Lost Kingdoms

This last volume of Phillip McMath's Viet Nam war trilogy moves back more than a hundred years to focus on the Civil War in Central and Southen Arkansas. Incidents and locations, however, pull the story farther back to DeSoto's decimation of the land's first inhabitants, to the Mexican War, and out past the Civil War's end to the Mexican War for independence and to Viet Nam and its aftermath for one Arkansas mother. Like Tolstoy, McMath intersperses meditations on the nature of history with fine storytelling. Like Faulkner, he constructs sentences and paragraphs of sufficient complexity to illustrate his love of language and to mirror the tangles of both landscapes and relationships as the story moves along. Heavy use of dialect may disconcert some non-Southerners, but reading the words aloud will make most passages clear. While set in Arkansas, the themes of loss, struggle, honor, and villainy transcend time and place. McMath brings the past alive by creating believable characters--one-armed guerilla fighter Dagmar Pilgrim, runaway house slave Septimus, a slow mule named Ulysses --to mix with historical figures like young Confederate spy David O. Dodd, Union General Frederick Steele, Confederate Jo Shelby, DeSoto, the Emperor Maximilian. This epic story confirms the connections between seemingly disparate incidents, connections which continue into the reader's own present.