A Spyglass Look at the Past: Running, Rioting, and More
Running, Rioting and More
Historical Non-Fiction
By:
Clyde W. Toland
In this collection of historical nonfiction stories, Clyde Toland draws not only from his personal life, but also historic incidents and individuals as a “spyglass” through which readers can examine selected moments from the past. The collection combines contemporaneous accounts, later reflections, personal experiences, and carefully researched history.
Toland begins with an affectionate portrait of growing up in Iola, Kansas, during the 1950s and early 1960s. He also provides personal accounts written at or near the time of the events: touring Europe at age seventeen in 1965, completing a 21.7-mile nonstop run in 1971, and observing and avoiding the student riots in Madison, Wisconsin, following the Kent State killings in 1970.
Other stories feature Frederick Funston before he became a nationally known U.S military figure, including his experiences as a teacher, botanist, explorer, and gifted writer. The collection also recounts the tragic Vegetarian Colony through Miriam Colt’s firsthand account, Charley Melvin’s dramatic actions during Kansas prohibition, and a German woman’s observations in a June 1938 letter. Wilt Chamberlain, Jim Ryun, and Truman Capote make brief appearances.
Together, these writings preserve historical records, illuminate Toland’s life and other individual lives all the while inviting readers to consider the parallels and contrasts between past and present.
“Clyde Toland’s latest, A Spyglass Look at the Past, is at once a beautifully written and moving memoir that poignantly reminds us what it meant to grow up in an America alive with possibility, and a series of historical adventures that time and again reveals the enduring importance of Kansas.”
-- Heather Ann Thompson, historian at the University of Michigan and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History for Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.
“I have always considered growing up in Kansas, and specifically being born in a small Kansas town, to have been a great life advantage for me. I was drawn to Clyde Toland’s book because it helps to tell the story of the American West and about real people from that point of view and background.
The West is about people, and to paraphrase Clyde—it is the human element that determines the course of history, whether on a large scale or on a small one.”
-- Philip F. Anschutz, financial investor, author of Out Where the West Begins, Vol. 1 & 2