Author: stanprager

On August 11, 2013, my wife and I were eagerly settling in at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center—popularly known as “The Kate”—in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, truly pumped for the upcoming show that evening with Marty Balin, the primary founder of the groundbreaking psychedelic rock group Jefferson Airplane, one of its principal lead vocalists and songwriters, and an indisputable icon of the sixties San Francisco music scene. But when he took the stage with his band, Marty clearly was not pleased. The Kate is a wonderful, intimate venue, a gorgeous little theater with a capacity of only 285, the sightline and acoustics great from any angle. But what Marty spotted from his vantage point was the number of seats that remained unoccupied, and you could tell it put him in a sour mood from the get-go. About midway through the show, before he launched into the tune “Miracles”—a top hit from Jefferson Starship, the ‘70s band that was a direct descendant of the Airplane—he snarkily advised his mostly greying audience that he usually saved this one for the encore, but he would go ahead and do it now in case anyone had to split and go check in on the babysitter. The collective wince that went around the room was palpable.

But he sounded fantastic. Magnificent, actually. If you closed your eyes, you would think that sweet, soulful tenor that hit every high note effortlessly was being projected from the lips of  the dynamic 23-year-old powerhouse who created the Airplane back in ’65 rather than the dour, 71-year-old emblem of the disillusioned that stood before us. I tried to tell him that, too, in the sparsely attended meet and greet that followed the show, but it was not received as intended. “Man, you sounded amazing,” I gushed. “If I was in another room I would have thought the singer was still in his twenties!” Marty regarded me cooly. “I’m not old,” he grumbled. “I’m still young.”

Marty was fooling himself, of course, but he was indeed young once upon a time, in a magical place called San Francisco that became the spiritual and geographical epicenter for a profound generational shift that was identified most prominently by youth and rebellion. Back then, he was a musical wizard of sorts who conjured up an assortment of other outsize talents that coalesced into a remarkable supergroup which later churned out tunes that defined and then transcended a singular genre of rock ‘n roll that would come to serve as a soundtrack for the zeitgeist of the times. Coming down from an all-night acid trip at Woodstock, the ethereally beautiful Grace Slick boldly proclaimed to an early morning audience, “It’s a new dawn.” And for a little while, at least, it seemed that way. It’s impossible to consider the phenomenon of the hippie counterculture and landmark moments of the mid-to-late sixties—from the Summer of Love to Altamont—without the iconography of Jefferson Airplane decorating the scenery, so deeply did the band cut a groove that inextricably bound it to the cultural and musical landscape of those years. And there’s no doubt that Marty’s fierce, towering vocals on “Volunteers” characterized the hard rock anthem of that epoch: “Look what’s happening out in the streets … Got a revolution, got to revolution …”

In a highly ambitious attempt at a single-volume definitive history of the Airplane—as well as all the many offshoots, collaborations, and solo endeavors it spawned—acclaimed music journalist Jeff Tamarkin knits together extensive interviews with exhaustive research to turn out Got a Revolution!:The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane [2003], a fast-paced, entertaining, if cliché-ridden and uneven account that succeeds more often than it falls short. That’s a mouthful, but then so is the book and the musical sensation that it chronicles.

And Tamarkin gets right to it. Conspicuous in its absence is a socio-history of the distinctive 1960s San Francisco scene that birthed the Airplane. Thus, readers unfamiliar with the cultural milieu of the pot-smoking hippies who were denizens of Haight-Ashbury and environs, as well as the antiwar politics of protest that vehemently stapled an element of rage to mantras of “peace, love, and drugs,” will come to this book with a decided disadvantage. The author turns first to Marty, who not only selected musicians for the Airplane but went on to promote it at a nightclub he co-owned called The Matrix that featured local groups such as The Doors, The Grateful Dead, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. The house band was Marty’s band. The first recruit was rhythm guitarist Paul Kantner. Lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen was next. The original bassist was replaced by Jorma’s buddy Jack Casady. Drummers came and went, but the longest lasting and most consequential was Spencer Dryden. The initial female vocalist was Signe Anderson, who left after having a baby. She was replaced by Grace Slick, who changed the entire dynamic of the band.

A former model and debutante, Slick brought good looks and a witty, wiseass stage persona to the game, as well as her soaring mezzo-soprano vocals that not simply attached a signature sound to Jefferson Airplane but came to define 1960s psychedelic rock. Grace also brought with her two tracks from her former band with her ex-husband, The Great Society, which would become big hits for the Airplane: “Somebody to Love,” and “White Rabbit,” a hallucinogenic homage to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland brimming with surreal imagery and not-so-subtle inferences to LSD, penned by Grace after an acid trip of her own. Grace’s intellectual depth and songwriting talent would prove a big influence on the band. But so too would her erratic personality.

It wasn’t long before factions formed and Marty lost control of his own band. Marty was a new-fashioned crooner of sorts, whose dulcet voice was wrapped around ballads and love songs. As the tunes took on a harder edge, the others came to reject Marty’s influence as poppy schlock. After a series of bed-hopping adventures, Grace settled in with Paul, and they had their own ideas about the direction the music should take. Jorma—whose first love was the blues—and his friend Jack formed another bloc. Spencer refused to play the game and just grew alienated. In time, he was fired. It was kind of a revolving door with drummers.

Tamarkin does a pretty competent job of animating the personalities involved so the reader gets to know them, but it’s evident that he had far more material on some than the others. We get up close and personal with Paul and Grace, replete with anecdotes galore, but there’s less nuance in his sketches of Jorma and the rest of the gang. Still, as a fan who has long admired the band, I found it discouraging to peek in on them behind the scenes. Once they tasted success, the Airplane purchased a seventeen-room mansion at 2400 Fulton Street in the heart of Haight-Ashbury for use as a communal residence and office space. There they proceeded to act like a bunch of spoiled rich kids with a Dionysian penchant for wallowing in sex, drugs, alcohol, and materialism. If the sex and drugs resonated on the streets, their behavior was otherwise vastly dissimilar to the ethic of the hippie counterculture they ostensibly represented. They exhibited almost no authentic sense of social consciousness. They had guns. They had a passion for expensive toys and reckless behavior. They were consumed with petty jealousies and rivalries. Their protest politics descended into a blind devotion to Mao’s China.

