Carol’s review of Cahokia Jazz > Likes and Comments
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I'm not a Catholic.
Well, this is unexpected. I apologize for my intemperate remarks. There were a lot of things I found problematic about your book, but I'm so flattered that you noticed my review!
Carol, thank you. Perhaps unfair to turn up out of the blue like this, so I'm sorry too. You are fully entitled to take the book any way you want, and to find it problematic. It's just that I *didn't* write it as a Catholic propaganda. I clearly find the Catholic record in the New World more mixed than you do, with some splendours as well as horrors, especially down in the Jesuit towns for the Guarani down in Paraguay, which I borrowed for the history of Cahokia. But I got there at all by a process which went: to survive at all with any autonomy, a native state would need lots of technology transfer and a powerful outside sponsor. After that, the Cahokia that resulted had to be a mixture. One I think would still have been worth keeping. I'm not enough of an optimist to think there could have been an indigenous society *untouched* by the European settlement. And for me, the Moon's ruthlessness was meant to stand for the tragically bad things that the leaders of any society sometimes have to take on themselves for the public good. Anyway, I shall now disappear. I hope you enjoy your next book more!
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Francis
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Apr 19, 2025 04:39AM
I'm not a Catholic.
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Well, this is unexpected. I apologize for my intemperate remarks. There were a lot of things I found problematic about your book, but I'm so flattered that you noticed my review!
Carol, thank you. Perhaps unfair to turn up out of the blue like this, so I'm sorry too. You are fully entitled to take the book any way you want, and to find it problematic. It's just that I *didn't* write it as a Catholic propaganda. I clearly find the Catholic record in the New World more mixed than you do, with some splendours as well as horrors, especially down in the Jesuit towns for the Guarani down in Paraguay, which I borrowed for the history of Cahokia. But I got there at all by a process which went: to survive at all with any autonomy, a native state would need lots of technology transfer and a powerful outside sponsor. After that, the Cahokia that resulted had to be a mixture. One I think would still have been worth keeping. I'm not enough of an optimist to think there could have been an indigenous society *untouched* by the European settlement. And for me, the Moon's ruthlessness was meant to stand for the tragically bad things that the leaders of any society sometimes have to take on themselves for the public good. Anyway, I shall now disappear. I hope you enjoy your next book more!
