Undaunted Courage

The Hunger Games Triliogy is very popular right now.  Each child received one of the books in his/her  Easter basket.  Caroline is reading them all for the first time.  Mary Elizabeth and Thomas are rereading them. The Hunger Games movie came out a few weeks ago and had the best opening weekend of any movie.  We've all seen the movie now.  It was good, but the book is better.

Want to see a funny spoof on the Hunger Games?  Google "The Hungry Games."  Hysterical.  It's a spoof of the movie trailer.  It's fun to watch the spoof and then watch the true trailer for the movie.

The Hunger Games is not my favorite book. 

Mary Elizabeth asked me what my favorite is.  I would say my favorite book is Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West  by Stephen Ambrose.

(The description below is from Amazon.com.)
In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead a voyage up the Missouri River to the Rockies, over the mountains, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, and back. Lewis was the perfect choice. He endured incredible hardships and saw incredible sights, including vast herds of buffalo and Indian tribes that had had no previous contact with white men.

He and his partner, Captain William Clark, made the first map of the trans-Mississippi West, provided invaluable scientific data on the flora and fauna of the Louisiana Purchase territory, and established the American claim to Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.

Ambrose has pieced together previously unknown information about weather, terrain, and medical knowledge at the time to provide a colorful and realistic backdrop for the expedition.

Lewis saw the North American continent before any other white man; Ambrose describes in detail native peoples, weather, landscape, science, everything the expedition encountered along the way, through Lewis's eyes.

Lewis is supported by a rich variety of colorful characters, first of all Jefferson himself, whose interest in exploring and acquiring the American West went back thirty years.

Next comes Clark, a rugged frontiersman whose love for Lewis matched Jefferson's.

There are numerous Indian chiefs, and Sacagawea, the Indian girl who accompanied the expedition, along with the French-Indian hunter Drouillard, the great naturalists of Philadelphia, the French and Spanish fur traders of St. Louis, John Quincy Adams, and many more leading political, scientific, and military figures of the turn of the century.

Historical non-fiction can be so dry.  NOT so with Stephen Ambrose.  His style of writing is fluid and interesting.  He brings this history to life, engaging the reader as any good novelist will do.

If you're looking for a good read, this is it.  It will take you longer to read than The Hunger Games.  But don't let that stop you.  Go get a copy and read it now.