Of all of them, Grace comes off the worst: selfish, egotistical, unruly, provocative, grandstanding, a raging alcoholic given to violence—she once attacked Paul with a sword. The Grace who was fired from Jefferson Starship in 1978 for goose-stepping to mock a German audience was the same Grace at Fulton Street, just an older version. Some of her antics were entertaining—like when she schemed to slip acid into President Nixon’s drink when Tricia Nixon’s Finch college alumnae invite to a formal White House tea party included the former Grace Wing; she never got past security. Some were just crazy, like when she set out on an inebriated high speed street race with Jorma that sent her off the road into an embankment; the car’s driver side was crushed, but with no seat belt and the luck of a drunk, she incurred only minor injuries. In between such exploits, Grace delighted in promiscuity. Even in an age when free love was common, Grace took it to extremes, and she seemed incapable of fidelity to anyone. She managed to bed down with everyone in the Airplane—except Marty. Many observed that when the two performed together it was as if they were making love before a cast of thousands, but offstage Marty demonstrated no interest in her physically. When asked in an interview if he had ever slept with Grace, Marty famously said that he wouldn’t even let her—well, no need to repeat it here, you can Google it!

If Grace’s character seems to scrape the bottom, Marty’s floats near the top. Hardly a burly fellow, it was Marty who leaped off the stage at Altamont to protect a concertgoer being attacked by a Hell’s Angel, only to be beaten unconscious for his heroic intervention. If perhaps jealous of the way Grace seized the spotlight, and increasingly dispirited as he was sidelined by the others, his devotion to the band never flagged. But ultimately internal tensions got to him, and in 1971 he was the first to walk away. A year later, Jefferson Airplane was history.

Given the talent, conflicting ambitions, and disagreement over musical directions, it is less surprising that the Airplane crashed than that it lasted as long as it did. But the band didn’t really dissolve as much as it divided. Jorma and Jack’s side project, Hot Tuna, became their full time gig and still endures today. Some terrific collaborations by Grace and Paul—my favorite is Baron von Tollbooth & the Chrome Nun—eventually evolved into Jefferson Starship. Marty contributed one song to their first album, the beautiful love ballad “Caroline,” and later became a permanent member of the new band. And that first effort, Dragonfly, ranks up there with some of the best of the Airplane. One of the finest tracks on that album is “Ride the Tiger,” which contains lyrics that boldly predict: “Look to the summer of seventy-five … All the world is gonna come alive.” It was not to be. The era of the sixties—which some would date from JFK’s 1963 assassination to Nixon’s resignation in 1974—was done. Disco was ahead. LSD was passé; coke was the new cool. And while long-haired zombies on quaaludes masqueraded as hippies, stumbling through the garish excesses of a far less promising new dawn, it was a look, not a lifestyle. It wasn’t until the final death knell of Reagan’s election and the murder of John Lennon that reality sunk in. Jefferson Starship put out a couple of solid albums but then fell into a steep decline. A sad caricature of it—on and off, with and without Grace—dubbed just “Starship” continues until today. I’m not a fan.

Tamarkin should have closed out the volume when the Airplane ended, but instead he determined to chronicle every twist and turn of the successor bands and the various solo efforts ad infinitum—or at least until the 2003 publication date. The result is a diminished writing quality and a narrative that reads more like an extended Wikipedia entry. Disputes among members continue, personnel come and go, but it becomes a blur as the author himself seems to want to plow through all the years ahead and finally be done with it. It is unfortunate because the balance of the book detracts from the achievements of earlier chapters.

When I say that I can’t remember when I first started digging the Airplane, I mean that quite literally, because their music and their vibe was so entangled with my then concurrent pursuit of altering consciousness that recollections of those days are a bit murky, to say the least. But it must have been sometime around 1972, when my fifteen year old self would get high and then blast FM radio, which treated me to “White Rabbit” and “Lather” and—my all-time favorite—“Wooden Ships.” And I started to buy their albums. Of course, by then the Airplane had disbanded, although my voyage of discovery had just begun!

I still own a large collection of Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, Hot Tuna, and various collaborations, most on the original vinyl, some on CD. (And yes, the vinyl sound is vastly superior!) I made a point of listening to all of it chronologically—with some help from Spotify to fill in the blanks—in the course of reading Got a Revolution! The majority of it holds up admirably, especially the Airplane albums Surrealistic Pillow and Volunteers, some of the Kantner-Slick efforts, Jefferson Starship’s Dragonfly and Red Octopus, and much of the Hot Tuna catalog. I never stopped being a fan.

In 1989, Marty, Paul, Jorma, Jack, and Grace briefly reunited Jefferson Airplane, put out a new album, and embarked on a tour. My wife and I saw them live at Lake Compounce Festival Park in Bristol, Connecticut on September 4, 1989—with Hot Tuna as an opening act. I will never forget the thrill I experienced standing in the first rows under the stage with chills running up and down my spine during their live performance of “Wooden Ships.”

In 1996, the Airplane—including Spencer Dryden—was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and they performed live, sans Grace, who sat out the ceremony. Grace had retired shortly after the ’89 tour, and has since declared that rock is a “young person’s game.” She quit drinking and mellowed out markedly. As this review goes to press, Grace—who casts herself as “The Queen of Acid Rock and Art”—passes her time at 86 as a painter of rock legends and characters from Alice in Wonderland, with her work earning critical praise. Jorma and Jack, both in their 80’s, continue to tour with Hot Tuna. I have sat in on several of their shows in intimate venues; they never disappoint. Paul Kantner died at 74 on January 28, 2016, in a weird coincidence on the very same day that Signe Anderson passed away at the same age. Marty Balin died at 76 in 2018. In later interviews, he made clear that his recollections of the Airplane were bittersweet. There’s no doubt that he never really got the credit he deserved. My memory of him at The Kate, so downcast, yet lingers.

It’s been sixty-one years since the 1965 launch of Jefferson Airplane, but their music never gets old. Despite the shortcomings with Tamarkin’s book, I would still recommend it. And don’t forget to spin their albums while you’re reading.

