Customer Reviews

James Edward Oglethorpe: Foreword by Eugenia Price

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I have been reading books for over three decades and Joyce Blackburn's take on James Oglethorpe ranks as one of the worst I have ever read. There are a number of severe problems with the book. Blackburn tries too hard to make the book appeal to young and old readers alike and she simply fails on both counts. Oglethorpe is presented as a saint and Blackburn assures the reader that he was a man whose integrity went unquestioned-and then skims along material dealing with Ogelthorpe killing a man in a tavern fight and accusations of political corruption. Worst of all, Blackburn tries to fictionalize the biography. The reader is taken into Oglethorpe's thoughts and Blackburn even offers conversations. In "The Spooky Art," Norman Mailer warned would be historical novelists not to cram too much information in conversation. Had only Blackburn learned this lesson the book would have been much better. Instead the reader is forced to suffer as Ogelthorpe's mother tells James about his brother, what he is doing, where he is living, his political and religious beliefs, and basically recites the brother's resume to young James. This would be fine if done in a non-fictional format but not in conversation. This gets even worse when the author takes Oglethorpe to Georgia since everyone in the fledgling colony offers detailed information through conversation at just the right moment. Nor does this end once Oglethorpe comes back to England as Blackburn continues to play puppet master for Samuel Johnston and James Boswell and John Adams, putting words in all these worthies' mouths.

Blackburn should receive praise for doing something truly incredible. Mark Twain stated that James Fennimore Cooper's Indians were all incredibly stupid. Blackburn makes even dumber Indians than Cooper did. For example, an Indian kills himself with a rifle. Other Indians find the body and decide that the English must have killed him since only the English used rifles. Never mind the fact that the rifle was still there of course. Never mind the fact that there are only a few ways to kill yourself with a rifle; the chief way of course is pointing it in your mouth and blowing your brains out ala Ernest Hemingway and Edmund Ruffin. So faced with a body with, in all probability, his brains blown out and a discarded rifle nearby, the Indians blame the British all so that one of Ogelthorpe's friends who is, to use Blackburn's phrase, a "red man" can demand the Indians kill him too since he is now British due to the saintly Oglethorpe. This would be fine in a bad Western of the 1950's. It really has no place in a "biography" that is being pushed by the National Park Service.

It helped me with my project and gave a lot of good facts. I learned soo much.It was a book that kept my attention. Rylee

My eight year-old "history buff" enjoyed this book very much. I enjoyed the chapters I read with him and the interesting facts he reported as he read about the life and experiences of Oglethorpe -- his progressive views on slavery, his friendships with Native Americans, his work to promote the establishment of Georgia as a colony, the conflicts he encountered.