John Prebble Writer

[MacBean]

No, no, please post here Rex! You are probably as well read on the Jacobite rebellions as anyone here, and I'd really value your comments.

I liked Preble's Culloden. It's definitely not the whole story and doesn't pretend to be in any way. Failure to include important information may be seen as biased, though I don't really see it that way. It's a story from a particular point of view - from the tragic point of view of the soldiers who fought and died, were captured, or escaped. How many American books on the Revolution fail to include the British assumption that we should have been willing to pay taxes to offset the considerable costs of the French and Indian War? Are they then biased?

I'd say go ahead and read Preble, but then read other works on the same subject. Rex once posted a lovely list here.

[IRISH]

i read and loved the clearances and i'm in the middle of glencoe, with culloden on my shelf waiting to be opened. i thought the clearances was a remarkably well written book which i thoroughly enjoyed, just as i am currently enjoying glencoe.

if you have an interest in these events, i strongly recommend that you read the trilogy, perhaps best done in historical chronology (despite my not doing so...)

[Lallans]

Prebble is the best Canadian author I've never read. I've got a twin cloth bound set of his books Culloden and Glencoe all set to go. In the 70s you couldn't throw a billiard ball into a Canadian bookstore without hitting one of them. The Clearances book was less common, probably surpressed so as not to cause rioting.

[figheadair]

Another of his books, often overlooked, is The Lion in the North which is an history of the Scottish Nation and its struggle from foundation up until the '45 era.

[Biathlonman]

I first discovered Prebble's Culloden in the early 70s - and it was a revelation.

There are lots of general Scottish history surveys around, but The Lion in the North is so stylishly written you want to dip into it just to see how he treats even the most mundane event - he was that good a writer. What a stylist he was!

Prebble chose painful and tragic events to write about - but you won't find them handled better by any writer since. Pretty easy to see why he left Canada when he did - his talents would have been wasted here then.

[MacSpadger]

Mutiny is another good Prebble read. I started reading Prebble's book in the 1970's when I was a teenager in Scotland. He seemed to be writing about subjects that people wanted to know about, but that most native Scottish writers wouldn't touch.

[muirkirkca]

One aspect of the Clearances that apparently overdone was that emigrants from Scotland were transported to Canada in the most appalling of sailing ships. A couple of historical presenters as the Scottish Studies spring and fall colloquiums made this point - A number of ships made several crossings with emigrants on board and returned with materials from the colony i.e. wood, furs etc. The Irish didn't fare nearly as well with the coffin ships and high death rates and this source was used in the Clearances.

Anyway both my Scottish ( 1831) and Irish ( 1855 ) ancestors made it successfully to south-west Ontario and were primarily done in by cholera.

Interesting books however.

[Lallans]

Mutiny is another good Prebble read. I started reading Prebble's book in the 1970's when I was a teenager in Scotland. He seemed to be writing about subjects that people wanted to know about, but that most native Scottish writers wouldn't touch.

It happens, after you get to the rude colonies...