He was the most famous man in America, but he wasn’t even an American. The United States was a young country, but he was an old man. Many of the key figures of the Revolution and the early Republic were gone, most notably Washington and Hamilton, but yet many remained, including Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and then-President of the United States Monroe. And, perhaps most remarkably, he himself not simply remained but endured, even thrived, the last surviving Revolutionary War major general, advanced in years and slowed a bit by his walking cane, but yet spry enough to unhesitatingly accept Monroe’s invitation to visit as “The Nation’s Guest”—first braving the month-long three thousand mile transatlantic crossing on a packet ship from France to New York City, then to set out on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution for what would become a thirteenth month tour of the United States that would cover some six thousand miles by steamboat, carriage, and horseback. The year was 1824, and his arrival sparked a widespread contagious joyous frenzy that turned into a kind of Beatlemania a full one hundred forty years before Beatlemania was a thing. He was the Marquis de Lafayette.

Many who are familiar with this era are aware at least in passing of Lafayette’s visit, but journalist Ryan L. Cole has put the spotlight on what will certainly be ranked as the definitive study of this event with The Last Adieu: Lafayette’s Triumphant Return, the Echoes of Revolution, and the Gratitude of the Republic [2025], a meticulously researched, well-written, if sometimes dull chronicle of a singular moment in American history. I used to marvel at what it must have been like for Lafayette to reconnect with the likes of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson at the very twilight of their long lives, but in this fine work the author demonstrates that these colorful episodes, while worth dwelling upon, are the least important parts of his story. Instead, cleverly positioning Lafayette as a kind of Rip Van Winkle character, Cole treats the reader to a series of snapshots of thirteen colonies that in a half century have grown into a mature nation now comprised of twenty-four states (and vast unorganized territories), as seen through the eyes of the indefatigable Frenchman as he spends more than a year traversing thousands of miles and stepping at least once on the soil of each and every one of those two dozen states!

Despite the heritage myths that have long clung to textbooks, American independence could never have been achieved without the decisive military and economic support of the French, still smarting over their disastrous loss of North American territory to their ancient enemy, the British, in the Seven Years War, known as the French and Indian War on this side of the pond. Lafayette became the face of French intervention here. An idealistic young nobleman chasing military glory when he volunteered to assist the colonists in their rebellion, he became at nineteen the youngest major general of the Continental Army, incurred a serious leg wound, and served courageously and with great distinction throughout the course of the war. Along the way, he bonded with Washington, who came to treat him like a son.

Back in France, Lafayette, through a remarkable sequence of maneuvers and astonishingly good luck, managed over the years to survive taking a leading role in the French Revolution as well as dodging the guillotine when the Revolution turned against him, enduring five years in Austrian and Prussian prisons, then tiptoeing through Napoleon’s tenure and the Bourbon Restoration, and finally navigating fierce political crosscurrents and clandestine conspiracies during the reign of  Napoleon III. Through it all, he conducted himself with great dignity and remained loyal to his ideals. Still, by 1824, when President James Monroe extended his invitation, Lafayette was at sixty-seven—an old man in those days—widowed, broke, and recently defeated for reelection in the Chamber of Deputies. But he did not hesitate to embark on yet another adventure!

For the reader, it is slow-going before that adventure gets underway, as Cole devotes nearly one hundred pages—about a quarter of the entire book—to Lafayette’s storied biography and the long preparations for the voyage, before “The Nation’s Guest” finally reached the nation’s shores. The United States Lafayette encountered upon his return was almost another universe compared to the one he had departed decades before. From his arrival in New York, cheering crowds and celebrations accompanied him everywhere, and he was poignantly greeted again and again by the white-haired thinning ranks of Revolutionary War veterans. Cole is at his best as he brilliantly recreates the cities and towns and hamlets of 1820s America and, through Lafayette’s own sharp recollections, contrasts these with an earlier time when the notion of the United States was but an uncertain dream that blood—including Lafayette’s own—was once spilled in fond if tenuous hopes for success. Students of American history will savor these moments.

But as the great man’s journey proceeds, the blur of repetition in a succession of strikingly similar welcomes from place to place can grow tedious, especially as Cole has deemed no detail, no matter how trivial, worthy of omission. Moreover, while we naturally crave to learn more about the famous lives that are met in his travels—such as Jefferson and Madison and Adams—the author frequently devotes a page or even a page-and-a-half to minor characters who cross Lafayette’s path, sometimes wearying tangents that can feel like footnotes in a David Foster Wallace work that are here tangled up in the narrative.

But if there are weak points, there are a host of strong ones, as well. My favorite chapter is devoted to Lafayette’s time in Alabama among the indigenous Creek, whose dwindling numbers attempt to strike an impossible balancing act by clinging to much of their traditional ways while struggling to safeguard their independence through awkward attempts at assimilation with the rapacious Americans, hungry for their lands and all too eager to defraud them. Alas, like their kin in Georgia, most would lose it all in the not-too-distant future, forced West as Indian removal became a popular mechanism for the expansion of white settlement.

This is a reminder, as Cole underscores elsewhere, that Lafayette’s excursion also coincided with the end of another era, as Monroe—with one foot still in the eighteenth century—presided over the final months of his presidency against the backdrop of the 1824 election that would pit the old guard of John Quincy Adams against the emerging rough brand of new politics attached to Andrew Jackson. Lafayette refused to take sides here, but elsewhere he was adamant about something that continued to appall him: the human chattel slavery that was fading in the north just as it had become inextricable from the economic engine of the southern states. He made no secret of his disgust at the peculiar institution, particularly during his tearful reunion at Monticello with his old friend Jefferson, who, long reconciled to the moral contradictions, served up eloquent platitudes tempered with hope that the next generation would devise a way to deal with this unfortunate wolf-by-the-ears conundrum. In retrospect, we know that they will: at Fort Sumter and Appomattox. Of course, these days historians acknowledge that what we usually celebrate as triumphs for the new nation were at the same time tragedies for the indigenous and the enslaved.

