A list of the 10 best books of 2006 compiled by the NY Times:
– Absurdistan (Gary Shteyngart)
– The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (Amy Hempel)
– The Emperor’s Children (Claire Messud)
– The Lay of the Land (Richard Ford)
– Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Marisha Pessl)
– Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir (Danielle Trussoni)
– The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Lawrence Wright)
– Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (Nathaniel Philbrick)
– The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Michael Pollan)
– The Places In Between (Rory Stewart)
Some of these books sound very interesting and will sure be on my to-read list.
[Source: NY Times]
I’m getting to the “Mayflower” book, which is indeed supposed to be superb. For a very long time, the world was sold the bit about selfless Indian-Pilgrim cooperation and that marvelous Thanksgiving feast. That the settlers first survived by robbing Indian graves for burial gifts of food was but one of those half-forgotten dark tales, told in some old Yankee families. 🙂 (The Indian villages were abandoned, their inhabitants the victims of diseases brought by European fishermen.)
Those settlers were mostly from Essexshire, which has a coastline, yet it took them two generations to learn how to fish–and that in a time when the North Atlantic teamed with cod. (Hence, Cape Cod.) Then there was King Philip’s War with the Indians, in which one out of every seven English settlers died and the English toehold in New England almost lost. And there’s Miles Standish, the colony’s military commander–quite a character: a short, Bantam rooster of a man, a very deadly ex-soldier, sort of a gun slinger for the Earl of Warwick and his brother, the second Earl Holland. Indeed, it was Warwick who leased the Mayflower from the Dutch for the Pilgrims.
Anyway, from the reviews, a fascinating tale well-told.