Blackjacks & Blue Devils

Steinbeck could have learned a lot from this book. Its stories bring us American history in living color (real people, in white, black, and red), from Oklahoma land runs of 1889-92 down through the Dust Bowl, World War Two, Viet Nam, and the invasion of Iraq. We meet homesteaders, bootleggers, revival preachers, rich oil men and failing farmers, children of slaves working for freedom, a WW2 veteran who trades his phantom arm for a farm, a dying WWII vet whose son peddles smart bombs that are killing Iraqi children. In the first story, we are there for the much-mourned death of a grandmother who homesteaded; in the last story, which brings us full circle, a man and woman make a new beginning, leaving behind her redneck husband to (as Huck Finn put it), set out for "The Territory." -Carter Revard, author ofHow the Songs Came Down, Winning the Dust Bowl, & Cowboys and Indians Christmas Shopping