Love's Children

Book Description

As the wife of a frequently absent slaveholder and public figure, Anna Matilda Page King (1798-1859) was the de facto head of their Sea Island plantation. This volume collects more than 150 letters to her husband, children, parents, and others. Conveying the substance of everyday life as they chronicle King's ongoing struggles to put food on the table, nurse her "family black and white," and keep faith with a disappointing husband, the letters offer an absorbing firsthand account of antebellum coastal Georgia life. Anna Matilda Page was reared with the expectation that she would marry a planter, have children, and tend to her family's domestic affairs. Untypically, she was also schooled by her father in all aspects of plantation management, from seed cultivation to building construction. That grounding would serve her well. By 1842 her husband's properties were seized, owing to debts amassed from crop failures, economic downturns, and extensive investments in land, enslaved workers, and the development of the nearby port town of Brunswick. Anna and her family were sustained, however, by Retreat, the St. Simons Island property left to her in trust by her father. With the labor of fifty bondpeople and "their increase" she was to strive, with little aid from her husband, to keep the plantation solvent. A valuable record of King's many roles, from accountant to mother, from doctor to horticulturist, the letters also reveal much about her relationship with, and attitudes toward, her enslaved workers. Historians have yet to fully understand the lives of plantation mistresses left on their own by husbands pursuing political and other professional careers. Anna Matilda Page King's letters give us insight into one such woman who reluctantly entered, but nonetheless excelled in, the male domains of business and agriculture.

Casanova: The Man Who Really Loved Women

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An Extraordinary Man Through Ordinary Glasses
Excellent Primer on Giacomo Casanova.
Insightful Analysis of a Misunderstood Man
Interesting and Poetic but not Compelling
Hypnotic and Masterful!

Casanova: The Man Who Really Loved Women
Lydia Flem
Manufacturer: Noonday Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0374525579

Amazon.com

It seems that Giovanni Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) wasn't really a Casanova after all ... or, rather, not according to the contemporary definition of the word. Belgian psychoanalyst Lydia Flem presents a bold new interpretation of Casanova's life as seen through his 12-volume History of My Life (incredibly, it's incomplete), excerpts from which are sprinkled liberally throughout the text of her book Casanova. Yes, it's true, the man dedicated his life to the pursuit of happiness, but he also once declared that "to be happy, it seems to me one needs only a library." And far from being a serial seducer who conquered women only to abandon them, he treated women as intellectual equals, was almost never the one to initiate a breakup, and remained friends with many of his former lovers. Flem's insights into Casanova's life--and his memories of that life--are delivered in lively prose that moves quickly without skimping on intelligence. --Ron Hogan

Book Description

A deliciously entertaining account of Casanova's adventures and many accomplishments.

In this fascinating interpretation of Casanova's notorious History of My Life, Lydia Flem discerns the pattern that enabled a sickly Venetian baby to become the audacious, gallant Casanova, the man who flung himself into experience without asking for anything in return but that most scandalous of all rewards--pleasure. By interspersing her own witty narrative with quotations from the most entertaining and apt passages from Casanova's memoirs, Flem shows how he realized that "real happiness stems from the recollection of pleasure."

New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Customer Reviews:

An Extraordinary Man Through Ordinary Glasses.......2006-06-29

The author's praise of Casanova as an extraordinary man is belied by a rather ordinary Freudian analysis to which he is subjected. Of course, Casanova's biography is understandably irresistible to Freudian analysts, but any such analysis of this giant individual and champion individualist is necessarily reductive. The book is also non-chronological and the jumps in time are at times annoying, for all that a chronology is provided at the beginning of the book. I wished there were more quotes from Casanova's autobiography. I wished to see the passage of such a life unfold before me in its natural progression. I then realized that Casanova was such an incredible being that I wanted him to tell his own story. Realizing I was likely reading the wrong book, I ordered "The History of My Life."

Excellent Primer on Giacomo Casanova........2002-09-22

It took me two weeks to finish the whole book, and I must say it was a fascinating read. I've always wondered who Casanova was and what he did with his life. This book answered my questions and more.

Giacomo Casanova was a lover, philosopher, scientist, spy, and finally, a librarian for the King of Dux in Bohemia. He had lived an interesting life. A life some of us could only dream of living.

This book is by no means the most exhaustive work on Casanova (it wasn't meant to be), but is an analysis of one who saught approval of women because of his mother (she hadn't paid much attention to him).

I recommend this book. It's a good introduction on Giacomo Casanova.

