Barbara J. OlexerRecensioni

A Father-Daughter Comedy Duo

Father to the Man is a true tragicomedy. Keith Kovacek is a big frog in a small pond, together with his identical twin, Kurt. The boys and their bosom buddy have a hilarious running feud with a cop that amuses them much more than it does the Law. The twins get into a fight with some movie types over a calliope, of all things. This is basically a coming-of-age story and after Kurt is killed in an accident, Keith has to grow up for both of them. He becomes a single father whose adorable little daughter brings him joy and laughter. Lindsey is a handful and she knows exactly how to manage her daddy. His maturity gets side-tracked but when Lindsey is an adolescent, Keith is forced to grow up along with her. This story is sad and funny and sweet and thoroughly enjoyable. Set in beautiful Ashland, Oregon – the cover is worth the price of the book. Reviewed by Ruby Doyle.

Murder by Accident is the second book in the series about a young teacher in an Oregon logging camp in the 1950s. This go-round Marge O’Connor has decided to buy a horse to ride in her spare time. An old man on a ranch near Bend has just the mount for her but while she’s there making the deal, he is murdered. It’s none of her business and she tries to keep her nose of out it but someone follows her home and throws a Molotov cocktail at her. That’s just too much and she enlists her rodeo rider cousin’s help in figuring out who wants to murder her and who killed the old rancher. It’s a great story with a surprise ending. Olexer does a good job of capturing the flavor of the fifties. The large print makes it easy to read, too. Reviewed by Ruby Doyle

Grandma Takes a Ride on a Flexible Flyer

Remember Flexible Flyer sleds? When I was a kid (a long, long time ago), they gave us hours and hours of delight every winter. Here’s a story, Death Takes a Flyer, in which one is used to transport a murdered grandmother. Marge O’Connor is a very young school teacher in a remote logging camp in the Blue Mts. of Oregon. In a creepy middle of the night scene, she discovers the body on the sled. Then two of her pupils find another body and it begins to look as if no one is safe in the little community. Trapped by a snowstorm that cuts them off from outside aid, Marge and her neighbors set about finding the villain. The book is set in the fifties and Olexer is adept at reproducing the dialog and ambiance of the time. Get cozy in front of the fireplace and enjoy a nostalgic look back (over your shoulder). Reviewed by Ruby Doyle

“At Home and Abroad: Prize-winning Stories” edited by Barbara J. Olexer. This anthology of stories is entertaining and instructive. Most are from writers in the U.S. but some are from other countries: India, New Zealand, Canada, and others. The book is the culmination of a contest (that has since been discontinued, much to my disappointment). There are essays, memoirs, and short stories of all kinds,

Some of the pieces are hilarious: “Every Man Wants a Yellow Dump Truck;” some are sad: “Ghosts of Cienfuegos;” and some are pure fantasy: “Forever Twelve.” But they all have one thing in common – they are good. The authors are from many different places and many different walks of life but they all turn out interesting and entertaining stories. There are more than three hundred pages of great reading between these covers.

This is a short course in the development of American culture. The boys who grew up to be president came from all classes from the fabulously wealthy to the incredibly poor. Some came from cities but most were from farms or farm towns. With few exceptions they wanted good educations. Many of these young men worked their way through college and some underwent the most exacting privations to gratify that wish.

War interrupted the education of some. James Monroe fought under George Washington and Gen. William Alexander (aka Lord Stirling) but military reorganization cast him adrift right in the middle of the Revolutionary War and he returned to Virginia to study law under Thomas Jefferson. Bill Clinton got so caught up in and confused by the draft laws during the Vietnam War that he left Oxford without taking his degree when he was a Fulbright Scholar.

A number of the young men who would one day be president taught school. James Garfield was hired to teach a rural one-room school that the older boys delighted in breaking up and sending the teacher to look for other employment. In spite of their best efforts, including an attempt to brain him with a length of stove wood, Garfield tamed the rowdies and brought order to his classroom.

The chapter on Ulysses S. Grant is especially poignant. Olexer tells us the names of the famous Civil War officers who were at West Point when he was. She also gives details of Grant’s Mexican War career. It is somewhat eerie to read about Grant and Pierre G.T. Beauregard creeping up on an adobe house together as Robert E. Lee and George McClellan watched.

