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This is one of those books that should replace whatever sanitized history text is promulgated in public schools these days (I'm extrapolating from my school days). Even now, for me this was an eye opener, I hadn't realized the Trail of Tears was not a singular event but a decades long campaign of ethnic cleansing in an unholy alliance of slave owners, wannabe slave owners, real estate speculators, a president with genocidal tendencies (how is he still on the twenty dollar bill?), and New York bankers (what else is new).

Even for those in the genocide-is-bad camp, there's plenty of stereotype-confounding nuance to be learned, like how many Native Americans had thriving farms (including some with slaves, although they tended to be treated better, relatively, sometimes given their own farms like feudal serfs), many applied for citizenship and titles to their land (turns out that "come assimilate with us" was a bluff), and race was not such a notion within Native American society, there were tribes including African Americans and mixed race families. Also, the accounts of how cholera decimated populations in their forced cramp conditions (some on their journey west refused to be packed into steamboats) should turn you into a pro-masker.

I expected a lot about the ordeal of battle and valor and patriotism, and there is plenty of that, but nearly as much attention is paid to the aftermath, how the experience affected the veterans of that campaign, standing out even for those who later fought in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and how the media and political circus, and really the public essentially appropriated (and mischaracterized) the famous flag raising moment on Iowa Jima for their own needs.

I do feel the author glosses over racial issues, emphasizing how PTSD issues were not well recognized or treated back then (or less well, anyway), but in the process somewhat casually dismissing the element of race in the troubled life (and untimely early death, after all he had survived) of the Native American flag-raiser. Then there's the offhand mention of the "Japanese-American relocation" ("internment" is already bland terminology for a concentration camp). And the nostalgic quote "We were one people back then" ignores how a large portion of the population were still second class citizens (segregation and anti-miscegenation laws were still a thing) and some white workers in the south went on strike rather than work with African-Americans.

Nevertheless, as much as any other war history book I've read (I can't believe this one was rejected twenty-six times by publishers), it brings home the grisliness of and inhumanity of war (Japan has never had the same reckoning with the racism and atrocities of its past that Germany has), the utter callousness and dubious competence of upper management (the Navy limited pre-invasion bombardment of Iwo Jima for bureaucratic and political reasons), and the emotional wounds it left on the survivors, who didn't feel they were heroes because they were the ones who survived.

It's not one of the more scintillating rivalries, with legendary wordsmiths essaying lengthy accusations and protestations often anonymously in sensationalist newspapers (some things never change), but if you have any interest in dictionaries or even just wondered what happened to all the English u's (it's a hassle with open source code, American programmers must suffer entrenched variables named "colour"), this book explains how the Quixote-like Webster (yes, that Webster) tried to define a distinctly American English and the dictionary disputes that ensued. It also explains how Merriam of Merriam-Webster got into the act (and how in a rivalry of ideologies it's still the unscrupulous business people who win), what's with all the Webster dictionaries without the Webster name (it's public domain now, go ahead, write a dictionary and call it Webster's), and leaves us lamenting the forgotten fame of word wizard Worcester (still rememberd as a sauce, oops that's Worcestershire, and a Boston-area T stop). But Americans were the winners with a heightened interest in (now) their language and a stream of dictionaries since then (alas, the lengthy list in the appendix does not include Wiktionary). I'm kind of curious whether any of this affected the development of dictionaries in other languages, too.

The one thing that everyone comments on is how confusing it is that the chronology is in reverse, and I have to agree, although maybe it would work out better in a movie. But I don't want to criticize too much for trying something innovative, and maybe the author selected this structure because the childhood years, despite receiving less lengthy and meticulous treatment, were the most amazing, that a kid who was considered hopeless by his teachers and didn't last more than a few years in school (who knows what would have happened to his intellectual curiosity if his mother hadn't been so aggressively supportive and home-schooled him) and hit the railroad tracks as an itinerant telegraph operator in his early teens, lost most of his hearing at age twelve, and was broke until his self-taught inventing paid off. And even in the rest of his life, he spent as much as he made, always investing not just his money but all his time in bringing his ideas to fruition, so really, the later years were as inspiring (notwithstanding the occasional union busting, but he was no Henry Ford). There are obvious comparisons to current day tech entrepreneurs, but really there is no comparison, and the same with this bio, it's meticulous treatment, not a hagiography, with the bibliography itself spanning thirty pages.