Insightful Analysis of a Misunderstood Man.......2001-11-22

Lydia flem provides a refreshing account of the, often misunderstood in North America, Giacomo Casanova. She bases her study on Casanova's autobographical History of My Life which he wrote while exiled from Venice in a Bohemian castle. In many ways casanova was a romantic and an intellectual. he loved the good life, enjoyed aesthetic pursuits, was a violinist, writer, poet and even dabbled in medicine. he was also the contemporary of Mozart and was born in the city of Vivaldi (another misunderstood venetian who was exiled from his native city). Most significantly, Flem stresses the fact that casanova was more of a feminist than a womanizer. He did have affairs with plenty of women, surely (and why anyone should object to that is a mistery). However, he appreciated women, treated them as equals and only sought mutual pleasure. The misunderstanding comes from the notion that he only sought sexual pleasure. No, he was witty, spoke several langauges and his comapny was welcomed throughgout the courts of Europe. he was also a bit of a Robin-Hood and, like most fun-loving and charming people, spendthrift and unconcerned with financial matters.
This is the account of a charming personality. There is much to learn form Casanova, and I admit I purchased the book with thge original intent of sharpening my own seductive techniques. I found them, in fact, extremely effective - especially with intelligent ones (mostly from eastern europe) just as Casanova did.

Interesting and Poetic but not Compelling.......2000-10-23

In light of today's widespread sexual promiscuity, Giacomo Casanova's 132 reported seductions are less than shocking. The legend of this infamous Italian lover, however, rages on, fueled by the replication of his 12-volume memoir which runs more than 4000 pages in length.

Giacomo Casanova was more than a lover; he was an author, an actor, a priest, a translator. In her book, Casanova: The Man Who Really Loved Women, Lydia Flem, a Belgian psychoanalyst and critic, outlines Casanova's life in eighteenth-century Venice, not to paint yet another lurid portrait of one of the world's most famous lovers, but to prove that he was also one of the world's most misunderstood.

When Casanova was only a year old, his actress mother left him in the care of his grandmother while she performed on the London stage. When he was eight, his father died. Alone and abandoned, Flem sees Casanova's nomadic, pleasure-seeking life as a search for the parental comfort he was denied. She further characterizes him as a man in search of an identity. Admitting he was the son of actors never really furthered Casanova's desires; he invented a noble lineage for himself and christened himself the Chevalier de Seingalt.

True to our expectations, Casanova learned the art of seduction at a very early age. He was eleven and training for the priesthood in a seminary when Bettina, the sister of a priest, seduced her obliging victim. Deciding the priesthood was not his true vocation, Casanova returned to his native Venice and fell into bed with two sisters at the same time, an act that was to set the stage for his later bizarre-but-comical affairs. The love of his life, we learn, was a woman named Henriette, a cross-dresser who enjoyed passing herself off as a castrato. And, there was the charming girl Casanova made love to and nearly married, the daughter of one of his girlfriends, who just happened to be Casanova's own daughter as well. But, Flem tells us, despite his steamy adventurousness, Casanova retained an air of modesty. His own memoirs are draped in staid and proper eighteenth-century euphemisms, tinged with an ecclesiastical touch: he tells us how he "conquered the ebony fleece," "got close to the altar frieze," and "performed the gentle sacrifice."

Flem does not view Casanova as a traditional womanizer par excellence; she sees him, instead as a sentimental, the epitome of gentlemanliness, a lover of life whose greatest desire was to share his happiness (as well as his intellectual pursuits) with women. That's believable enough, but Flem, however, seems to take her analysis a bit too far. "There is not a trace of misogyny in Casanova," she writes. "Women are his masters. The feminine so fascinates him that he would like to merge with it." This is a little difficult to swallow since Casanova, himself, called the independence of women a "source of great evil," and said he'd rather die than give up his manhood.

Casanova lived a long life and eventually even this master seducer had to deal with the specter of old age. He did so most admirably, spending the final years of his life as a librarian in a Bohemian castle and devoting thirteen hours per day to the creation of his memoirs. Surprisingly, it is through his writing, along with his thinking, reflecting and remembering, that brought Casanova his greatest joy. Although his contemporaries urged him to publish his memoirs before his death, Casanova steadfastly refused to do so. He did, though, believe that it would be through his words that he would secure lasting happiness as well as his own place in history.

