The Last Camel Charge – An intriguing look at America’s pre-Civil War desert military experiment – #bookreview

The Last Camel Charge: The Untold Story of America’s Desert Military Experiment
Forrest Bryant Johnson
(Berkley Caliber, hardback – Kindle)

The U.S. Army employed camels as transportation and pack animals in the American West during the mid-19^th century and tried to create “a U.S. camel cavalry, a true camel corps,” the author of this fascinating history work notes.

Initially headquartered near San Antonio, Texas, the fledgling camel corps soon became involved in expeditions of discovery, as well as fighting in several areas.

The notable actions included a victorious camel charge against Mojave Indians in the Arizona Territory and helping naval lieutenant Edward Beale’s successfully create a wagon trail from Texas to California.

The Civil War ended the camel corps experiment, the author shows. But Union and Confederate forces both used camels during the conflict, and the last U.S. Army camel died in captivity in 1934.

Meanwhile, rumors abound that a few wild camels, distant offspring of the Camel Corps, are still alive and roaming the most desolate and isolated areas of the American Southwest. Indeed, the author notes, several wild camels were photographed near a West Texas railroad track in 2003.

– Si Dunn

Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present – #bookreview #in #music

Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present
Jean A. Boyd
(Texas Tech University Press, hardback, list price $65.00; paperback, list price $39.95)

Fans of 1930s and 1940s western swing will find plenty to enjoy in this entertaining book by Jean A. Boyd, a  Baylor University music history professor and native of Fort Worth, Texas.

She celebrates the distinctive music and its Texas roots and highlights several groups that, unlike Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, did not or have not made it into the national spotlight.

Yet these bands have picked, fiddled, strummed and sung their way to regional stardom in Texas and Oklahoma.

Her book likely will also appeal to musicologists and performers. She includes musical analysis and transcriptions of recorded performances, as well as histories and recollections.

– Si Dunn 

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ActionScript Developer’s Guide to PureMVC – Hands-on learning for experienced developers – #programming #bookreview

ActionScript Developer’s Guide to PureMVC
By Cliff Hall
(Adobe Developer Library and O’Reilly Media, paperback, list price $29.99; Kindle edition, list price $13.99)

A key concept in this book is “code at the speed of thought.” And the book is written for a very specialized audience, according to Cliff Hall, architect of the Open Source PureMVC Framework.

“ActionScript developers who are interested in, or are already working with PureMVC, will gain usable insights,” Hall says, “although Adobe Flex and AIR developers will be best served, as the example application is written with AIR.”

He also notes that “developers who are using or learning any of the PureMVC ports to other programming languages could certainly use this book as a basis for understanding the framework classes and how they are used.”

ActionScript is one of the dialects of ECMAScript, which is used most often for client-side scripting of programs that are executed on users’ web browsers. (JavaScript is one of the other ECMAScript dialects.)

Where PureMVC fits into the picture is in its ability to help developers get their work done faster.

“Too often in the development of a large application,” Hall emphasizes, “the developer must stop and think about where to find some class he needs, where some new class should go, and how to wire them up in such a way that gets data from wherever it lives to a display so the user can interact with it or vice-versa.”

He continues: “Regardless of the high level complexities in your application, you will never truly be doing anything more involved at the lower levels than moving data from point A to point B and occasionally doing some calculations on it. You should not have to keep inventing ways to do it; instead, your energy should be focused on the requirements of your current use case.”

So this is where “code at the speed of thought” comes in, with help from PureMVC.

“PureMVC is a simple framework,” Hall says, “that helps reduce the amount of time spent thinking about these low level issues by providing solutions for organizing your code and an expression of the well known Model-View-Controller concept based on several time proven design patterns.”

Despite that somewhat wordy sentence of introduction, Hall generally delivers clear, concise explanations. And his paragraphs are highlighted with numerous code examples and illustrations.

His 239-page book is divided into 10 chapters:

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Building an Application with PureMVC
• Chapter 3: Modelling the Domain
• Chapter 4: Implementing the User Interface
• Chapter 5: Proxying the Model
• Chapter 6: Mediating the View
• Chapter 7: Applying Business Logic
• Chapter 8: Advanced Model Topics
• Chapter 9: Advanced View Topics
• Chapter 10: Onward

That final chapter includes using a debugger with PureMVC, PureMVC utilities and a listing of some other resources.

For experienced developers seeking to know more about PureMVC, this book can provide a good hands-on guide to learning its fundamentals.

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– Si Dunn is a novelist, screenwriter, freelance book reviewer, and former software technical writer and software/hardware QA test specialist. He also is a former newspaper and magazine photojournalist. His latest book is Dark Signals, a Vietnam War memoir available now in paperback. He is the author of a detective novel, Erwin’s Law, a novella, Jump, and several other books and short stories.

The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill – #bookreview

The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill
By William F. Cody, edited and with an introduction by Frank Christianson
(University of Nebraska Press, paperback, list price $27.95)

“Buffalo Bill” Cody was one hell of a frontiersman and self-promoter, at a time when Americans were hungry for Wild West heroes.

William F. Cody published his part-fiction, part-true illustrated autobiography in 1879, at age 33, recounting his adventures (to that point) as an explorer, Indian fighter, buffalo hunter, Pony Express rider, temporary Medal of Honor winner, and theatrical entertainer.

This new reprint of Buffalo Bill’s book (the original version; others followed) has been edited and provided with a well-written introduction and three appendices by Frank Christianson, an associate professor of English at Brigham Young University. Christianson is author of Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells. Twenty-six additional images and photographs related to Buffalo Bill also have been added.

One helpful feature of Christianson’s book is a chronology of William F. Cody’s event-filled and promotion-filled life. He was born in an Iowa farmhouse in 1846 and lived long enough to become a movie producer four years before his death in 1917.

Interestingly, William F. Cody”s autobiography made it to print just as his frontier career was ending and his career as a stage entertainer and promoter was taking off. Within four years, his “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” show would be on its way to becoming, in Christianson’s words, “one of the most popular traveling exhibitions in entertainment history.” 

Christianson notes: “William Cody’s seventy-one years were a time of accelerating change in America, and he found himself in the midst of many of the era’s most defining events. Like the ever-shifting boundary of the American frontier, Cody’s life was characterized by frenetic movement.”

Christianson points out that ”Cody, like his father, was an indefatigable entrepreneur” who tried his hand at many things, including unsuccessfully attempting to manage an inn and create a town, but succeeding as a buffalo hunter and military scout, two occupations which “had the most direct bearing upon his future celebrity.”

William F. Cody’s book and Frank Christianson’s expanding materials add up to some very entertaining and informative reading. Yes, Buffalo Bill left behind a legacy often based on self-interest and inflated images of life and events in the American West. But the Honorable William F. Cody also made, Christianson contends, ”a valuable contribution to the records of our Western frontier history.”

– Si Dunn‘s latest book is a detective novel, Erwin’s Law. His other published works include Jump, a novella, and a book of poetry, plus several short stories, including The 7th Mars Cavalry, all available on Kindle. He is a freelance book reviewer and a former technical writer and software/hardware QA test specialist.