Here's a tight, well-written story of a man (Major James Brionne, formerly of the U.S. Army) whose home in Virginia was torched and his wife killed by a gang set on destroying him because of his previous work which led to the arrest, trial, conviction, and hanging of the murderer Dave Allard.

The time is the early 1870s. Brionne with his son Mat (who had barely managed to escape the clutches of the Allard Gang in Virginia) make their way out west to Utah Territory to eke out a new life there in the desert landscape. There they are tracked down by the Allards and the outcome is not without its thrills and chills.

A very compelling and eloquent account by Iris Origo which conveys both the tempo and temper of life that existed in Italy as she went from being a sometimes uneasy German ally and neutral to a full-fledged co-belligerent with Germany after June 10, 1940. The diary begins on March 27, 1939 and ends on July 23, 1940.

What can I say? I love Louis L'amour novels and the Sackett novels most of all. In this book, Jubal Sackett, the loner son of Barnabas, goes off on his own quest to see the far blue mountains. Other reviews go into the story line in detail so I wont bother here. However, I love the scale and grandeur this book brings to mind of the North American continent in the early days of settlement. I would have loved to experience that.

Oh and who doesn't need a 3,000 pound buffalo bull named Paison as a pack animal and transporation?!? Could you imagine riding something like that?! There is even a battle with a woolly mammoth.

Picks up where the previous book left off. Still can't fault L'Amour's writing style, always putting his characters in dangerous situations and coming up with creative endings, it's really no wonder that so many of his books were turned into movies. The problem, however, is that the narrator is so BORING. I thought the first one was okay, but this time around I was literally falling asleep during some parts, because whilst the characters are having battles and life-or-death situations, the narrator's voice doesn't inflect at all, just stays soft and smooth. Nice, but where's the emotion? How can I believe "he shouted, angrily" when you use the same tone of voice one inquires the time with?

 

+1 for the female characters not being shrinking violets, but that's not really an archetype that fits into the pioneer story model to begin with.

 

Time skip was strange, but then I realized that it ties into the other books in the series and expands on the family's descendants roughly in order it looks like so worth paying attention to - if you can stay awake.

One of those books that kicks off a "family coming to America" saga, exploring descendent generations as the series goes on, at least that's how I understand the genre. This being the first book in the series, it focuses on the founding father of the line and how he turns a chance opportunity - finding some old gold coins - into an enterprising adventure - going to America to trade goods for prized furs - and eventually decides that he likes the country enough that he would like to settle there permanently, establish a trade post, and explore the land.

 

This being a L'Amour novel, he also has a love interest (who shows up in the most improbable of circumstances of course) and numerous near death experiences. One thing about L'Amour's books is that it's never boring; he follows the rule of always putting his characters in conflict with an antagonistic force, be it human rival, minor character of passing interest, nature, or self.

 

My one major dislike was that there seemed to be a lot of pointed commentary that, while true from a historical standpoint as it led to the establishment and eventual separation of the colonies and founding of America and so on and so forth, pushed the Manifest Destiny philosophy to a distasteful degree IMHO.