But for white Americans at the time, looking back a half century to the Revolution and peering ahead at whatever uncertainties might loom in their future, Lafayette’s presence further cemented a national identity and stoked a peacetime patriotic revival that was perhaps like nothing ever seen before or since in the United States. It was to be a real positive for Lafayette, as well: not only for the mountains of accolades that boosted his self-esteem, which had in recent years declined along with his fortunes, but also as a grateful nation found ways to restore his financial health. Reinvigorated, he returned to France and in the coming years became again—incredibly—another leading figure in yet another revolution that led to the overthrow of King Charles X. When he passed away in 1834, Lafayette had outlived every American Founder except James Madison. Despite my quibbles, The Last Adieu deserves high marks for its significant contribution to the historiography and its thought-provoking analysis of an America that once was.

NOTE: I received this book as part of an Early Reviewer’s program.

Imagine that you were brought up in a home that hosted a large extended family that was multiracial and multicultural. Your parents were white, of European ancestry, but through marriage and adoption you had a Native American uncle, an aunt who was born in China, a Mexican cousin, and an African American brother, all who resided under one roof. Your childhood was marked by a hardscrabble endurance against the elements in an environment that was sometimes harsh and even dangerous. Every member of the household made critical contributions to the family’s success in a near constant struggle for survival. One day, later in life, something happened to you—perhaps a head injury—that left you with profound memory loss. You could clearly recall events of your upbringing, but recollections of the people involved—with the exception of your father—had dimmed dramatically. You could still remember your mother, but only indistinctly. The rest of the family existed only as vague shapes, bit players who emerged from the shadowy recesses of your mind now and again, their key parts in your nurture almost entirely erased. Later, looking back, you would claim with confidence that your formative years were shaped solely by your white father.

True story? In a way. It’s actually a kind of an allegorical tale of how our collective memory of the American West has been so distorted by books, film, and TV that what still clings to the minds of many is an image of a mostly empty landscape of big skies and heroic white men wearing white hats—like John Wayne—taciturn, rugged individualists who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps to conquer a hostile, untamed land. And somehow, over time, the rich constellation of the remaining cast of characters who once walked that same earth—women, the indigenous, Mexicans, and others—faded until they became, if not entirely invisible, little more than bit players who put in cameos of hardly any consequence.

The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier [2026], a stunning achievement by noted historian Megan Kate Nelson, proves a long overdue remedy for this stubbornly pernicious amnesia with an exciting, even page-turning, panoramic history of the American West that restores the legacy of so many who were by accident or design largely expunged from chronicles of the past. Blending the “journey motif” literary device with rigorous scholarship, the author—in a series of roughly chronological episodes that often overlap—deftly guides the reader to follow in the footsteps of seven specific individuals who each not only left an essential mark on the West but are likewise emblematic of others who once walked alongside. A gifted storyteller who seems incapable of writing a dull paragraph, Nelson rekindles moments of passion, adventure, glory, and tragedy that followed Lewis & Clark to Wounded Knee, true accounts that via her talented pen somehow turn out to be more thrilling than much of the fiction imagined in dime store novels or blockbuster flicks.

Women are conspicuous in their absence in nearly all accounts of the West, just footnotes in the literature, and in popular culture reduced to cardboard cut-outs of pioneer wives or saloon girls—but always of solid Anglo stock, of course. So it is particularly welcome to find that four of Nelson’s chosen seven are female, and of those, three are people of color. Only one—Sacajawea—is familiar to most Americans today. But Nelson challenges our traditional patronizing portrait of this so-called “good Indian”—who helped guide the heroic white folks of the Corps of Discovery—to spotlight her crucial role in an expedition that may not have succeeded as it did without her.

Born an Agaidika Shoshone along what is today the Idaho-Montana border, at twelve Sacajawea was captured in a raid by a rival tribe, the Hidatsa, and force marched to present-day North Dakota. At thirteen, she was sold to a Quebecois trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau who made her one of his wives. When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark first encountered her in 1804, she was a pregnant sixteen-year-old. They needed a reliable guide and interpreter, and to that end Charbonneau was hired, who brought along his Shoshone-speaking wife. It is unlikely anyone ever asked this teenager if she wanted to be a wife or a mother or a blazer of wilderness trails, but nevertheless, shortly after giving birth, she set out to lead the expedition thousands of miles, toting her son in a cradleboard strapped to her back. Stripped of the caricature imposed upon her as the rare Native American female to actually earn mention in textbooks, Nelson’s Sacajawea was a flesh and blood young woman who was central to their mission as she navigated difficult terrain, identified edible plants, rescued their precious journals from a capsizing boat, and—perhaps most significantly—as an Amerindian traveling with an infant telegraphed peaceful intentions and ensured the safety of the group while facilitating trade with tribes they encountered along the way. She was clearly vital to their efforts; she was mentioned in excess of one hundred times in the journals! Still, she was never compensated; Charbonneau was instead paid for bringing her along. Upon her untimely death some years later, Clark adopted her son Jean Baptiste, who would coincidentally cross paths with Jim Beckwourth, who also has a starring role in The Westerners, decades down the road. And it turns out that Jean Baptiste—half French, half indigenous, raised by an American—was far more typical of the multiracial, multicultural frontier than the white men wearing white hats we were directed to idolize.

Maria Gertrudis Barceló is another fascinating character.  Nearly a third of today’s continental United States was once part of Mexico. Largely through violence—annexation, war, and purchase under pressure—more than half of Mexico’s original territory was incorporated into the US, along with something like one hundred thousand Mexicans. One of them was Gertrudis Barceló, a fiercely independent woman—in a culture that permitted that—who ran a vast gambling operation and owned her own saloon in Sante Fe. Both entrepreneurial and opportunistic, when New Mexico changed hands in the Mexican War, Gertrudis Barceló’s operations continued unabated and she died one of the wealthiest residents in the region. Yet, in traditional histories of the American West, you would likely never learn that Gertrudis Barceló or thousands of other Mexicans who were absorbed into the United States ever existed.

