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Title: The Journals of Lewis and Clark by Bernard DeVoto ISBN: 0-395-85996-4 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 30 April, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.89 (18 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Dazzling, legendary
Comment: There is not much new that I can add which has not already been said of the Journals. Simply put, fantastic! I have read some excellent books regarding the Lewis and Clark Expedition, but reading the actual journals themselves makes one feel as though they are right there alongside them. Names such as John Colter, the Fields brothers, George Drouillard, Peter Cruzatte, Touissant Charbonneau and his wife Sacajawea, John Ordway, George Shannon, and many of the others in the journal become so familiar, it's as if the reader is a "fly on the saddle" (so to speak) during the entire expedition. Every chapter, every leg of the journey, has something relating to the hardships, sacrifices, conjectures, speculations, survival strategies, Indian confrontations and appropriate manners of behavior, along with wonderful descriptions of landforms, Indian culture, animals, plants, climate, etc. A truly gripping, meaningful look at early western U.S. exploration. DeVoto's introduction and editing is extremely well done.
Rating: 5
Summary: Journals of the men who shaped the face of the nation.
Comment: This is an excellent book. It is hard to imagine the hardship these men had to endure on their trip across the nation, but by reading this book you get some kind of idea. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is even slightly intrested in the history of the Lewis and Clark expedition. This book tells it exactly how it happened, from the men who were there. I strongly believe that books like these should be required reading in schools....who knows what this country would be like today had it not been for those brave men.
Rating: 4
Summary: Great Historical/Adventure Literature
Comment: This would be, if I could do it, a two-part review. To the source material itself, the journals, I would award five stars out of five--six out of five, even, spelling errors and all, for it's absolutely superb stuff. I have read a fair bit in the adventure and exploration line of literature, but nothing as good as these journals for conveying what it felt like to be on such an expedition. Often, it is the little detail at the end of a day's entry that works the magic; for example, when you read several dozen times about the mosquitoes and gnats being "verry troublesome," or "exceedingly troublesome," it tells you something. As does Lewis's quiet contentment with a bellyful of fresh meat after a long and weary hike. And, as Stephen Ambrose notes in his moving and evocative foreword to this book, the fact that these are on-the-fly journal entries--not memoirs--means that the reader sees the good and the bad choices, the discovery that went on along the way. You will probably recognize at once, for instance, that not all grizzlies will be as easy to kill as the first one the corps encounters, but they don't know that, and you are there to read of their changing opinion of these bears as they meet more and more of them. So the raw material is first rate.
The second part of my review would be for the editing, and I would give that four stars out of five. DeVoto, for all his erudition, does make something of a nuisance of himself from time to time. In the first place, he was clearly writing for the "Manifest Destiny" camp of historians--an outlook now taken with a few grains of salt. Here he is, for example, commenting on the earliest hostile encounter with an Indian tribe, "Indian bluster immediately collapsed and from then on the terrible Tetons were mere beggars. The moral of the episode was that a new breed of white men had come to the Upper Missouri, one that could not be scared or bullied. The moral was flashed along the Indian underground faster than the expedition traveled. It explains why the captains were received with such solicitous respect by the Arikaras," etc (p.34). So there's a bit of that sort of thing to put up with. Also, for reasons I cannot fathom, DeVoto inserts bridging passages, paraphrases, in certain spots rather than using actual journal entries. One of these is the death and burial of the expedition's one fatality. How did the captains and the other men react to this? I would have liked to know that. There's another such paraphrase covering Sacagawea's incredible meeting with her long-lost brother. What did Lewis and Clark think of that amazing coincidence? We're not told by this book.
All in all, however, this is a magnificent read, and my quibbles above don't detract materially from its enjoyment. If I have one suggestion for anyone looking to read this, however, it would be to view Ken Burns's extraordinary PBS documentary on the expedition first; your library should have it.
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Title: Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose ISBN: 0684826976 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 02 June, 1997 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: National Geographic Guide to the Lewis & Clark Trail by Thomas Schmidt ISBN: 0792264711 Publisher: National Geographic Pub. Date: 01 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title:Lewis & Clark - The Journey of the Corps of Discovery ASIN: B00005MEPN Publisher: PBS Home Video Pub. Date: 28 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $29.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $24.58 |
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Title:National Geographic - Lewis & Clark - Great Journey West ASIN: B00006AUK1 Publisher: Warner Home Video Pub. Date: 27 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.95 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $24.32 |
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Title: The Essential Lewis and Clark by Landon Y. Jones ISBN: 0060196009 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: July, 1999 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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