FYE Summer Reading: Ludlow   Tags: block 1  

"David Mason's Ludlow is a magnificent novel in verse, meaning it has the speed, concision and accuracy of the best poetry along with the expansiveness and character development of a novel. It tells the searing story of a handful of immigrants - Greek, Mexican, Scottish, Italian - in southern Colorado, climaxing in the Ludlow Massacre of April 1914. Here we find the orphaned Luisa Mole, who must choose between life among the miners and the middle-class family who adopt her, and the historical figure Louis Tikas, a Cretan immigrant with his own divided sense of American identity. There are also such characters as Too Tall Macintosh, Lefty Calabrini, George Reed and his shop-keeping family, and even John D. Rockefeller, Jr., an array of figures from multiple classes in a novel that never succumbs to simplistic political pieties. Fusing fiction and history, imagination and truth, individual lives and hard facts of political reality, Ludlow is a major contribution to the literature of the American West." from the Ludlow book jacket