There’s also Polly Bemis, a tiny but remarkably intrepid woman who was born in China, sold as a slave, smuggled to San Francisco, and eventually ended up in a mining camp in Idaho. Under the best of circumstances, in this era the Chinese in America were frequently subject to racism, exclusion, and violence, but somehow Polly persevered, winning her freedom and going on to run her own boarding house. Another is Ella Watson, a Wyoming pioneer who met a tragic end, and then suffered the further indignity of having her reputation sullied after death by being branded “Cattle Kate,” a rustler and woman of ill repute who inspired the Zane Grey novel The Maverick Queen that I read some years ago. But it turns out that the Cattle Kate persona was completely fabricated, and rather than outlaw, Ella was a homesteader who ran afoul of a land baron who sought her property and its water rights.

Of all the principal figures of The Westerners, the most intriguing could be Jim Beckwourth, an extraordinary fellow who instantly reminded me of Jack Crabb, the protagonist of Thomas Berger’s novel Little Big Man later portrayed by Dustin Hoffman on the big screen, although in real life Beckwourth—narcissistic, amoral, and manipulative—comes off as far less sympathetic than the fictional Crabb. While tall tales are so intermingled with facts that it is difficult to fix upon a truly reliable biography of Beckwourth, Nelson skillfully sketches out a nuanced portrait of a man whose incredible life is symbolic of the American West. Born into plantation slavery in Virginia but unusually favored by his white father, Beckwourth’s darker complexion, an obstacle in the east, turned into an advantage on the frontier, where he could inhabit a variety of different worlds. And he did. A fur trapper, mountain man, trader, and explorer—these are just a few of his various occupations—Beckwourth demonstrated much courage, resourcefulness, and dedication to his own self-interest, seeking his fortune while collecting and abandoning a series of wives and paramours along the way. One of those wives was indigenous, and he lived with her and her Apsáalooke Crow tribe for a time. But that experience did not dissuade him from a later stint as an army scout caught up in the infamous Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 that saw hundreds of encamped Cheyenne—predominantly women, children, and infants—butchered by soldiers. Beckwourth went on to write a book about his exploits, and died an old man of natural causes. If there’s a moral to the story, it could be that many who survived the brutal challenges of the frontier were not only the fittest but the most unprincipled.

An exception to that rule could be Little Wolf (Ó’kôhómôxháahketa), Sweet Medicine Chief of the Northern Cheyenne, arguably the most admirable of Nelson’s seven, who consistently acted only for the interests of his people, and never for himself. The greatest tragedy of the West is the fate of the indigenous that once included hundreds of tribes and millions of inhabitants, their numbers already reduced and lifeways dramatically altered well before the time of Lewis & Clark. Europeans unintentionally brought to the shores epidemics that devastated virgin populations. And not only disease touched them: horses and firearms first introduced by the conquistadors forever changed their way of life. In what would become the United States, eastern settlements that grew into towns and cities gradually forced relocation of many tribes west, displacing those who came before, even prior to when forced “Indian removal” became official US policy. As it was, spread out among so many distinct tribal groups with divided loyalties, they never really had a chance: manifest destiny, the transcontinental railroad, the cavalry, and especially the conviction that the west belonged exclusively to white settlers to do as they pleased with it, would doom their independence. Little Wolf, born when Jean Baptiste would have been only about fifteen years old, could not have known that within his lifespan Native Americans would never again roam free, but would be confined to reservations ever after. The saga of Little Wolf’s valiant struggle against this inevitably represents some of Nelson’s finest work here.

Finally, for those who are looking for white guys, Nelson gives us Ovando Hollister, a Yankee with a commitment to abolition who was raised in a Shaker community and went west to seek his fortune, then on to fight for Union and emancipation in the Civil War. Later, he became an influential journalist. But while he championed freedom for blacks, he was consistently hostile towards the indigenous. He had no objection to Sand Creek, and even came to Beckwourth’s defense in the press, glossing over the atrocities to object that he was unfairly maligned for his skin color.

But there’s another white man who looms over Nelson’s narrative who is not one of her central characters: Frederick Jackson Turner. Three years after another massacre, this time at Wounded Knee, Turner presented his paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which—as Nelson points out in her Prologue—was the genesis of the frontier myth that the West was fundamental to the cultivation of our national identity, preordained for white Americans to dominate in a crusade to supplant savagery with civilization. For well over a century, Turner’s thesis has overshadowed the historiography, as well as popular culture, and is principally responsible for that very amnesia identified at the outset of this discussion. It was presented to me as received wisdom when I was an undergrad in the 1980s. And it lingers still.

The Westerners is an effective rebuttal to Turner, whose thesis is not only flawed but in fact mistaken, and even harmful. Sure, there were plenty of white Americans who were, for better or for worse, significant to the development of what would become the western part of the United States. But there were lots of others—among them blacks, Mexicans, Asians, and especially Native Americans—whose contributions were just as critical. Millions, in fact. Sadly, most of their identities were erased. If we can give a pass to the movies for colorful stereotypes, and for only carving out screen time for the white guys with the white hats, the truth is that the texts from my grade school classroom were—if decidedly duller—not that far removed from the celluloid. The likes of Maria Gertrudis Barceló, Polly Bemis, Little Wolf, and so many more simply did not make the cut. In a superlative, meticulously researched work that will appeal to scholars as well as delight a general audience, Megan Kate Nelson succeeds brilliantly in resurrecting not only these lives, but the spirits of a multitude long lost to time.

I reviewed this previous book by the same author, here:

Review of: Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, by Megan Kate Nelson

Back in 2011, I was visiting Philly, where my daughter lived in those days, but the timing of my trip was all about the opening day of the exhibit of the Tarim Basin mummies at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Fans of the history of the storied Silk Road know of the Tarim Basin as once hosting a number of oases that serviced caravans in the otherwise forbidding Taklamakan Desert, now located in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. Naturally mummified, the collection of desiccated remains that was scheduled for display at the museum that day are incredibly old—some dating back about four thousand years—but what’s more astonishing is their ancestry: an isolated population of Ancient North Eurasians that once spoke Tocharian, an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family.

To put that in perspective, these days in excess of forty percent of the world—more than three billion people—speak some kind of Indo-European language, including German, Italian, Russian, French, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Persian, Greek, Irish, Albanian, Lithuanian, Armenian, and the English employed in the writing of this review. Tocharian was once part of that family! It is believed that all these languages (and hundreds of others) are descended from what once was a common tongue called Proto-Indo-European (PIE).

