assorted books

Astoria: Astor and Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire, by Peter Stark (HarperCollins, 2015)
Books on the history of US Western exploration usually, after describing Lewis and Clark's journey in great detail, mention briefly that wealthy merchant John Jacob Astor sent a party to establish a fur-trading post, to barter with the natives, at the mouth of the Columbia, the far end of L&C's journey; that they did so, calling it Astoria, but at the outbreak of the war of 1812 a couple years later, they gave in to the threats of the Brits' far stronger navy and sold them their assets, and that was the end of that.*
But you don't hear anything about how Astor's men got there in the first place. This book tells that, in hideous but captivating detail. This was only the second party of whites to cross the continent north of Mexico, and the skill and luck of Lewis & Clark is demonstrated by the terrible time of it these people had, taking nearly two years, including two winters in the wilderness, to get there, losing several people along the way. Meantime, Astor also sent a ship around the Horn, which got there first but also had a terrible time of it, also losing several people along the way. Stark's theory is that, by the time they got there, everyone involved was suffering from PTSD, which is why they were so inert about getting the post set up. Other weird events included the destruction of the ship by a suicide bomber. Yes, in 1811.

The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press, by Calvin Trillin (Random House, 2024)
Not as consistently interesting as Trillin's previous retrospective collection of a half century of journalism, Jackson, 1964, and Other Dispatches, which covers racial issues. This one mixes serious articles with humorous pieces, and the problem is that, in classic New Yorker style (where much of this originally appeared), many of the serious reports are far longer than any possible interest the reader might have in the subject. I guess it depends on your inherent interest, because the one on the rise of the satirical redneck movie reviewer Joe Bob Briggs did not become wearisome. It seemed to me that the trouble with Joe Bob began when the paper didn't take enough care to mark the satire off, for instance mixing Joe Bob's four-star ratings of splatter films with the regular reviewer's two-star ratings of serious films.

*However, the fact that the Americans were able to establish a post there before the British in the first place - the Brits kept finding the wrong rivers when they were trying to float downstream from the upper end of the Columbia in what is now B.C. - plus Lewis and Clark, plus an American ship having made the whites' discovery of the mouth of the Columbia in the first place (which is why the river is called that), contributed to a U.S. claim to the area, which is why Oregon and Washington are U.S. territory today, and there's a town called Astoria on the site of the Astor post. It was because I was going there that I bought this book at Powell's in Portland, though I didn't read it until after I got home.