What I liked best about this book was its main character, Captain Jefferson Kidd. He’s a kindhearted old man who travels from town to town in 1870s Texas, reading the news aloud to anyone willing to pay a dime to hear it. When he agrees to return a ransomed 10-year-old Kiowa captive to her family in south Texas, his solitary life changes. The girl, Johanna, is “wild,” as some characters describe her. She doesn’t remember the rules of white civilization (if you can call it that) or her white family, and she acts Kiowa in every way.

The captain recognizes that his own inner voice led him to take charge of this young girl, and he follows that voice, though not without resistance. At times he longs for the simplicity of life alone. At the same time, he is lonely and wants something to change. He writes to his grown children in Georgia asking them to move to Texas, and he daydreams about courting a woman he knows. But life has given him this child to deliver, and for now he is committed to her.

Together they face hardship and danger, and through it all he stays compassionate toward Johanna and her point of view. I really like the captain. If everyone were like him, this would be a different world. I hope I am like him.

As for Johanna, she shows that a sense of self can be learned. She was born white, yet she became Kiowa in every way. That raises a question: what is the sense of self? Are we really the thoughts, opinions, preferences, biases, education, and culture we identify with, or is that a mental structure, simply conditioning in the brain? And if I am not the personality I see as me, what am I?

I did want to learn more about Johanna’s life as a captive (really, as an adopted Kiowa child), but that isn’t part of this story. For readers who feel the same, Jiles recommends The Captured by Scott Zesch. It’s a nonfiction account of children taken captive on the Texas frontier. She says, “They apparently became Indian in every way and rarely readjusted when returned to their non-native families… even when they had been with their Indian families for less than a year.”

News of the World is a short book, only 209 pages in paperback, and one you can easily read over a weekend.