There is no extant record of PIE, but its elements have been partially identified through linguistic reconstruction, which is a remarkable tale in itself, although perhaps a far more extraordinary one lies in tracing how it is that descendants of this proto-language are spoken today by billions of people at such distant geographies. In Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global [2025], both stories are expertly woven together in a fast-moving, well-written, if sometimes flawed narrative by science journalist Laura Spinney, which serves as a solid introduction to the global implications of Proto-Indo-European for the past and the present.

I first became intrigued by the Indo-European languages some years ago during my deep dive into the classics and the Bronze Age Mycenaean Greeks who peopled Homer’s Iliad. The Mycenaean script was first discovered (if not identified at the time) in the ruins of the Minoan Palace of Knossos on Crete in 1900 by British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, on tablets tagged as Linear B to distinguish it from the other, earlier script found on other tablets that were labeled as Linear A. Linear B also turned up elsewhere on the Greek mainland, but no one could decipher the strange symbols. More than a half century later, Michael Ventris and John Chadwick cracked the code and determined that Linear B was in fact a form of ancient Greek, in use by the Mycenaeans who conquered the Minoans. The Linear B syllabic script seems to have evolved from the still undeciphered Linear A, which was almost certainly Minoan and probably unrelated to Greek, and thus likely a non-Indo-European language.

There are important lessons here that have global implications. First, while the ancient Minoans and Greeks for a time utilized similar scripts, the languages recorded by these scripts were different. Second, and perhaps of even greater significance, that the Minoans learned to speak and write the Greek language of their conquerors does not imply that the two distinct peoples were otherwise related. When Greek written language reemerged after a kind of dark age that followed the collapse of the Bronze Age—one of the earliest literary works recorded was The Iliad—they wrote it down in an alphabetic script borrowed from the Phoenicians, an unrelated people who spoke Canaanite, a Semitic, non-Indo-European language. Thus, the populations that today speak Hindi, French, Albanian, or English are not by necessity genetically related to those who at one time may have overrun them and imposed an Indo-European language upon them, although they may be, and in some cases we can determine that they definitely are.

But long before this—long before there were Greeks—their Indo-European ancestors walked the earth, presumably speaking PIE. Where did they come from? We cannot be certain, but the most widely accepted theory is based upon the Kurgan hypothesis, proposed by Marija Gimbutas, which holds that nomadic pastoralists from the Pontic-Caspian steppe (now southern Ukraine and Russia) moved south and west in the 4th millennium BCE and imposed their culture and language on Neolithic farmers in their paths. Kurgans are the ancient burial mounds archaeologists have linked to these steppe nomads. (Gimbutas’ later reputation suffered due to her fixation on a belief in an “Old Europe” matriarchal civilization dominated by a life-affirming Mother Goddess, which has been panned by archaeologists for lacking evidence, but the central tenets of the Kurgan hypothesis have withstood vigorous scrutiny in subsequent studies.)

Her work was revised and refined by anthropologist David Anthony, whose magnificent book—The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World [2007]—I read some years ago. Anthony argues that steppe nomad warriors, armed with domesticated horses and the advanced technology of wheeled vehicles, dominated Neolithic cultures in Europe, Anatolia, and beyond, spreading the proto-Indo-European language across continents. Paleogenetics has confirmed the likelihood that Gimbutas and Anthony were on to something, as DNA analysis has demonstrated the presence of a signature Y-chromosome (passed down by males) in modern Europeans, notably the Y-DNA haplogroup R1b that is traceable to steppe nomads. Evidence of mtDNA (the mitochondrial DNA passed down by females) in contemporary populations indicate that migrations of women from the steppes also occurred. Modern Indians are of mixed ancestry, but there too there is no mistaking the paternally inherited Y-chromosome that steppe nomads introduced thousands of years ago.

This was of course not the last time that steppe nomads put their mark on civilizations east and west—think Scythians, Huns, Turks, and Mongols—which certainly puts a lie to the “great man” historiography that dominated the textbooks of my youth, and solidly rebukes the likes of Will Durant, who with some arrogance once pronounced that civilizations rise on stoicism and fall on epicureanism. Really? How about climate change, pandemics—and invasions by steppe nomads?

Spinney deserves high marks for her review of the Kurgan hypothesis and competing theories. She is also on solid ground as she walks the reader through how it is that linguists can be certain that more than four hundred languages spoken by billions of people today—as well as a number of extinct branches of the Indo-European language family—are indeed related and must have descended from the PIE originally spoken by steppe nomads. To that end, she walks the reader through the homology of Indo-European languages to identify their linguistic kinship and common ancestry with PIE, including the correspondence of sounds, similar grammatical structures, and especially the shared vocabulary found, for instance, in ancient Sanskrit and Latin, and their modern descendants like Hindi and French.

Vocabulary that shares common ancestor words from PIE—but may sound altered today due to regular sound changes—are called Indo-European cognates. A popular example is the English “mother,” which is in Latin mater, Greek mētēr, Sanskrit mātṛ, German Mutter, Russian mat’—which share the “*mater-” PIE root. There are many other examples, including “father” which has the PIE root “*pater-” and appears as Latin pater, Sanskrit pitṛ́, Greek patḗr, French père, Spanish padre, Armenian hayr, and Irish athair. A hint of how these two words might have been pronounced in the very distant past may be detected in today’s Lithuanian—the most archaic living Indo-European language with the least sound changes, considered closest to the original PIE—with mother rendered as “motina” and father as “tėvas,” preserving in this “conservative” East Baltic tongue older sounds that changed, for instance, in Latin and English. It is not surprising that words like “mother” and “father” should remain closer to their ancient PIE roots, but there are many other examples of such cognates, although due to sound changes over thousands of years, some may not correspond as elegantly as others.

Indo-European languages are divided into either centum or satem languages according to how the sounds of the dorsal consonants (“K,” “G,” and “Y”) evolved. At one time, it was believed that there was a neat divide between western and eastern languages with centum and satem, respectively, but then Tocharian was discovered and it turned out to be something like a centum tongue, even if it’s a kind of special case. It’s complicated.

