Home Forums Miscellaneous Topics Movie, Book, and Music Review Holt Collier and The Last Jew

Both of these are kind of obscure so I thought I'd post a review.

Holt Collier, by Minor Ferris Buchanan, is a biography of the hunter who guided Theodore Roosevelt on his famous Mississippi bear hunt in 1902, givng rise to the whole Teddy Bear thing. I was generally familiar with the story, but a friend whose old family place and relatives are mentioned in the book gave it to me because she knows I like hunting and am a TR fan. Turns out Collier was a black man who was a slave of Colonel Howell Hinds, served in uniform in the CSA in the Ninth Texas Cavalry through three years of fighting, killed two white men after the war---one a Yankee captain of which he was acquitted by a court martial during reconstruction, the other a corrupt Louisiana deputy sheriff who by universal public opinion "needed killing" and for which he was never indicted, killed more than 3,000 black bears, and was generally one hell of a man. A great read.

The Last Jew by Noah Gordon is about a boy who is left behind when his family is all killed or exiled when Ferdinand and Isabella kicked the Jews out of Spain during the Inquisiton in the late 1400s. He survives on the run his whole life in a hostile Spain, hunted by the Inquisition, which was burning any Jews thay could find at the stake. Lots of historical details of a period with which I was not very familiar.