Right now I have three books open: The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner, and Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, by history professor Martha A. Sandweiss. This last book was a gift from Ray, and tells the story of famed geologist/explorer Clarence King and his secret double life, married to a black woman and passing as black, but all three books deal with the changing world of the mid and late 1800’s, and John Wesley Powell is the thematic center of the three.
Unfortunately, I stopped reading them all, and have become obsessed with Craig Johnson’s “Sheriff Walt Longmire” series, a bunch of cowboy detective mysteries, total page-turners: great scenery, great characterization, but essentially chewing gum for the mind. Anne got them from her Mom, and I got them from Anne; I think she’s read all we have, and I’m on the third one in the series now.
