About this title: This novel intriguingly rewrites an actual historical event. In 1854, a Cheyenne chief requested that the U.S. Army provide a thousand white brides for the young warriors in his tribe. The U.S., of course, refused, but Fergus considers what might have happened if a "Brides for Indians" program had been instituted. One of the brides is a volunteer, a woman who was about to be institutionalized by her family for an unfortunate love affair, and the novel is primarily her story, as she must choose between an Indian chief and a U.S. Army captain.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Good. 1999-Paperback----Used-Good-Hall Street Books proudly ships from Brooklyn, NY. All orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours, M-F. 100% money back No-Worry guarantee with expedited delivery and delivery confirmation available. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780312180089ISBN:031218008X
Description: Fine in fine dust jacket. Lightly read. Nicely kept. Clean and bright. Owner's initials inside front cover, else pristine. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 304 p. Audience: General/trade. May Dodd may be the most compelling fictional character since Little Big Man-the story of the Old West, and women's place in that hard world. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Date Published: 1999-02-15
ISBN-13:9780312199432ISBN:0312199430
Description: Very good. One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd. Privately owned. Paperback. Pages are clean and free from markings and/or highlighting, with tight binding. Very nice copy. 949. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780312199432ISBN:0312199430
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Pages are clean, several are dog-eared; wraps have fore edge lift. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 304 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Edition: 3rd ed.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780312199432ISBN:0312199430
Description: Fine. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 304 p. Audience: General/trade. Book is in excellent condition. Cover and pages are clean, binding is tight. We ship daily, Satisfaction Guaranteed. read more
Edition: 3rd ed.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780312199432ISBN:0312199430
Description: Fair. No dust jacket as issued. Ex-library. Usual library markings and stickers, several pages are dog-eared, wraps have edge curl. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 304 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Griffin, New York, New York, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780312199432ISBN:0312199430
Description: Very Good. 8vo-over 7 3/4"-9 3/4" tall. 394 pages. Tight binding, clean and crisp text. A hint of shelf wear, and some light soiling from dust to edges, otherwise better than Very Good. No inscriptions. No reading creases to spine. Not ex-library. A very good and solid copy. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780312199432ISBN:0312199430
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Good+, page edges are stained, one is dog-eared, bumped at the fore edge corners, as are the wraps. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 304 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
"If this book was not assigned to me for my book club, I wouldn't have wasted my time to read it. Not only is Fergus' novel, overly sentimental, historically inaccurate, misogynistic, it is racist towards Native Americans. AND it's all told in my least favorite method of narration: the journal entry. Chapters will often begin with, "So much has happened since my last entry, I don't know where to begin...." This is an easy tool to push time forward, and overdone in poorly written novels.
Fergus' novel was chosen for the Doubleday Book Club, which means that publishers have no idea what women read. It's true that women are the main demographic in Book Clubs, but that doesn't mean that we only want to read women "survival stories," (let alone one poorly written by a man.)"
I received your letter of 20 January 1876, accompanied by portions of your journal, and, in short, I'm not falling for it. They sound like they were written sometime in the 1990s, and probably by a man. While I found many reasons to come to this conclusion, the biggest giveaways were your obsession with penis size and the fact that your signature was followed by an AOL e-mail address.
Sincerely, Disgruntled Reader
OK, that was a bit harsh and if for some reason Mr. Fergus is reading this review, I want to say to him: I didn't completely dislike "One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd," and I give you credit for trying to adopt the viewpoint of not just a woman, but a woman from more than a century ago. That took balls. Unfortunately for your readers, those balls weren't backed up by brains.
While Fergus obviously did a lot of research to learn about the culture of the Cheyenne nation and other Indian tribes -- he even shows his work by giving us a bibliography -- he completely fails to transport his readers back to an earlier time. That's the most basic requirement of any historical novel. Few pages go by in which Fergus doesn't attribute to May Dodd words and ideas that would be completely foreign to any woman living in the 1870s -- even a woman as progressive as May is supposed to be. For most of the novel, May sounds less like a 19th century woman of any background or educational level, and more like a Volvo-driving Web designer from San Francisco who's on her way to pick up her daughter at soccer practice, has to drop her off at the ex-husband's for his weekend visitation, and then, before going to her newly purchased fixer-upper in the Mission District, plans to stop by the polling place to vote for Dianne Feinstein.