Casanova: The Man Who Really Loved Women is an interesting and poetic, if not completely compelling look at one of history's more flamboyant and lovable figures. Flem, though, seems to have fallen into the trap of over-analysis; she seems to be reaching for meanings that just weren't there. Casanova's words regarding women apeak for themselves: "One-third...," he writes, "made me laugh, one-third gave me an erection, one-third gave me food for thought." It is too bad this extraordinary man never found the one woman who could give him all three.

Hypnotic and Masterful!.......2000-08-20

Casanova. The word denotes a charming but unscrupulous libertine, a man without a soul whose love-making is really a well-disguised hatred of women. And for those of us old enough to remember Bob Hope's movie "Casanova's Big Night," the word also conjures up bedroom farce and foolish swordplay.

Wipe all that from your mind. In Lydia Flem's stunning interpretive biography, Casanova emerges as a complex and learned man of deep feeling, kind, generous, questing. Oh yes, he was devoted to beautiful women and craved sex, but the women he was drawn to had to be witty and intellectual or he couldn't delight in them. And his enjoyment was not at all callous, for the relationships he treasured incorporated "lightness, cheerfulness, and reciprocal pleasure," according to Flem who also says that Casanova was anything but a misogynist. "Never to harm a mistress, never to arouse her anger of disappointment, never to make her suffer from their affair in any way--that is what he consistently aspired to."

Flem's short but intense, savory book is in effect a brilliantly poetic gloss on the massive memoir (Histoire de ma vie) Casanova was able to begin writing at 64 thanks to his lifelong habit of keeping journal notes, letters and copies of letters. He wrote it in the "third act" of his life when he'd "thrown away or squandered everything he once owned. He [had] no woman, no fortune, no house, no homeland." In his time, he'd been a friar, a law student, a physician, a translator, a magician, an alchemist, a publisher, a theatrical impresario, an orchestral violinist, a mine inspector, an author, a spy, the co-creator of Europe's first lottery, and of course a lover of many women, often more than one at a time, and occasionally in family groupings: sisters, or mother and daughter.

Casanova had "a stubborn taste for happiness." He lived for pleasure, particularly to give it, and the paths thereto were as multifarious as the bizarre, colorful twists and turns in Casanova's picaresque life. He was extravagant with his lovers, showering them with whatever luxuries he could afford--clothes, jewels, banquets--entertaining them in high style. Enormously well-traveled and exiled from his Venetian home, he belonged to "that vast country without frontiers where people speak and think in French: the Europe of conversation and gallantry."

But as all that eventually slipped away from him, he realized that through language, he could turn himself into a work of art, into something immortal. By writing his memoir, he would "make his life an insolent demonstration of the reality of pure pleasure and, even more insolently, of the enduring existence of happiness in remembrance."

This witty, cultured, and sensitive man had a very strange childhood. Plagued with massive nosebleeds that threatened his life, he'd been ignored by his actor parents who believed him to be a "quasi-imbecile." Yet once this bleeding was cured (by witchcraft, perhaps?), he blossomed into a precocious scholar who could charm adults with repartee in Latin. Still, the virtual abandonment by his parents always rankled and as Flem sees it, he sought to be dazzling on the world's stage so as to constantly earn his mother's favor, and enjoyed flouting authority as a way of perpetually thumbing his nose at his father. These two imperatives animated everything he did, along with a need to cover up his commonplace background.

These conclusions and Flem's other observations about Casanova do not in any way reduce him to a psychological schematic--rather, she interprets his rich life with depth and acuity, making him glow. In an age of "pathographies" which sketch the decline and fall of notable people in as much grim detail as possible, what a delight to encounter a biographer who doesn't just love her subject, but revels in him and his world. Weaving in short but powerfully apposite excerpts from Casanova's 12-volume memoir, Flem not only takes you for a journey into a man's soul, but opens up the people and manners of the wildly extravagant middle and late 18th century.

The writing in Casanova is so ravishingly beautiful that it's a shock to remember you're reading a translation from the French. Equally as surprising is the fact that the author is a psychoanalyst and yet instead of jargon, Casanova is filled with poetry. This is a sumptuous and dazzling work, a feast of a book and easily one of the most entertaining and revelatory biographies I've read in years.

Book Description

Christiana and John Tillson moved from Massachusetts to central Illinois in 1822. Upon arriving in Montgomery County near what would soon be Hillsboro, they set up a general store and real estate business and began to raise a family.

A half century later, Christiana Tillson wrote about her early days in Illinois in a memoir published by R. R. Donnelley in 1919. In it she describes her husband’s rise to wealth through the speculative land boom during the 1820s and 1830s and his loss of fortune when the land business went bust after the Specie Circular was issued in 1836.

