Byline: Alistair Munro SHINTY players are said to enjoy having lumps knocked out of themselvesalmost as much as they like hurting the opposition. So it will come as no surprise to learn a player at one leading club endures aweekly journey...

I Acted from Principle: The Civil War Diary of Dr. William M. McPheeters, Confederate Surgeon in the Trans-Mississippi. Edited by Cynthia Dehaven Pitcock and Bill J. Gurley. The Civil War in the West. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002. Pp. xvi, 423. $34.95, ISBN...

Let not the size of ["The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters"] dismay you. It is a small-scale "Anthony Adverse" of the California gold rush with touches of "Huckleberry Finn," a lively, often funny, picaresque tale that conveys a real feel of what it must have been like on the immigrant trails and in the gold fields, and only occasionally does the story become too long. The publisher's blurb stresses the author's "meticulously researched facts,...

["The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters" is] a top-quality tale of the trail to California's gold fields and grassy valleys in 1819. (p. 40) This novel is as authentic as any story any man could have told after making the trip. It is based largely on the journal of an adventurer who did make it—Dr. Joseph Middleton. In addition to this on-the-scene report, many other authentic narratives and documents contributed to the story.

"The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters" is full of thoroughly researched minutiae about wagon trains, Indian ways, gold mining, life in the San Francisco of the time, and such, and is delivered in a cheerful, funny, and headlong prose that makes its unabashed theatricality a total delight.

Winthrop Sargeant, "Books: 'The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters'," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1958 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), M...