Indo-European is further categorized by its branches, and language divergence began very early on with the oldest branches of Anatolian (Hittite) and Tocharian, and later splits into Hellenic (Greek) and Indo-Iranian (Vedic Sanskrit). To my mind, perhaps most fascinating is the number of extinct languages that were once derived from PIE. The Tocharian of Central Asia is one, of course, which has no modern descendants, and actually the whole Tocharian branch is defunct. Another is its earliest, Hittite, which dates back to 1750 BCE. The Hittites, who once dominated Anatolia, modern Turkey, are famously referenced in the Hebrew Torah, and are notable in the archaeological record for the massive chariot warfare that occurred circa 1274 BCE between armies led by Hittite King Muwatalli II and the Egyptian Pharoah Ramesses II at the Battle of Kadesh, located in modern day Syria, which ended in stalemate and the world’s first recorded peace treaty! The Hittite Empire fell with the collapse of the Bronze Age, and eventually their language disappeared, as well.

Like Tocharian, the entire Anatolian branch—that once included Hittite as well as other tongues such as Luwian, Lydian, and Lycian—is entirely extinct, with no successor languages. Surviving main branches—many of which also include now vanished languages—are Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Italic, Hellenic, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Armenian, and Albanian. Of these, the largest belongs to the 1.7 billion who speak Hindi, Persian, Urdu, and Kurdish, among the more than three hundred Indo-Iranian languages. While reading Proto, I got a kick out of the fact that the guys I buy beer from at my local package store hail from the Indian state of Gujarat, and speak Gujarati—an Indo-European language! There are close to four hundred fifty living languages in the Indo-European family today, but also more than eight hundred others that no longer exist.

Proto serves as a fine introductory course on Indo-European languages and their shared PIE ancestry, although it turns into a kind of travelogue as Spinney takes the reader on a journey to various spots across the globe where IE tongues are spoken, looking to the past and present with captivating excursions into history, archaeology, linguistics, genetics, and culture. On the one hand, this makes the book far more readable—she is a very talented writer—but will leave some wanting more, especially as she exercises the author’s prerogative to devote more emphasis to certain branches of IE than to others.

There are, unfortunately, a couple of glaring errors. The first is when she repeats the discredited notion that the volcanic eruption circa 1628 BCE of Thera (modern Santorini) brought on the collapse of the Minoan civilization, and opened the door to the Mycenean Greeks [p238]. Classicists know that while the catastrophe at Thera significantly weakened the Minoan thalassocracy, Mycenaeans did not conquer Crete until circa 1450 BCE—nearly 180 years later! Worse, Spinny repeats the long-debunked canard that the Egyptian pyramids were constructed by slaves [p.195] rather than skilled, paid laborers—a notion imagined in technicolor by Cecil B. DeMille but repudiated by historians. These are, of course, just two blemishes on an otherwise fine work, but nevertheless made me want to fact-check some of her other material.

Still, those of us who thrive on breaking news in science and history will derive a great deal of enjoyment from Proto, which balances content with readability such that there is an  appeal to an academic as well as a general audience—which is an achievement worth an underscore! But those with a focus on politics rather than scholarship might not be on board. Hindu nationalists firmly reject any connection to outside cultural influences, and vehemently deny that Sanskrit and Hindi are Indo-European in origin. Perhaps they share the conceit of the ancient Athenians, who likewise imagined themselves as autochthonous?

There are political sensitivities in the People’s Republic of China, as well. Turning back to my visit to Philadelphia for the opening day exhibit of “Secrets of the Silk Road” and the Tarim mummies: in the end, at the very last minute, to my great disappointment, the Chinese government yanked permission to display the mummies; paper cut-outs of the body forms were substituted. It was never stated out loud, but we all knew the reasons were purely political. The region where the Tocharian-speaking North Eurasians once roamed was now home to the often persecuted Muslim Uyghur minority population. Any challenge to the myth of the homogeneity of a single ancient Chinese people and culture in the wider geography of the PRC is a source of anxiety to the totalitarian regime. Apparently, the double-whammy of Turkic speaking Uyghurs and archaic Indo-Europeans was just too much for the Chinese Communist Party, and they pulled the plug on showcasing the Tocharian mummies.

Later, there was a change of heart, and the mummies were restored to their exhibit cases, but by then I was hundreds of miles away and never got to see them. Yet, that episode hardly dulled my interest in the Tarim mummies, nor the Indo-European language family, and in the last fifteen years I have read fairly deeply about both. Proto is only my latest!

On June 23, 2023, as the world watched with mouths collectively agape, longtime Vladimir Putin associate Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the notorious paramilitary force known as the Wagner Group, mounted a rebellion against the Russian military leadership over its fumbling prosecution of the war in Ukraine. Wagner mercenaries captured Rostov-on-Don almost unopposed and began a slow advance towards Moscow.  This was not only the most significant challenge to Putin’s increasingly authoritarian rule, but the most consequential threat to the legitimacy of the post-Soviet state in the three decades since Boris Yeltsin used tanks to shutter the Duma to forestall his own impeachment. Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. Prigozhin called off the mutiny, and all criminal charges were dropped as he agreed to relocate Wagner forces to Belarus. Not long after, it was reported that Putin hosted Prigozhin at the Kremlin and fences were mended among the old allies, but few believed that would be the end of the story. So, on August 23^rd—exactly two months to the day since the rebellion launched—perhaps it came as a surprise only to Prigozhin when the business jet carrying him and his associates exploded north of Moscow.

So who was Yevgeny Prigozhin? What was his actual relationship with Vladimir Putin? What role did the Wagner Group play as an extension of Russian power, not only in Ukraine but in Africa and the Middle East?  And how could the thuggish ex-con paramilitary Prigozhin rise to such prominence to make international observers—albeit briefly—wonder aloud if he would be the instrument to topple the Putin regime? In a remarkable achievement, Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos [2025], international expert and Arizona State Professor of Practice Candace Rondeaux brilliantly addresses these questions and much more in an extremely well-written if dense account that is at once a kind of dual biography of Prigozhin and Putin as well as a nuanced history of post-Yeltsin Russia.