The Tillsons lived quite ordinary lives in extraordinary times, notes Kay J. Carr, introducing this edition. Their views and sensibilities, Carr says, might seem strange to us, but they were entirely normal to people in the early nineteenth century. Thus Tillson’s memoir provides vignettes of ordinary nineteenth-century American life.

Customer Reviews:

Insight into Pioneer Life.......2007-08-23

This is a great book for those interested in Illinois history. It mentions towns in Southern Illinois such as Hillsboro and Vandalia, but also touches on Springfield, Peoria, and Quincy. It is a fairly quick read and enjoyable.

Casanova's Women: The Great Seducer and the Women He Loved

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A new and refreshingly different view of Giacomo Casanova
Fact vs. Fiction
Fiction dressed up as history

Casanova's Women: The Great Seducer and the Women He Loved
Judith Summers
Manufacturer: Bloomsbury USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1596911220
Release Date: 2006-10-31

Book Description

Told from the perspective of his innumerable sexual conquests, Casanova’s Women renders a vivid flesh-and-blood portrait of the famed philanderer, clearing away the myth while illuminating the lives of the women who have too long languished in the shadows. The eighteenth-century Venetian adventurer Giacomo Casanova used his magnetic personality to talk his way into the beds of more than two hundred women. Charming, brilliant, and devastatingly attractive, he claimed to like women and to understand their emotional and sexual needs. To those he truly loved, he was the perfect lover—thoughtful, generous, and imaginative. To others he could be ruthless, selfish, and dishonest. Judith Summers’s exuberant and candidly erotic biography reveals how Giacomo Casanova, a sickly son of Venetian actors, went on to transcend the rigid social boundaries of the eighteenth century to keep company with kings and beguile beautiful women. With original research culled from period diaries, wills, correspondence, and memoirs, this unique look at the legendary lady-killer gives voice to the many women on whose naked backs Casanova’s reputation was built.

Customer Reviews:

A new and refreshingly different view of Giacomo Casanova.......2007-08-27

"Listen here, Casanova..." Just who was Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798)? He is remembered dimly as the world's greatest seducer, a user and abuser of women. At least, that is the story normally told. In this interesting book, author Judith Summers takes a new look at Casanova, by looking at some of the women whom he knew.

The Casanova in this book is different than the one painted in many biographies. He is a sinner, a seducer who used women, grew tired of them, abandoned them, and often left them in dire situations. But, he is also a victim, used by women who were more scheming than himself, abandoned when he had nothing more to offer them, finally left alone and lonely.

But, is this a faultlessly documented biography that can positively substantiate every claim? In a word, no. The author takes a new look at Casanova, and presents him as she sees him, and it is a fascinating portrait.

Do you want a new and refreshingly different view of Giacomo Casanova? If so, then get this book! It is a remarkably interesting read, looking at a fascinating time filled with fascinating people! I highly recommend this book!

(Review of Casanova's Women: The Great Seducer and the Women He Loved)

Fact vs. Fiction.......2007-02-07

The author has combined a capsule biography of Casanova with background information about some women who deeply influenced him, as well as details of their relationships. Unfortunately, Summers has also taken the tack of attributing thoughts and emotions to the people that are pure speculation. Her chapter which compiles the various theories regarding the identity of the enigmatic "Henriette" is interesting and well done. The memory flashbacks, supposedly dating from Casanova's declining years, belong more properly in a work of fiction.

Fiction dressed up as history.......2006-11-16

Unfortunately the author of this book takes inexcusable liberties with the truth. I don't mind if she ventures an opinion, but it should be labeled as such. From the first page the book reads like a cheap potboiler, with details that are unknowable and therefore untrue. Again, if an author chooses to do that and says so, that is one thing; but a reader unfamiliar with Casanova will form a very false image of him based on this because that reader has no way of knowing when this author is just making it up.

Examples of Summers' disregard for history appear on pretty much every page, but here is a vivid one: on the way to marry a girl named Teresa, Casanova is arrested because he has lost his passport. Summers says he pretended to lose it in order to get arrested to get him out of the marriage. That is fine as speculation, but she states it as fact. Such distortions misrepresent the man and are arrogant and dishonest. Nowhere does Casanova say such a thing, and there is no other source - Summers cites none in her notes - and how would such a thing be known without Casanova's admission? and besides, his memoirs are full of admissions of the ruses, betrayals, and trickery Casanova proudly pulls off.

