RUSH: Okay, Joe, age 13, in Toledo, Ohio. I’m glad you called. It’s great to have you with us on the program today. How are you?
CALLER: Good! How are you doing, Rush?
RUSH: I’m very well. Thank you, Joe.
CALLER: Yep. So I’m here, and I want to just say how awesome I thought your book was. I read my first book of yours in the Rush Revere series, the Brave Pilgrims. My grandma, who’s been listening to you for about 15 years, just told me about it, and I thought it was great.
RUSH: (chuckles) Well! Your grandmother told you about it; you thought it was great. Well, it is great. I thank you.
CALLER: Yeah. I just learned about the Pilgrims in school. I go to Toledo Christian. But, yeah, it goes so much in depth with the Pilgrims and there’s a lot of things that I didn’t learn about in school that I learned about in your book, like William Bradford and Miles Standish. We just kind of learned the outline at school, but then when you read your book, it just goes deep, and we learned like the real facts about it.
RUSH: Well, you have no idea how much you are making my day. This is one of the greatest book reviews that we’ve ever had. You’ve done a better book review than I could have done, and I wrote it.
CALLER: (giggles) Thanks.
RUSH: Joe, this is great. Do you have all the books or have you just read the first one?
CALLER: I just read the first one.
RUSH: Oh-ho. Well, I tell you what. If you’ll hang on, the Revere office would love to send you the other books, some CDs, the audio version of each book, and some other goodies, too. So if you’ll hang on, Mr. Snerdley will get your mailing address, and we’ll try to get this stuff out ASAP like sometime next week. He’s exactly right, and he wouldn’t know if he hadn’t read the book. The original Thanksgiving story is kind of glossed over with the fundamental point being…
Look, from the multicultural standpoint, you kind of understand it. Multiculturalists have taken care of the school curricula. And even I, folks, was taught the basic version that the Pilgrims had a tough time of it, they were new arrivals, and it was not their land, and the Indians were wonderfully nice and compassionate and sharing, and they taught the Pilgrims everything. And it makes for a wonderful story. Makes for a great story! But it isn’t anything to do with the first Thanksgiving, which was actually proclaimed by George Washington as president of the United States.
The Pilgrims were giving thanks to God for having been given guidance on how to arrange their affairs and to be able to devote themselves to their religion according to their desires, using their freedom. That was the depth of their gratitude. Now, in Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims, the reader is taken aboard the Mayflower. We research some things that happened on the Mayflower. These are written for young kids 10 to 13.
The Indians and some of the Indian personalities — Squanto and others — are written about in Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims. It is a complete story. We use time travel. Rush Revere, that’s me, a high school substitute teacher has a talking horse that can time travel because of an accident that happened during a lightning strike. So the horse can go anywhere in American history and take some students from Revere’s school, and they actually go back in time to be part of the history. That’s how it’s taught rather than just recited as facts and figures. So, Joe, I appreciate that very much.
That’s an absolutely fabulous review.