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Sto caricando le informazioni... Fenwick Travers and the Years of Empire: An Entertainmentdi Raymond Saunders
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Appartiene alle SerieFenwick Travers (1)
"Fenwick Travers is a rollicking good-natured, and thoroughly unmilitary brawler who finds himself in the army as the result of pure happenstance. Above all else, he wants to establish himself comfortably in the world without undue exertion. Unexpectedly, he excels in his new career. While campaigning in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, Travers acquires a completely gratuitous reputation for valor in combat while hobnobbing with Teddy Roosevelt and Black Jack Pershing. After the war, he remains in Havana to conduct a cozy gunrunning operation." "After things begin to sour in Cuba, our hero is off to China to help put down the Boxer Rebellion. He battles howling fanatics, becomes aware of unlimited opportunities for looting and like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn before him, is soon off on a treasure hunt. Travers eventually returns to New York as a national hero, feted and honored by the nation's political and military leadership."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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 Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni...GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia: (3.58)
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"...a cheating, drunken, sycophantic libertine, a charlatan, an adulterous, cowardly, gluttonous blackguard, a bounder, a dastardly, caddish, philandering mountebank, a poltroon, a besotted, lecherous, scheming toady, a roué, a sybaritic rapscallion, a rakehell, and an All-American Hero!"
Except for that last part about All-American Hero, it sounds like there could even be a family connection between Saunders' character and MacDonald's...
Like Flashman, Fenwick's stories are supposedly based on his memoirs. The protagonist is a soldier, a good horseman, and very successful with the Ladies. Fenwick is a bastard (literally). He describes his father as an ex-soldier (an officer) who met and seduced his mother in 1874. We know that Flashy was in the United States in 1875. Is it possible that he was there a year earlier?
In any event, this story recounts Travers' adventures in the American army. Along the way, he meets great figures in American history. In this, the first book of a trilogy, Saunders writes of "Fenny's" formative years from growing up in southern Illinois and his subsequent service in the American Southwest and the Indian Wars. By luck and/or blackmail he ends up with an appointment as a cadet to West Point, which leads him beyond, to a leading role in the Spanish-American War in Cuba. Naturally, there is a pretty New York socialite and another pretty senorita involved.
There are a few differences between this book and those from GMF's Flashman series worth noting. First, and most importantly, Saunders isn't quite the writer Fraser was. Readers looking for the quality battle scenes that Frasier's books are known for will be very disappointed. Additionally, Saunders does not include the copious historic footnotes that George MacDonald Fraser liberally included in the Flashman novels.
However, Saunders' books are all around good fun (I read this one while on a trans-continental flight) and I recommend them for fans of Flashman (who can accept the differences and enjoy the similarities) as well as those interested in America's "imperial history" -- just make sure to take the "history lessons" with a grain of salt. (