John Putnam Demos

Impeccable scholarship, vital insights into culture conflicts of the past, and present.

This wonderful book is the best kind of popular history: uncompromising in the standards of its scholarship, yet accessible and fascinating to a broad, non-academic audience of readers interested in the nature of cultural identity, and clashing/co-existing societies. It tells the story of one family forcibly ruptured into two worlds, when an Indian raid carries off family members, including a seven-year-old daughter so thoroughly embedded in her new, Indian (sorry; the tribe are not native Americans but a Canadian offshoot of various native groups) world that by the time her "redemption" is possible, she no longer wishes to return to the world of her birth. Insights, and ironies abound. (Her Puritan family is more distressed at her succumbing to "Popery" than to nativism.) The author meticulously collates, and limits himself to, documented historical data, yet does not hesitate to draw broader, thoughtful conclusions, always delineating the border between provable fact and well-founded projection. This is a work of both socio-psychological depth, and tremendous historic integrity. Whether you come to the book for interesting historical fact, or for deep insight into the nature of cultural intersections and conflicts, you will be well rewarded.… (mais)