Pocahontas Books

Pocahontas, which wasn't her real name, was kidnapped by the English and turned into an Englishwoman. The book contains lots of pictures of her, two of them made during her lifetime, plus pictures of the kinds of dwellings she would have lived in as an Indian princess. You'll learn about the lives of her descendants, too. For example, her son inherited land from his grandfather Powhatan --- land in the thousands of acres --- and turned it into a tobacco plantation. Hundreds and hundreds of descendants of Pocahontas are living today. Even though she only lived to be 21 years old, she played an important part in our nation's history and today there's a statue of her that stands in Jamestown, Virginia.

The IN THEIR OWN WORDS series also gives you tips about how to research historic information. It explains the difference between primary sources and secondary sources when you're studying history. For example, you will see some pictures that people, even young schoolgirls, have painted of Pocahontas over the years. You can decide whether you think they were accurate likenesses, or whether people tried to make her look more beautiful than she really was.

Read this book and find out a lot more facts and interesting history about one of the most famous people in America. Pocahontas may even have been the person most responsible for there being the United States of America.

--- Reviewed by Tamara Penny

It really is a well constructed and designed play set based on Disney's "Pocahontas." The book opens up into 4 quadrants and you tie the front and back covers face to face with the attached ribbon. Each of the quadrants has props that pop up and represent four different scenes from the movie. The set comes with an audiocassette with actual voices and effects from the film in stereo. Included are fully painted characters of Pocahontas and John Smith that you can reenact different scenes in accompaniment to the sound.

This set is very similar to the one issued for Disney's "Beauty and the Beast." My daughter and I both loved this. We still play the audiocassette to relive "Pocahontas" in the car.

This guide is fairly clear about how to combine terms to form appropriate soil labels. It is also excellent for providing a basic (or complex) understanding of soil formation and variants within soil groups.

This book is very good handbook not only for the young scientist who start to learn about the soil, but also for the teacher to review their knowledge about the properties and classification of different soils in the world.

By Kathleen Thompson And Deborah L Chabrain

I like this book because you have to find out something in the story and the illustrator draws great pictures. Pocahontas became famous and the English called her Lady Rebecca Rolfe.

Folks, read this book or any other book by William Vollmann and keep in mind that this is an author with a profoundly stunted emotional growth. There's nothing cute about celebrating prostitution as the "most honest form of love" -- it's sickening writing, the babbling of a man still stuck in the fantasies of adolescence who will never understand that real love transcends economic exchange into a pure giving of oneself to another. He pats himself on the back for his "ferocity," when in fact he's never really outgrown being a journal-scribbling teenager who thinks every word he scribbles needs to be published and admired. His writing amounts to one big infantile gesture of lashing out at his Mommy and Daddy -- he admits as much in his interviews -- but at the same time hoping all these books he writes will make his parents love him. It's sad.

The fact that Vollmann has a big crowd of admirers says a lot about the sheep-like mentality and the moral vacancy of too many people who like cutting-edge literature. Read the bombastic praise Vollmann receives that is printed on the dustjackets of his books, and reviewers envious of his lifestyle just look like fools with the pumped-up praise that lavish on Vollmann. Go to a Vollmann reading and look around -- the people there are the sort who are hip, cynical, wear funky glasses and hate their parents, and whose main worry is keeping up with the latest slick novels and edgy CD's to hit the shelves. They have no ability to think for themselves and they are bored with life -- so they are profoundly impressed by this guy who writes about his experience with prostitutes. If you recognize yourself in this description, you need to get a life.

There's a certain sort of bourgeois person who believes their life can be redeemed by writing a novel in which they'll "show 'em all" -- the 'em being Mommy and Daddy, the cool kids who rejected them in high school, the jocks who called them nerds, etc. Vollmann is the "patron saint" of this sort of misfit. I read an interview in which Vollmann stated confidently that he is as important as Shakespeare or Faulkner. He doesn't seem to understand that the self-absorbed navel-gazing of a well-read prostitute's john doesn't quite cut it as great literature, no matter how many big words and descriptive phrases he tries to pack into his sentences. Vollmann's delusions are as bloated as his books, and his vision lacks even a hint of the universality or breadth or understanding that literary importance requires. Nobody but a few misfit loners and antiquarians will be reading Vollmann fifty years from now. Vollmann is a Montherlant in the making -- that is, an irrelevant curiosity that even most highly educated people will not have heard of.

Please think for yourself and don't buy this book just because you think it's kind of neat and edgy that this guy writes about his experiences with prostitutes. Don't engage in the sad spectacle of living vicariously through William Vollmann's sad, warped world. You'll just put yourself one step closer to moral oblivion.

