James H. Street (1903–1954)

A story about a boy finding a rare basenji "laughing and crying" in the woods, and ... well, it's a proper book with a good deal of age to it.

No one really talks in writing like this anymore, it's a mess of words like "heah" instead of yeah and "howdied", and "som'n" which makes reading it quickly a mess of going back over these words. I've not seen the word Som'nt in a long long long time, if more than once.

I'd like to say I felt for the bond Skeeter has with Lady/Isis of the Blue Nile(what a name), but he is pretty easy to let her go and then switch gears to getting a hundred dollars worth of the reward. It's a very sharp change in the literature. An acceptance most kids simply do not have in them. Skeeter gives up and gives up hard and that's basically it.

To quote the book's weird speeches, reading this was brisk and slick as el'em.… (mais)

4788. Tap Roots. by James Street (read 2 Jan 2011) This is the second book of a pentology on the Dabney family. This volume opens with the death of Sam Dabney and relates the effort of his supposed son, Hoab Dabney, to resist secession. There is a tangled love affair involving two of Hoab's daughters and Clay , who becomes an officer in the Confederate Army and eventually leads a force against Hoab's forces after marrying Hoab's daughter. The book is a bit slow-moving but is not bad reading though one is bothered by the irrational actions of some of the characters. I would not mind reading the next volume in the series, entitled By Valor and Arms, since at the close of this volume the Civil War is not yet over.… (mais)

4152 Good-bye, My Lady, by James Street (read 11 Apr 2006) Street was a well-known author back in the 1940s and 1950s, though I don't remember hearing of him. This is a boys' story, published as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post in 1941 or so and published as a book in 1954, telling of a boy in Mississippi swamp territory who lives with his uncle. They are dirt poor. The boy comes to find a dog--a Basenji (a breed I'd never heard of, which rarely barks but makes other noises)--and trains him and they become best buddies. Then he learns the dog belongs to somebody else, in Connecticut. The denouement is poignant in the extreme, and I was amazed at how taken I was by the story. It is the best dog story I have read in years.… (mais)