Page after page is full of this stuff. The nun MM writes a letter to Casanova, and in this book,the author writes: "MM puts down her pen and reads through what she has written. Then, with a burning feeling in her chest, she clutches at the heavy crucifix that hangs like a stone around her neck". This detailed scene is pure fiction. If you are going to write this way, I want to know more - like was the pen a Bic? What color ink? Where did she buy the crucifix, Wal-Mart?
This is bad writing, and worse - bad history.

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Remarkable Insights to Human Drives and Emotions Highlighted by the Exotic Settings
Mysteries of Indonesia

The Cockatoo's Lie
Marion Bloem , and Wanda Boeke
Manufacturer: Women in Translation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1879679086

Customer Reviews:

Remarkable Insights to Human Drives and Emotions Highlighted by the Exotic Settings.......2006-11-27

Marion Bloem looks at the human condition through the eyes of several generations of a family - almost all women - reminiscing in the first person. Each reminiscence comes as a pithy vignette - mostly as direct speech. This device keeps the pace moving swiftly. To identify the speaker, the author has provided a family tree at the beginning of the book. The reader, by triangulation (as it were) from the relatives referred to, works out who is talking.

The highly colored, sharply-observed scenes move between Java and the Netherlands, and between Dutch and "Indo's" (mixed race Dutch/Indonesians). The publisher's write-up suggests that the accent of the book is on the crisis of identity experienced by Indo's. However, what comes through more powerfully is that, whatever their origins or wherever they live, Indo's have the same day-to-day worries, passions, frustrations, delights and preoccupations as everyone else.

The Cockatoo's Lie, by focusing on context, emotions and family ways is a remarkable Odyssey laying bare the intricate network of strings and pulleys manipulating the family's lives down through the generations, culminating in that of the narrator. We see how her extended family (in particular) mold her beliefs, attitudes, taboos and complexes. Her mother indoctrinates her with an austere "Jiminy Cricket" conscience against which she rebels. Male readers will be amazed by the revelations of female emotional processes and how they result in meta-behavior. One example will suffice: the narrator's mother frequently slaps and chastises her as a child. Years later the mother repents and explains to her now adult daughter that: "every slap I gave you was actually meant for your father." But on the way the family members give homilies that still resonate today: "The man must be older, bigger, richer, so that as a woman you can lean on him, not the other way around, because then everything will go wrong."; and: "...you shouldn't want to be better in everything than your husband, because then you'll lose your respect for him, and he will feel inferior."

In fact, the title of the book refers metaphorically to the Indo narrator's discovery of her own physical attractiveness, the development of her healthily vigorous sexuality and the top-to-toe tingling of physical desire which she dubs "the ribbon".

She has a series of red-blooded adventures, mostly with the tacit (if hardly credible) acceptance of her anthropologist husband who studies the Trobriand Islanders near Papua New Guinea. He uncovered one of their legends concerning a cockatoo and a clitoris. The clitoris: "would risk everything for a single sensation that seemed more important than food" to the point where it starved to death. This notion is the principle leitmotif for the narrator's struggles with her Jiminy Cricket to break out of the limits she has set herself. She oversteps one limit by clandestinely having an extended love affair with her husband's friend. She felt that this was one instance in which she had betrayed her husband - the one man she truly loved. In the end she learns that she: "prefers the reveling in desire to the moment at which that desire is fulfilled."

All these: aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmothers, grandfathers, first loves, cockatoo, ribbon and Jiminy Cricket are just some of the factors in a rich patchwork of influences shaping the narrator's own humanity. It is a profound, intelligent and clever book that, with each reading, reveals increasing depths and subtlety of interwoven detail.

As a qualified translator myself, no commentary is complete without mentioning Wanda Boeke's superb translation from the Dutch. The book reads not only as though it had been written in English, but as though it had been thought in English. I have just one minor quibble: the occasional (not, mercifully, systematic) lapse into the use of "I" where "me" is called for. For me (sic), crippled phrases like: "The grass taller than I ..." and: "... a woman two years older than I..." suck down my attention like Rorschach blots. The morbid fascination of them makes me (sic) lose track of the story. But that's just me (sic): - read the book and enjoy!
[...]

Mysteries of Indonesia.......2000-01-12

Didnt read Marion Bloem for a long time. This is a great boek, mysterious and dreamy. It's a beautiful story about the female and male influences, and Indonesian influences on the main characters life.

