Slaughter is bad '80s music, I fucking know that.
Elena wanted it, Elena got it. Always wanting me to post my writing. And to be completely honest, the only writing ever do besides all the crazy shit here is forced rare essays for The Institution of Hooking and Insanity. And since I haven't been coming up with very lengthy entries as usual, well, here it is, something to take up space and time. Much like Hugh Hefner, but he's living THE LIFE. Prepare to bore your ass off with a book report for history class a couple months ago. It is not advised to read this, but you will have to scroll down to see Chuck Norris.
Valley Forge is a novel that looks into the lives of a diverse variety of colonists living during the Revolutionary War. They are all people who reside, stop by, or do business in or pertaining to the town of Valley Forge, which an important site in means of events and happenings of their patriotism. MacKinlay Kantor brings us another edition to his collection of more than forty books under his belt. He was born in Iowa in 1904 and became a newspaper writer at the age of seventeen. His other books and professions include movie screenwriting, patrolling in the NYPD, and serving in two wars. In this novel he goes into the short ordeals of various American colonists for brief periods of time, spanning the latter days of the 18th century.
MacKinlay Kantor emphasizes the pride and bravery that the American rebels and rebellion spirits had. Most of the characters’ stories he tells about are young soldiers and their struggles through adolescent training and live threatening decisions they face throughout their adventures. What they all share in common is, they are all striving to achieve the same goal - freedom from Britain. The factor that the author considers most important is loyalty. All of his characters mentioned have an indelible loyalty to their cause. If their cause, liberation from Britain, did not have loyal supporters, the heart and soul of the entire thing would fall to pieces and nothing would come of it. This leads to Kantor’s bias.
It is undoubtedly that he is all for the American cause. He speaks lowly of the British soldiers and mentions the term "lobsterbacks" quite often during the novel. Other than the motive of the war in the first place being against the British, the author utilizes this fact into why he wrote the book in the first place. Upon serving in two wars himself, he apparently has a keen interest in history and opposes the enemy in which he fought those wars with. Or in this case in the book: the British.
Valley Forge was published in 1975. The space between that year and the years that the Revolutionary War occurred is quite significant. This book is very unique in the way it was written, and being just mainly a story to read through and is not meant to gather information by. It isn’t unique enough in a sense to put it in its own category of fiction and literature, but it is truly one to keep in mind.
The first chapter [and first story] tells the reader about General George Washington showing some young boys how to expertly skip a rock across a pond. The subject matter seems rather simple enough, but Kantor’s classic colonial dialogue makes it difficult to distinguish the age of each character discussed and even General Washington himself. For some readers, they may not even realize that "Zexcellency" is really a title for Washington until reading quite a few more chapters into he book. One of the most captivating chapters is Chapter 6: the story of the young soldier whose name is Malachi Lennan. He tells of his fear of Native Americans and how, by eavesdropping at night under a bed listening to a friend of his father’s, hears a terrifying story of one native of a certain tribe being tortured by members of another tribe. The scalping and burning of the man captures one’s imagination quite vividly, and could very well disturb one at that also.
One of the most boring chapters in the book is Chapter 14. It is about another young boy who encounters the foul natured General Wayne. General Wayne tells the boy to go and fetch his beautiful horse which the boy claims is resting at a neighbor’s stall. Upon arriving at the neighbors’ home, they greet him gallantly and serve him a delicious dinner. The boy then rides his steed back to the army camp and awaits for the next battle to begin. This chapter is very lengthy compared to some of the other ones, and this adds to its level of dullness.
This book, of relation to this course, probably would not do too well in terms of getting a lot of information. It is too much focused on the plain redundant wartime drama that is usually seen in the movies. It’s not at all close to a documentary; a walkthrough of what life was like from all different points of view of Revolutionary War era life. However, if you are looking for a read just for the fun of getting into someone else’s point of view and lifestyle or how they go along with their life during this dire time in history, then this book is for you.
Overall, this book did not flatter me. To all honesty, this book was very genuine and accurate according to its time; it was written in the same dialect and dialogue as things were back then. The stories were real, the characteristics of the characters were real, the events were real, but my enjoyment of this book was not real. Some plots to certain characters really did fascinate me, but all to suddenly end at the end of the chapter, and never reading about that character again. It is these cliffhangers and abrupt beginnings of a new story at the start of every chapter that does not captivate me to keep on reading the book. In between the interesting chapters, are ones that are quite tedious and boring to read, most of which I cannot figure out a point or reason that it was written in the first place.
The mechanics of the novel aren’t very easy to read either. Even if the text is widely spaced and the lines are double spaced, there are no quotations anywhere, so it is oftentimes difficult to tell when a character starts speaking or stops speaking. MacKinlay Kantor also, after or before stating a quote, does not even state who is speaking that quote. Therefore the reader must have a keen ability of using context clues to decipher the language of the text. Whether this style of writing is really the exact same style as works were written during colonial times, it is not worth doing if an author is trying to reach amateurs of learning history. But for an experienced, more advanced reader, this book will be just what you’ve always wished for - an unadulterated, genuine piece of literature keeping roots to the real style and manner of the late 1700s.
Christina N. @ 5:27 PM