Only a few of these young men traveled to any great extent in their first twenty-five years (each essay concludes at the 25th birthday). John Quincy Adams did travel widely in Europe and at the age of fourteen went to Russia as secretary to the first U.S. Minister to the Court of Catherine the Great. Franklin Delano Roosevelt went to Europe eight times between the ages of two and fifteen.

All in all, Olexer has done an exemplary job of delineating the presidents’ educations. I wish now for a companion volume of brief essays on the careers of these men to make it easy to see what kind of man each turned out to be (Who remembers the presidencies of, for instance, Martin Van Buren and Rutherford B. Hayes?). Perhaps such a volume would also show how each one’s education affected his later life.

Fossil Rocks is a modern western set in the small town of Fossil, Oregon. The protagonist, Wesley Callaghan, is cast in the heroic mold of the late Chris LeDoux – he’s a singer/songwriter, a ranch hand, and a bronco buster. Yelisa MacKenzie is the owner and operator of a mercury mine. When she and Wesley meet, we find out “Whatcha Gonna Do with a Cowboy” when he don’t saddle up and ride away. This is action, adventure, and sweet love, all tangled up together. It’s one great read!

The Enslavement of the American Indian in Colonial Times challenges the current perceptions of race relations in America. Europeans rampaged through the East Coast tribes from Newfoundland to Florida, displacing, enslaving, and killing the Indian people. The colonists needed two things in order to prosper: land and labor. They saw the Indians as supplying both. Slavery played an important part in early colonial history in the North as well as in the South.

The Pequots were the first to experience the English colonists’ policy of enslavement. They were nearby and had recently been split by an internal power struggle; therefore they were relatively few and vulnerable. The colonists cloaked their rapacity in spurious motives of religion and self-protection and struck the unprepared Pequots. They expected that the sale of slaves would pay for the war, provide the labor they needed on their farms, and open up all the Pequot lands for English settlement.

Olexer does a good job of reporting the Pequot War, King Phillip’s War, and the numerous Indian wars that followed. At times my reading was impeded because I kept shaking my head, thinking, “This is amazing, why didn’t I ever hear about the Indian slave trade before?” One special feature of the book that I liked is that she gives a brief (very brief) account of the many tribes that are still extant. A lot of them are prospering and some are flourishing. The Pequots, for instance, after being reduced to three survivors on their reservation, have recovered sufficiently to have donated fifty million dollars to the new National Museum of the American Indian.

Remember Billy Barty and how he used to kick the members of Spike Jones' band in the shin when they irritated him? As a working private investigator who is 26 ½ inches tall, Wrin Veersil abhors being called "cute," so don't do it, however cute you think she is. She probably won't kick you in the shin but you'd still be advised not to irritate her. Her assistant is a former Marine, Claude Newhouse. Claude is six-foot-five and not a man to be trifled with.
"If You Can't Trust Your Uncle Sam" is set in Washington, D.C. and the Tulelake Basin at the foot of Mt. Shasta in northern California and southern Oregon. The cover photo of Mt. Shasta is worth the price of the book. It is truly gorgeous!
The storyline involves the murder/suicide of an FBI agent and his family that Wrin is hired to investigate. The trail leads west and Wrin finds herself in the middle of a huge mess that the government made when it shut off the water that the
local farmers need to irrigate their crops. The whole region is slowly dying, which muddies the waters, so to speak, in Wrin's investigations.
Although the situation is tragic, the author manages to find quite a bit of fun as Wrin and Claude close in on a cold-blooded killer.

They Lived Ever After. For a first novel, this is remarkably polished. It’s about three main characters, two women and a man, who appear in six earthly incarnations. There are five parts, almost novelettes, tied together with a prologue and an epilogue.

Part I is a fantasy set in Atlantis, complete with crystal-powered flying machines, battles with marauding dinosaurs, and a class of slaves, part-human and part-animal. Genetic researchers take warning.

If fantasy isn’t your bag, Part II is set in Africa several thousand years ago. The protagonist, an engaging young man called Ntare, is Black. He is a warrior by necessity but a family man by choice. His world is destroyed by Arab raiders and he sets out to wreak vengeance on his enemies.

