As a part of Saturday Morning Live, we like to give you weekly "Entertainment Picks to Click" which highlight various shows or movies we watch, music we listen to, or books we read.
I have been asked a lot about these, especially the books I've been reading. If you haven't heard, my best friend is in the National Guard and he got deployed far away so we can't see each other except for virtually for over a year. We started a little two-person book club to give us a reason to stay in touch. Here are the books we've finished so far:
The Real All Americans is a great book about Carlisle Indian School. Sally Jenkins is a top-notch sports writer and she dug into the history of the Native American population and the rise of "Indian schools" that were designed to help educate the native children in an Anglo-Saxon manner. The meat of the book follows the first of these schools, Carlisle Indian School, and their rise to prominence on the football field in the late 1800s and early 1900s with Pop Warner as their coach and Jim Thorpe as one of their star players. The story of the school's football team and how that medium allowed them to educate white football fans that they were indeed equals in many ways.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown chronicles the various Native American tribes west of the Mississippi River and how they eventually were chased from the land they had lived on before the White Americans moved westward. It is a very sad book, but the details give new meaning to how the United States as we know it came to be. Many unnecessary struggles occurred all over the western front as "Manifest Destiny" was preached by the U.S. government in the aftermath of the Civil War. Definitely a book that will make you think and have more empathy for those you may not know.
We moved into a more Colonial Period theme with The First Conspiracy by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch. Brad Meltzer is known for his shows on the History Channel: Decoded and Lost History. He wrote this book with the help of Josh Mensch and it reads like a fast paced TV show. Short chapters follow several key locations and characters and there are plenty of cliff hangers along the way that make you want to keep reading. This page turner talks about a little-known episode in the early stages of the Revolutionary War that had to be thwarted to save George Washington and the chances the Continental Army had to win the conflict and gain independence from Great Britain.
My friend Adrianne Branstad suggested this one last Saturday. American Royals by Katharine McGee is a novel about the United States if the government had a monarchy. She said she finished the entire book in a few days and loved the drama that it followed. There are subsequent books in this series as well.
Hear our "Entertainment Picks to Click" from last Saturday:
http://www.whoradio.com/listen/