Vollmann's books are a shotgun wedding of Kerouac keyboard improv and finicky, ultra-thorough research that would shame the most hardcore library mole. His unique voice is the result of the collision between his modern sensibility -- which he's endlessly amused by instead of, like too many contemporary authors, uncritically in love with -- and his passion for exhausted and outmoded forms of thinking and of writing. For Vollmann, "modernity" is sometimes a sort of limbo, the temporal version of the Greenland in his book The Ice-Shirt, where everything that can happen has already happened and the former sites of great battles, couplings, and doomed utopian experiments are now bare swatches of anonymous turf -- witness the last few pages of Argall, where "William the Blind," as Vollmann calls himself, drives through Pocahontas' former haunts and finds an endless cortege of theme parks and strip bars -- and sometimes an ongoing process to be participated in. As is well known, Vollmann is something of an adventurer, doing his Geraldo Rivera guerilla-journalist bit with the Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan long before they were the flavor of the month. What fascination his books have comes from this contradiction. Are we living history, or is everything over?

Sadly, I must report, his books are not yet as fascinating on their own merits. Argall is admirable in almost every way -- Vollmann is obviously stoked with the passion to rescue marginalized figures from the rubble of history, and he even works up genuine anger about wrongs committed centuries ago, whereas most people these days conform more to William Hazlitt's dictum: "The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings." On top of this, his prose is impossibly energetic and rich, like that of a postmodern Fielding. But as industrious as he is in terms of researching and writing, that's how lazy he is in terms of his conceptions and grand designs. His graphomania works against him, in short -- he fills seven hundred pages here without stopping to think, as most people will before half the book is over, that Blood Meridian has already been written and was done quite well already. There is literally zero distance between Vollmann's title character and McCarthy's The Judge -- both are seen as omnipotent spectres representing the depredations of America's colonial thrust, and both even talk in the same Shakespearean-Melvillean patois. And though the unquestioned verbal virtuosity of Argall ( the book ) is more than enough to carry you through to the end, it ultimately turns out to have very little staying power, being essentially a linear, straightforward account of the events contained in John Smith's autobiography, leavened with a peculiar brand of political correctness also swiped from McCarthy ( he admits the Indians are savage and unknowable, but still treats them as sacred for that very reason. )

Vollmann makes me think of what DeSade's doctor says to him in the movie Quills: "You produce more pages than you consume -- the mark of a true amateur." Let's face it, no one who writes as much as Vollmann has a well-honed sense of self-criticism. Part of me thinks that he would be better off laying aside the latest 900-page opus, reupholstering his crude if touching Weltanschauung, and then returning a decade later with a compressed and fully mature work of genius... But then he wouldn't be William Vollmann, he'd be Russell Hoban. For that reason, I doubt he'll ever write anything that attains a status above "James Clavell for eggheads," but nevertheless, there's a place in the cosmos for his brand of blunt, belated justice. Just don't call him The Judge.

It's easy to compare him with Pynchon, since they both attempt a similar feat of matching subject with style in an expansive format that contains much humor peppered within the story. But Vollmann isn't a humorist at heart, he's part historian and part seer. He brings you the characters that you'd love to believe really are; he worms his insistent way into their hopes and imaginings so that he can present you with their characters.

You learn a lot of history reading the Seven Dreams series, of which "Argall" is a part. You learn more about how Vollmann regards history. But what makes the author so necessary and integral to my reading is that way of making me see how his characters regard themselves.

So throw your reading schedule out the window. Pick up "The Ice Shirt" and start in on this yet-to-be completed chronicle of how the Europeans came to the Americas and what that meant for both the Europeans and the people who were already here. Catch up soon, because you'll want to starting wishing for the next book in the series to appear... compulsively so.

The book tries to out-do ULYSSES. It does. But finally, around the 400th page, who cares?

A favorite part of mine was when John and Pocahontas first become friends. When they let two bald eagles go free in the soaring wind full of colorful breezes, I almost felt as if I was there. I also liked the scene when they fall in love while they were running through the woods with a pack of fawns.

Finally, my last favorite scene was when Pocahontas saves John, the pale face warrior, from being killed by her father, Po-Hawton. She saved him by running up to her father a saying "I'm a Princess and Princesses get what they want, and I want him!" He was about to get killed because John's whole crew and his bigger boss invaded the Indians.

I really encourage you to read the book Pocahontas because it will help you learn about how the Native Americans.