Part III just misses being a bodice ripper. Our three have incarnated in the Caribbean during the heyday of the pirates. In an almost believable twist, one of them is a female pirate captain who is enamoured of a doctor who is emigrating from England to America. The pirates are ferocious, the women are beautifully seductive, and it’s all a lot of fun.

Our trio next meet in the Rocky Mountains. One of the women incarnates as a Black mountain man, the man as a Crow Indian woman, and the other woman as their son. This is mostly a domestic tale, although there are a couple of skirmishes with the Blackfoot. The life of the Indians is beautifully evoked.

World War II and the internment of the Japanese-Americans form the backdrop for Part V. This is a love story – boy meets girl, boy is separated from girl, boy and girl are reunited. Richard is a singer and Sheila is a dancer so it’s not hard to imagine this story on AMC as a musical.

All in all, this book is a lot of fun to read. You get the feeling that a great deal of research went into the writing but also that the author had a very good time writing it.

An enlightening look at an oft-ignored subject!

(Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book for review at the author's invitation.)

In THE ENSLAVEMENT OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN IN COLONIAL TIMES, author Barbara J. Olexer examines the subject of American Indian slavery. While she does trace the roots of American Indian slavery back as far as 1013, her discussion primarily focuses on the colonial period, particularly the 1600s and 1700s. THE ENSLAVEMENT OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN... offers an illuminating look at what, sadly, is a little-known subject. Given the dearth of books on this topic, Ms. Olexer's tome makes a welcome addition to the existing literature.

Starting with the Norsemen's "discovery" of America in the tenth century, THE ENSLAVEMENT OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN... explores the topic of American Indian slavery. What started as the kidnappings of individual American Indians eventually escalated into an American Indian slave trade, albeit on a smaller scale than the African slave trade. The trade reached its height during the 17th and 18th centuries, but had largely ceased by the 1780s. The reasons for the American Indian slave trade were many. Commonly, colonists instigated warfare between already unfriendly tribes, as a means of weakening their enemies as well as obtaining American Indian slaves "legally." Additionally, trading in American Indian slaves was another tool with which to rob the Indians of their land. American Indians were often tricked into slavery, ambushed by unscrupulous colonists, or simply kidnapped and "exported." By the end of the Revolutionary War, however, American Indian populations were decimated to such a degree that slavery was no longer necessary. Nor was it profitable; Africans were more plentiful and made for more obedient and resilient slaves.

THE ENSLAVEMENT OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN... covers both the scale of and the reasons underlying the American Indian slave trade. The book is divided into eleven chapters: It Began as Kidnapping; The Pilgrims and the Pequots; King Philip's War; The French in Canada; The English and the Westo; The Traders and the Neophytes; The Tuscarora and Yamassee Wars; The End of the Trade in Carolina; The French in Louisiana; The French and the Natchez; and Conclusion.

As you can see from the chapter titles, Ms. Olexer looks at the French as well as the English settlers, and also examines Spanish-Indian relations. A number of American Indian groups make an appearance, including the Huron, Eskimo, Pequot, Narragansett, Saconnet, Nipmuc, Mohegan, Iroquois, Seneca, Tuscarora, Westo, Powhatan, Catawba, Chowan, Yamassee, Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Waccamaw, Natchez, Sauk and Fox tribes, as well as the Wampanoag Federation and the Five Nations. Geographically, the discussion concentrates on the north- and south-east of the United States. Several chapters are devoted to the Carolina region in particular.

Although schools and scholars are finally beginning to acknowledge our forbearers' brutal treatment of the Americas' original inhabitants, the subject of American Indian slavery still merits little attention. Indeed, I don't recall learning of the topic at all during elementary, junior, or high school. Unfortunately, few books exist that tackle this significant topic. Barbara Olexer's THE ENSLAVEMENT OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN... helps to fill this void, and makes a great addition to the history buff's bookshelf. It's a must-read for anyone interested in the American Indian experience or the history of slavery. An added bonus: the author donates a portion of the proceeds to the National Museum of the American Indian.

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