Small examples: May repeatedly refers to another character as an "amateur ethnographer," describes herself as being "agnostic" when it comes to religion, characterizes herself as being as "big as a house" when pregnant, and says that a woman who ends her pregnancy "aborted" the baby. These are simply not words or ideas that any woman living in the 1870s would use, and especially not as casually as she does. This may sound like nitpicking, but there's never a point in the whole book in which even the most forgiving reader could honestly say to herself, "This can't possibly be a novel. He must have actually found May Dodd's lost journals from the 1870s." And yet that's what we the readers are apparently expected to do, at least according to Fergus's "Reading Group Gold" notes in the back of the edition I read.
There are other annoyances too. Many of the characters are given cutesy names that reflect their personalities and interests. The woman who studies and paints birds is named, unsurprisingly, Helen Flight, while a self-important and prudish character is, naturally, Narcissa White, and a dainty Southern belle is, wait for it, Daisy Lovelace. And, aside from giving characters lines and viewpoints that feel anachronistic, Fergus also makes passing reference to things that simply didn't exist in the 1870s. Hey, Jim, there was no Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra in 1875. Even the city's earliest such orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, wasn't formed until 16 years later. (Thanks, Wikipedia.) If you're trying to really make us believe we're reading a recovered journal, this is not the way to do it. Why not just give the Indian chief a BlackBerry, and President Ulysses S. Grant a subscription to Us Weekly?
All right, I've been nasty enough. There is a reason I gave "One Thousand White Women" two stars instead of one. Aside from the anachronisms, the book is reasonably well-written, and the story is compelling and relatively fast-paced. That makes up for some of the novel's faults. But you know what would have made the novel ten times better? Given that we're supposed to be reading the journals of a woman who's first diagnosed as insane, and then becomes a bride to an Indian chief under a secret government program, why come right out and reveal to your readers that she wasn't actually crazy and really did join a Cheyenne tribe? Why not leave it an open question, and let your readers decide for themselves whether the program was real or May Dodd was just nuts? That, perhaps, would make for a better novel.
On a side note, it was interesting to read Fergus's novel right after finishing Daniel Defoe's "Moll Flanders," and less than a year after reading Larry McMurtry's "Telegraph Days." What do the three have in common? Each novel is told from a woman's point, was written by a man, and focuses on a woman who are far more liberated and self-directed than her female contemporaries. While McMurtry's book was not a lot better than Fergus's (though it was a lot more fun), neither of them should even be mentioned in the same sentence as "Moll Flanders." (Oops.) It's impossible to imagine either one being widely read almost three centuries from now, as Defoe's 1722 novel is today."
"One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd is a very interesting and original book. In 1854 a Cheyenne chief proposed a plan to exchange 1000 horses for 1000 white brides for his warriors. The plan was rejected, but Fergus basis his fictional novel on a similar situation set in 1875. In the novel, the Cheyenne are promised 1000 white brides, and May Dodd, resident of an insane asylum, is one of the women selected. The character May Dodd was a strong woman and her story was compelling.
1875 finds May Dodd living in an insane asylum in Chicago. Her parents placed her there unwillingly because she was living with a man of a much lower social station without the benefit of marriage. May and her lover had two children together, and her wealthy parents used her promiscuity as means to have her committed. The asylum is a hopeless place, and May misses her beloved children greatly. When she is offered the opportunity to go west as a bride for a Cheyenne warrior in order to help assimilate the tribe into the white culture, she decides that this may be her only possibility of leaving the asylum. She journeys west with a group of other "brides," many of them from prisons or other undesirable situations. On the journey to meet her bridegroom, May comes to have deep feelings for an army officer. Knowing that their relationship is hopeless, May resolutely goes to her new home with the Cheyenne. She finds her new husband to be a man of honor, and she greatly respects him. As May and the other women who journeyed with her settle into their new lives, the U.S. government decides not to honor their bargain but to instead force these Cheyenne to a reservation. When violence strikes the Cheyenne in the form of the U.S. Army, many of the brides and their new families come to a tragic end.
I enjoyed this book. I quickly became caught up in the story, and was saddened by the tragic end that came to many of the characters. May Dodd was an unusual, but likeable heroine. I enjoyed the manner in which the beginning and end of the book take place in the present with one of her desendants searching for information about May after the family story of her dying in the Chicago asylum is derailed."
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