Ted Franklin Belue's 3 favorite reads in 2024

American Indian revivalism did not begin with the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa but it is their shared vision that is best known, even though their plea for a return to the old ways failed—as did most prophetic Nativist movements.

Part one tells the brothers’ backstories. The second marks Tenskwatawa’s rise as a prophet and Tecumseh’s ascendancy as charismatic leader. Part three’s drama of tragedy and loss is set against the War of 1812—a tale of aggression framed in alcohol-fueled cultural despondency, vanishing game, and broken treaties.

Readers will value the author’s compression, geographic clarity and depiction of Tecumseh’s dealings with American and Native leaders. Cozzens is a factually meticulous superb story-teller, making Tecumseh and the Prophet a solid piece of historical truth driven by a brisk narrative.

How can a civilization be abruptly destroyed?

In The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, acclaimed military historian Victor Davis Hanson posits how an imperialistic power through catastrophic defeat mingled with hubris, failing resources, technological disparities, inequities in war, and naiveté—like underestimating the prowess and determination of one’s foe—can rapidly perish.

For proof, VDH analyzes how the total military, cultural, and societal losses of four empires—Alexander’s razing of Thebes, Rome’s obliteration of Carthage, Islam’s reordering of Constantinople, and Spain’s erasure of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan—resulted in their abrupt disappearance.

Reading this well-researched, harrowing work of imagination and skill leaves a reader unsettled as to the fate of America’s imperial omnipresence and global order in light of uncomfortable truths revealed herein. Not to be missed.

Ernest Hemingway's minimalist prose in The Sun Also Rises captured a nation’s post-war angst. His Green Hills of Africa and Death in the Afternoon defined “He-Man” masculinity. Joan Didion, Flannery O’Conner, and Hunter S. Thompson are counted among his devotees. 

Beneath the façade was an unstable man who drank unendingly, wrecked marriages, and taunted death until his own abruptly came. Losing his first wife Hadley forever imprinted him.

A.E. Hotchner edited for Hem, drank with him, and commiserated. In Hemingway in Love: His Own Story, he recreates their conversational snippets from the writer’s definitive era. Eavesdropping on Hem and Hadley at bars and bullfights, we are privy to a movable feast of Parisian romance and gossipy tales of the “Lost Generation” and beyond, ending at St. Mary’s psychiatric ward.