WRITE IN THE THICK OF THINGS: (Sharing) Limelight & Insights

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

(Sharing) Limelight & Insights

Once a month, we're going to invite a guest writer to share insights on our blog.

We're delighted to announce our first guest as Julie Luek --author, magazine writer, regular contributor to "She Writes" and the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Assn. Also a blogger extraordinaire (we sit at her feet for tips).

Julie has agreed to share insights on the all-important strategy for authors of building a platform to make writing marketable to agents and publishers.

Watch for her upcoming guest post next Thursday, Feb. 21.

3 comments:

UnknownFebruary 15, 2013 at 4:52 AM
Should be a good guest post. :o)
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Kym-n-Mark ToddFebruary 19, 2013 at 6:17 PM
yes we can't wait! :)
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Mark's Goodreads Reviews

Mark's books

American Colonies: The Settling of North America

American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

Over the past three years, the genealogy bug has really bitten me, and I've plunged into genealogical and genetic research that started putting together the pieces of who I came from. But when I'd learn that so-in-so moved from Virginia to North Carolina, and then the next generation split up to move on to Mississippi or Kentucky or Alabama, the documentation rarely told me why.

Enter Pulitzer Prize-winner Alan Taylor's American Colonies, the sort of historical nonfiction book I hoped could help explain what had inspired my assorted great-great grandparents to migrate to and among the various colonies and territories of British Colonial America. And wow, did I ever get what I bargained for.

Though not with what I expected. My doctorate had specialized in eighteenth-century American Studies, and I thought I had a pretty good handle on the times. But what Taylor's excellent and very readable prose provided was the disturbing exploitative nature of English colonial empire-building.

Taylor's opus is organized chronologically by colony (or territory), repeating the chronology for each colonial initiative, explaining the politics and socio-economic dynamics that existed on both sides of the Atlantic Pond. We think politics is complicated these days (and they are), but complexities faced by our ancestors equal ours in every way, and more.

Nonetheless, the underlying story is framed to explain the systematic displacement of indigenous populations and slave-driven economies fueling much of early colonial development. Taylor does this with copious statistics and first-hand accounts and justifications by our ancestors, but the author's tone is even and never descends into judgmental asides.

It felt like getting back into the classroom to learn a history that hasn't been sanitized by the victors, sobering but compelling.

Highly recommended.

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Wednesday, February 13, 2013

(Sharing) Limelight & Insights

3 comments:

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