Jane Long of Texas 1798 1880: A Biographical Novel of Jane Wilkinson Long of Texas : Based on Her True Story

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Female Larry McMurtry. Lots to recommend about this book.
History comes alive!

Jane Long of Texas 1798 1880: A Biographical Novel of Jane Wilkinson Long of Texas : Based on Her True Story
Neila Skinner Petrick , and Neila Skinner Patrick
Manufacturer: Pelican Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1565547586

Book Description

Jane Long of Texas tells the exciting story of a pioneer woman who shared the excitement of the Texas revolution. She spied for the rebels, danced with the enemy and lived to see Texas part of a free nation. Biographical novel.

Customer Reviews:

Female Larry McMurtry. Lots to recommend about this book........2002-06-27

Well-written, fast paced action biographical novel.
Would make a different kind of Western movie.
Reads quickly.
Well researched.

History comes alive!.......2002-01-26

Jane Long of Texas is a must for those who love biographical history. Jane Long was an important American pioneer and her story is captivating. This book is an exciting version of the founding of Texas from the perspective of a strong and fearless woman. Learn factual history and enjoy a good read filled with culture, adventure, war, politics, betrayal, passion, love and tradgedy.

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Jane Long: A Child's Pictorial History
Elizabeth Dearing Morgan
Manufacturer: Eakin Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0890158614

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Jane Long: Frontier Woman
Ann Fears Crawford
Manufacturer: W S Benson & Co Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0874430909

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illustration is incorrect
AN INSPIRING BIOGRAPHY
Great reading for

Jane Wilkinson Long: Texas Pioneer
Neila Skinner Petrick
Manufacturer: Pelican Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1589801474

Book Description

Often called the "Mother of Texas," Jane Wilkinson Long led an eventful life on the Texas frontier. Her life as a pioneer, mother, widow, businesswoman, and revolutionary is brought to life for children in "Jane Wilkinson Long: Texas Pioneer." After being orphaned at a young age, Jane married Dr. James Long when she was only sixteen. Dr. Long dreamed of conquering "Tejas" and used his wife's fortune to build an army. Jane and her family soon joined him on the Bolivar Peninsula, only to be left again as Dr. Long attempted to conquer Mexico. Alone on the frontier with only her slave to help her, Jane endured a brutal winter. With the coming of spring, Jane learned of her husband's death in Mexico. Now a widow, Jane joined Stephen Austin's pioneers in the Austin colony and obtained a land grant. She built an inn in Brazoria that soon became a meeting place for revolutionaries like Stephen Austin, William Barret Travis, and Sam Houston. Jane's unflagging spirit helped her to build a life for herself and her family despite numerous setbacks.

Customer Reviews:

illustration is incorrect.......2006-07-21

Joyce Haynes may be a talented illustrator, but she might want to check her facts before she draws pictures about things she obviously knows nothing about. Jane Long (Mother of Texas) would roll in her grave if she knew she were depicted riding sidesaddle on the off side of a horse, rather than the near side.

AN INSPIRING BIOGRAPHY.......2004-06-10

As a child, Neila Skinner Petrick says that she loved hearing stories about the Southwest, especially Texas pioneers. Little wonder that she was enthralled by the life of Jane Wilkinson Long.

Often called the "Mother of Texas," Jane Long was an orphan who lived with her aunt and uncle in Mississippi. At the age of 16 she married Dr. James Long who wanted to conquer a far off land ruled by Spain - Texas. To this end he gathered an army and set off.

Four years later Jane saddled her mule, Agatha, and followed him. Accompanied by soldiers, her daughter, Ann, and a slave, Kiamatia, she made the long journey. After an arduous and sometimes perilous trek she met Dr. Long and his army at a fort near Galveston Island. It was there that Jane had their second child, Mary James.

When she was widowed she joined Stephen Austin's colony, and later moved to Brazoria on the Brazos River where she opened an inn. Later, when Sam Houston ordered settlers to go east for safety, Jane and her family did so. Then, when Houston and his men defeated the Mexican army, Jane returned home only to find that her inn had been burned to the ground. Of course, she rebuilt it, and also helped to build a church and a school.

She had seen the Battle of the Alamo; she had lived through dangerous times. What a woman! What a life!

- Gail Cooke

Great reading for.......2004-03-10

What a great book for young people! History is so often boring or mundane for the young reader, but not this book. By weaving together history, adventure and personal insight, Mrs. Petrick gives her audience a glimpse of early Texas in a most interesting way. The artwork adds beauty and interest. I loved reading it. Mary E. Jones

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