Porter鈥檚 Year in Books

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2024

5,220

pages read

books read

Porter Broyles

The Zimmerman telegraph by Barbara W. Tuchman

Shortest Book

pages

Longest Book

800

pages

Average book length in 2024

474

pages

Most Shelved

203,458

people also shelved

Least Shelved

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Porter鈥檚 average rating for 2024

3.5

Highest Rated on 欧宝娱乐

4.44 average

South to Freedom by Alice L. Baumgartner

Porter鈥檚 first review of the year

liked it

Oh man, this is such a difficult book to review.

On the one hand, this is the book that Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Mythaspired to be. I absolutely deplore that book. The authors of that book relied upon emotional outrage and preached to the choir in controverial language. South to Freedom uses rational thought and experience to show that Texas history is not as prestine as the Texas Gov would like us to believe. South to Fr Oh man, this is such a difficult book to review.

On the one hand, this is the book that Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Mythaspired to be. I absolutely deplore that book. The authors of that book relied upon emotional outrage and preached to the choir in controverial language. South to Freedom uses rational thought and experience to show that Texas history is not as prestine as the Texas Gov would like us to believe. South to Freedom would be a book that I would highly recommend to anybody interested in the role of slavery in Texas. It does not present anything radically new that you can't find in other books, but it does present Texas' history from a perspective that most people have not encountered.

This boks does an excptional job at talking about how Mexico and it's Anti-Slavery stance affected Stephen Austin's colonies, the early Texas Republic, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War.

To this extent the book would have earned 4, MAYBE even 5 stars. So why do I only give it 3 stars?

Because the book perports to be about the slaves who escaped to Mexico.

Some books are written at a 30,000 foot level---high level over view of the subect. Some at a 5000 foot level---mostly at a high level. Then some are written at sea level---focusing on specific people/event.

The title implies the later 2. Either it is a high level review with specific details; or it is at sea level talking about specific slaves that escapes. In the first half of the book, we only encounter 3 named slaves. The first escaped New Orleans and feld to San Antonio (which was part of Mexico at the time). We don't encounter another named slave until after the Texas Revolution when Joe and his compatriot flee to Mexico. While the story of Joe, one of the few survivors of The Alamo, is told, the escape to Mexico merits only the concluding paragraph of the chapter. The revelation of these slaves is not new.

This book was at the 30,000 foot level. Unfortunately, it did extremely little to talk about slave who escaped to Mexico. It does not talk about how slaves escaped. While an underground railroad existed in the North, no comperable system existed in Texas.

One of the big issues missing in the book was how slaves escaped to Mexico before Mexico allowed empressario's to work towards populating the Texas territory. The book The Mexican American Experience in Texas: Citizenship, Segregation, and the Struggle for Equality does a great job at introducing the idea about how slaves fled to Mexico. In that book, we discover that escaped slaves were granted certain priviledges and rights upon their arrival in Tejas Mexico. They were able to become property owners, inter-marry with Mexicans, and even hold political offices.

That book talks about some of the challenges that newly arrived Americans faced when confronting community leaders who were either escaped slaves or descendents of such. The fact that Mexico did not allow for the "one drop rule", challenged white communities. That book talks about how between 90-95% of the American immigrants to Texas came from slave states. It covers the challenges the Republic of Texas had to navigate ofter gaining independence.

This book did not mention any of that in it's history.

If this book was present as a book about Texas-Mexico and how the role of slavery affected their relationship, it would have been a 4 or 5 star review. As written and the lack of development of the title's thesis, it merits just 3. ...more

笔翱搁罢贰搁鈥橲 2024 BOOKS

Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism by Thomas Brothers

it was amazing

Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum

really liked it

Porter鈥檚 last review of the year

liked it

What a great and frustrating book.

I've been interested in the Wide Awakes ever since I first learned about them in Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Future books talked about them, but never more than a paragraph or so. I've always suspected that there was more to the story.

Grinspan's book proved there was. The Wide Awakes were a much more prominent and important group than we realized.

This book is absolutely fascinating in that it covers ...more

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