Photo Odyssey: Solomon Carvalho's Remarkable Western Adventure, 1853-54

Solomon Carvalho was a remarkable man by any standard. He was an inventor, religious reformer, painter and part-time adventurer. "Photo Odyssey" primarily deals with Carvalho's participation on John Frémont's fifth and final expedition to find a route for the transcontinental railroad. Carvalho's role was to document the journey by taking daguerreotypes, an early type of photograph. During the journey, the expedition encountered horrific hardship. Between fires, blizzards, starvation and physical adversity, the fifth expedition is a story that demonstrates the potential of human endurance. "Photo Odyssey" is punctuated with quotes from Carvalho's journal and stock photos that visually accompany the text. Arlene Hirschfelder wrote a good book with two issues. First, there's the Jewish issue. Having a "hey we were there, too" tone, his religious orientation could have been handled more effectively. In the initial section, the author hits the reader over the head with details about the Jewish diet and the ways in which the journey would have been difficult for such a devout Jew. Such a section should have been integrated into the rest of the book or included as an after thought. More over, the religious portrait that Hirschfelder paints earns lukewarm respect; there are times when Carvalho invited starvation by not partaking in available foods (so do we dismiss him as an idiot or praise him as devout?) and other times when he ate food that broke the kashrut (so do we praise his new found pragmatism or condemn him as a hypocrite?). The second issue is that while the subject lived an amazing life, this is not necessarily a feel good story. Indeed, we should not expect any Disney movies to be made about Solomon Carvalho's biography. In the end, his daguerreotypes were lost, people died, Frémont's proposed route for the railroad went unadopted and Carvalho never even finished the journey with his employer. Beyond this, the entire story is tainted with a degree of deception. Since Carvalho's publication of the expedition is our only significant account of the journey, we are today grateful. At the time, Carvalho betrayed a promise that he gave Frémont to not keep a journal. Hirschfelder glosses over this element and his profiteering from a publication of the journal by explaining that it was in the name of helping his former employer's presidential ambitions. If not an outright theme, the idea that Carvalho was a three dimensional character should have been mentioned. All in all, Arlene Hirschfelder retells the most interesting chapter of an exceptional life in "Photo Odyssey: Solomon Carvalho's Remarkable Western Adventure 1853-54."