funnies that I enjoyed from the author's fictional account.

The one that was especially amusing is where the main character was with Davy Crockett in a lounge in Washington, D.C. Crockett noted that there had been a withering attack on him in one of the morning papers. I asked if that sort of thing bothered him, for back then it would have bothered me a great deal. Crockett said, Oh, I'm a big target and easy to hit, so there's no honor in it. Every newspaper jackass with a pen and a half an hour of unclaimed times gets to take a shot.

Will Cooper and his real personality were never known by the media and observers that didn't really know him. He was misunderstood and a target of tabloid type media. He was given a magazine article by Senator Calhoun about him and in the fictional account he began reading it and the story started out pleasantly enough.....But then the article turned to a catalog of varied rumor and misinformed shit-ass opinion in regard to me. I was portrayed as a deep mystery, existing only to be solved by the writer. Local folks had been scrounged up to say all kinds of things about me, and since the tales had been collected at considerable effort on the writer's part, they were thus presented reverently as entire possible facts. And the various possibilities were arranged in descending order.

Some things never change, in real life and in the fictional accounts of peoples public lives.

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