Reviewed by Robert McCool
Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd is a 71-year-old vet of two wars who rides through the state of Texas reading the news of the world to groups of people for a dime apiece.
A newspaper printer who lost his press in the just finished War Between the States, he buys newspapers from both far away and local to Texas and people flock to his readings in order to hear the latest news. Many are illiterate.
While in Wichita Falls his sense of duty and compassion, and a fifty dollar gold piece, makes him take the job of returning a ten year old who was captured by the Kiowa Indians at the age of six to some of her relatives in San Antonio. The girl was raised as a Kiowa and knows no other way of life.
This sounds like a simple story, but in New York Times bestselling author Paulette Jiles 2016 novel News of the World (HarperCollins, ISBN 978-0-06-240921-8) it turns out hauntingly sparse and beautiful as the post-war Texas countryside they travel through in order for the girl to return to a family she knows nothing about.
At first she is as wild as she is uncommunicative. Rightfully frightened by the White world, it makes her begin to trust the Captain who must dodge Kiowa and Comanche, thieves who would steal the girl for a life in human-trafficking, the federal army, and a corrupt Reconstruction state government. At the same time the Captain continues doing his readings even in the deeply divided anarchy of the times. Sometimes fights occur over different opinions.
It is when the girl, Johanna, who is still a Kiowa warrior at heart, figures out how to survive an attack by the thieves who would steal her that she and the Captain begin to understand each other.
The journey is difficult. The ending is predicable, but satisfying in its own stark way. The book is definitely a good read, and I recommend it highly. I have seen the trailer for the recent movie and it is true to form. It’s hard to visualize anybody but Tom Hanks playing the Captain. This is a novel that I will read again someday when I want to travel throughout ninteenth century Texas.
