This morning I completed a book I've been reading for the last few weeks. It stands as not only one of best books I've read this year so far, but one of the finest novels I've ever read. The book is From Sea To Shining Sea by James Alexander Thom (Ballantine Books, 1984). Readers of historical fiction may already be familiar with Thom, but those are aren't but wish to be wholly absorbed into the Clark family (including Revolutionary War hero and founder of the state of Kentucky General George Rogers Clark and his younger brother General William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition) should slip into its welcoming pages. The mass market paperback runs 879 pages of small print, but allow me to assure you that no pages are wasted and the epic scope of the story (in effect three interconnected novels) warrants the page count. Thom wrote this novel with an ear for language, a tremendous amount of research, no shortage of humor, and a thankful lack of post-modernism, ironic detachment, or contrived political revisionism. I will resort to the enamored reader's cliche and admit that, truly, I fell in love with these characters. At times I'd find myself drifting into the once-pristine and unchartered America (harsh, beautiful) that these characters (real people, all) moved through. From Sea To Shining Sea is a marvel.

"Give 'em a joke, and a song, and a dream o' glory."