The Eagle and the Raven

this is a quick and easy read about the history that helped create the state of texas, and the men sam houston and santa anna. it's not a super interesting subject to me, but he handles it well enough, and made the history into a fast read. i will say that he talks about sam houston's friendship with andrew jackson, and the way he (very briefly) describes jackson does make me question just about everything else, character-wise. i know that michener always writes from such a white man's perspective, but to think positively of andrew jackson, or not mention his dealings with the native americans? i can only assume that sam houston - a white man who lived among them - was just as bad, but he never even mentioned it...

With a possible move to Houston in our future, I ran across this book and decided that I should learn something about Sam Houston himself. Though Michener spends a good share of this surprisingly thin (for Michener!) book talking about his writing in his later years (in the preface), and though he gives more of his own opinions toward the end about the figures of Houston and Santa Anna then he might have in a novel, I found the actual stories that he tells quite entertaining and interesting and probably a little more raw than you would find in a history text. This was purportedly a section that was edited from his novel, Texas. I think it was a good idea to publish it on its own.

This is an interesting study of rivals Santa Anna and Sam Houston, their backgrounds, their personalities, and their circumstances that brought them to the decisive Battle of San Jacinto on 21 April 1836. The battle lasted only 18 minutes and determined the future of Texas.

However, the Prologue to the book was nearly as interesting as the book. In it, Michener revealed how he happened to write ten books and publish seven of them between 1986 and 1990, keeping in mind that it usually took him three years to write one book.

Compares adversaries, Santa Anna and Sam Houston.