If you want to read a book that could pass as memoir--no, a book that you feel IS memoir throughout--"Blessed McGill" is your next read. Not a new book, but relatively unknown, it reads like a collection of short stories but is in fact a novel of a young man's journey through the southwest and Mexico not to mention his life in the third quarter of the 19th century. Although roughly divided into episodes, it is all held together by the power of Edwin Shrake's mastery of characterization seen in the persona of McGill.
Along the way in these pages, you'll meet various Indian groups in the U.S. and Mexico as well as non-Indian Mexicans and new American immigrants to the west. In addition to the drunkenness and violence on the restless frontier you'll meet a variety of languages, cultures and customs. People trying to carve meaning out of often intolerable conditions must perforce become as hard as the environment they endure. Many of these men and women will become your "kin" as you learn about them and come to care about them and wish them well. And, you'll mourn, too, for the ones lost along the way.
Most of all, I found myself in awe of the authenticity of the book, the language and circumstance ring as clear as church bells on Sunday morning, the characters true and credible as life itself, and sometimes with startling sweetness despite the scalping and skinning, the burning alive of unthinking ruthlessness in an untamed world. If you want gripping details, beautifully strung together sentences, and real people on the stage of an unfinished continent, Shrake's book is as good as it gets.
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Five Stars
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Come on Clint it would be even better than "The Outlaw Josey Wales"
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