It turns out that the intersecting avenues of (pardon the inevitable alliteration) Prigozhin and Putin were to be found on the  streets of St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad. It was there that teenage petty thief Yevgeny Prigozhin grew up to be a volent gang member who spent nearly a decade in prison before he found himself selling hot dogs alongside his mother in an open air market. Both street savvy and entrepreneurial at a fortuitous moment when a fierce, nascent capitalism served as tsar of the new Russian state, Prigozhin turned burgeoning profits first into the grocery store business, then, along with a pair of new partners, expanded into a variety of other enterprises that included the city’s first casinos. The restaurant business was next. Here the duality that marked his character was most evident—he was at once markedly intelligent and adept in his every endeavor, as well as coarse and cruel when it suited him. He hired strippers to lure in diners before word got around that the menu was superlative. And he casually meted out violence to employees who failed to live up to his expectations. Prigozhin redefined upscale dining when he remodeled a rusting hulk into a floating restaurant known as New Island that became one of St. Petersburg’s most fashionable eateries. New Island hosted key state dinners for Vladimir Putin, French president Jacques Chirac, and US president George W. Bush. Prigozhin personally served Putin on more than one occasion, which earned him the playful sobriquet of “Putin’s Chef.”

Putin, the former KGB agent who later remade Russia into his own fiefdom while dismantling the nation’s fledgling democracy of all but its most superficial forms, could be said to be as much of a thug as Prigozhin on many levels, even if a more polished and articulate one. Both St. Petersburg natives who made good, Putin went to university and Prigozhin went to prison. You can at once envision Prigozhin with bloody knuckles and Putin filing a nail while ordering a rival tossed out a window. The end result is the same. The two men most likely first encountered one another when the ex-con was in his casino business phase and Putin—who had held a number of significant political positions in the city—was serving as chairman of the supervisory board for casino gambling. Over time, they grew to be close associates, and even friends of a sort, with Prigozhin growing fabulously wealthy off government contracts awarded to his catering business. As Putin evolved from president to autocrat, he came to govern Russia much like an organized crime family, with his oligarchs—whose fortunes depended upon his favor—acting as loyal capos. Corruption clung to every corridor of Russian government and society. It suited Prigozhin well: he became a jet-setter who owned his own jets, and he moved into a compound that sported both a basketball court and a helicopter pad. And he diversified: some of his riches were pumped into Prigozhin’s so-called “Internet Research Agency,” a Russian troll factory later infamous for US election interference as it promoted Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton’s candidacy through a web of social media bots.

But it was as head of the Wagner Group that Prigozhin cemented his stature as a key oligarch closely aligned with Putin. A private military group that offered Russia plausible deniability in covert actions abroad, Wagner operated ruthlessly in geographies as remote from the Kremlin as Africa and the Middle East. Many found it impossible to unsee the widely circulated 2017 video of Wagner mercenaries first torturing and then using a sledgehammer to beat to death a deserter from the Syrian army. The sledgehammer became an unofficial Wagner emblem. But long before Syria, Wagner filled the ranks of the so-called “little green men” of professional soldiers with no insignia who appeared suddenly in 2014 in Crimea and in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, euphemistically identified by Moscow as organic separatists eager to secede and join the Russian Federation.

Putin’s brand of neofascist irredentism drew heavily on Hitler’s playbook. The Austrian Anschluss was almost effortlessly replayed in Crimea. And the Donbas would be the new Sudetenland. Meanwhile, Prigozhin and his Wagner Group would be the poorly disguised blunt instruments on the ground—as well as on plenty of other grounds, where shadow wars were conducted on distant continents and Russian power could be unofficially and mercilessly enforced. But absorbing eastern Ukraine proved a stubborn objective. And the West responded with economic sanctions rather than appeasement. Perhaps Poland 1939 would make for a better model?

On February 24, 2022, tanks rolled in, an act of unprovoked aggression not seen in Europe since World War II. But Russian ambitions turned out to be overoptimistic, to say the least. Putin expected to occupy Kyiv in a matter of days, but that was not to be. Ukraine held out. Joe Biden was president, not Donald Trump; Europe and NATO stood firm. But this spawned new opportunities for Prigozhin: he could rip off the mask, take Wagner out of the closet, and operate freely in Ukraine with his mercenaries as well as convicts recruited from Russia’s penal system. Yet, the war dragged on. Gains were few, Russian losses were magnified. Military effectiveness was handicapped by a culture of corruption not dissimilar to that which marked the rest of the state. Frustration fueled Prigozhin’s conviction that the stalemate might be broken if he was in charge, if only things could be done his way. He developed a heightened sense of self-importance. He clashed with high echelons of the military machine as well as with rival Russian nationalists. He made a lot of enemies. Still, Putin gave his old friend a lot of leash—until the day that Prigozhin came to believe his own bullshit. Putin’s chef proved to be the recipe for his own undoing.

Putin’s Sledgehammer is a magnificent book, but its inherent complexity and the level of detail it contains hardly makes for an easy read. I had the advantage of coming to it after previously poring through volumes by Peter Conradi on Russia, Thomas De Waal on the Caucuses, Serhii Plokhy on Ukraine, and Timothy Snyder on geopolitics. A talented writer whose work is based upon impeccable research, Candace Rondeaux ranks among those esteemed authors, but her work is not for beginners. Maps and a timeline would have been helpful. There’s also a dizzying array of characters, organizations, acronyms, etc. that are hard to keep track off, especially for those unfamiliar with Russian names and places. She does include a somewhat comprehensive table of principal players, but because these are arranged by association rather than alphabetically it is less helpful than it should be. Still, these are quibbles. This book will likely not only come to be considered the definitive biography of Yevgeny Prigozhin, but will certainly be counted as an extremely valuable contribution to the historiography in ongoing studies of the contemporary Russian state.

I have previously reviewed these other related books that are recommended reading:

Review of: Who Lost Russia?: How the World Entered a New Cold War, by Peter Conradi 

Review of: The Caucasus: An Introduction, by Thomas De Waal

Review of: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

Review of: The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy

Review of: The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder