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61 reviews for:
Trials of the Earth: The Autobiography of Mary Hamilton
Mary Mann Hamilton, Helen Dick Davis
3.72 AVERAGE
61 reviews for:
Trials of the Earth: The Autobiography of Mary Hamilton
Mary Mann Hamilton, Helen Dick Davis
3.72 AVERAGE
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
sad
medium-paced
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
I received a softcover copy of Trials of the Earth from Little, Brown and Company via Goodreads Giveaways.
Mary Mann Hamilton's Trials of the Earth is consistent with other memoirs of the period in style and content. There's a lot of death and severe weather and strange-seeming ideas about childhood and sentences the author doesn't elaborate on but would be easy to spin a whole miniseries episode around. I have a better time with these types of books if I'm reading "for" something besides entertainment.
Here's the first paragraph:
I would recommend this book if you have a strong interest in women's memoirs, history of the Mississippi Delta, pioneer narratives, etc. If it doesn't seem like something you'd usually read, though, you probably won't find it particularly compelling.
Mary Mann Hamilton's Trials of the Earth is consistent with other memoirs of the period in style and content. There's a lot of death and severe weather and strange-seeming ideas about childhood and sentences the author doesn't elaborate on but would be easy to spin a whole miniseries episode around. I have a better time with these types of books if I'm reading "for" something besides entertainment.
Here's the first paragraph:
In the early 1880s my father brought his family from Missouri down into the wild country of Arkansas that was just beginning to settle up. The Kansas City and Memphis [Railway] was just being graded though, and trains were running only as far as the little sawmill town of Sedgwick, so there we stopped to wait until the road was completed into the prairie country near Jonesboro, where my father expected to buy a home. Within a week he took pneumonia and three days later died, leaving my mother and six children stranded and helpless in a strange country.
I would recommend this book if you have a strong interest in women's memoirs, history of the Mississippi Delta, pioneer narratives, etc. If it doesn't seem like something you'd usually read, though, you probably won't find it particularly compelling.
This book is an autobiography by a woman who was born in 1866, and among the first of the settlers in the forests and swamps of the Mississippi Delta. What a life! The Hamilton family was pummeled by misfortune, and yet the author has such grit and determination that it reads like a gripping adventure story.
The scene that will stay with me is that of the flood--picture standing on a tall stump as the water rises around you and two of your children, losing hope that the canoe will come back for you before it's too late, and having a bear swim right past you on its way to higher ground!
For a "pioneer" story, I was surprised by how viscerally familiar it felt. The Mississippi she writes of 120+ years ago does not seem that far off the present. Though to be fair, I did spend a year in the not too distant past living in a comparatively unplumbed, unheated log cabin underneath the Mississippi long leaf pines. I, too, have laid in bed listening to ice-laden branches overhead and wondering if they were going to come through the roof. Or that evening I sat in the bathtub of that disintegrating toothpick house hugging my pillow as two tornados tracked by at the same time, one a couple miles north and the other a couple miles south. I wonder if all modern day Mississippians would find Mary's story as immediately recognizable? Or was my time there just unusually rugged for the modern era?
The scene that will stay with me is that of the flood--picture standing on a tall stump as the water rises around you and two of your children, losing hope that the canoe will come back for you before it's too late, and having a bear swim right past you on its way to higher ground!
For a "pioneer" story, I was surprised by how viscerally familiar it felt. The Mississippi she writes of 120+ years ago does not seem that far off the present. Though to be fair, I did spend a year in the not too distant past living in a comparatively unplumbed, unheated log cabin underneath the Mississippi long leaf pines. I, too, have laid in bed listening to ice-laden branches overhead and wondering if they were going to come through the roof. Or that evening I sat in the bathtub of that disintegrating toothpick house hugging my pillow as two tornados tracked by at the same time, one a couple miles north and the other a couple miles south. I wonder if all modern day Mississippians would find Mary's story as immediately recognizable? Or was my time there just unusually rugged for the modern era?
Exactly what I wanted in an audiobook. The tale of a pioneer woman, a life lived with grit, Grace, and God.
This book was okay - it just wasn't what I was expecting. I was looking for more of a frontier life/adventure story, but it was more family/neighborly drama.
A 2016 staff favorite recommended by Susie.
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Mary Mann Hamilton (1866-c.1936) was encouraged to write down her memories of being a female pioneer in the Mississippi Delta. She writes in her own voice about a life that modern day readers have no concept of, and might even find a bit fabricated but it's all true. From a manuscript that surfaced more than a half century after it was written, this book has been published before (1992, 2013) but is just now getting the attention that it deserves. Mary writes about living in Arkansas in the early 1880s, when as a teen she met and was forced to marry mysterious Englishman, Frank Hamilton who was an alcoholic 12 years older than her. Mary had a unrelenting, hard life as camp cook for lumberjacks who were clearing the wild Mississippi Delta before it was settled. Floods, infant deaths, betrayals, no electricity or running water and living off the land made for an arduous life and one that is fascinating to read. Her husband Frank supposedly came from an upper-class English family but refused to speak of his past or allow his children to claim their possible foreign inheritance. fascinating read of American history.
Note: I received a free review copy of this book and was not compensated for it.
Note: I received a free review copy of this book and was not compensated for it.
Mary Mann Hamilton's story is well written, engaging, even riveting, and full of the culture and history of the times. That being said, it was also very ugly in places, but even those instances are important historically. For me, not a book to "escape" in, but one in which the harsh realities of the times are laid out for inspection.
interesting but got a bit repetitious the further I went through it.