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Title: Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers by Robert M. Utley ISBN: 0-19-512742-0 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (4 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Frontier Justice misses the mark.
Comment: I had anticipated the arrival of this book from respected historian Robert Utley for quite some time having been given the heads up it was coming from one of my fellow Texas Ranger enthusiasts. I obtained my copy at the Texas Rangers Museum in Waco (apologies to Amazon.com) when I spotted it among the Texas Ranger logo covered coffee mugs, refrigerator magnates, thimbles, and other tourista gewgaws in the museum gift shop. I gobbled it up immediately and afterwards, like a foray into haute cuisine Chinese, felt hungry for more - much more.
The bibliography and endnotes provide evidence that Utley did a masterful job of research, uncovering even the most obscure reference to the Rangers. In some cases, these endnotes were more interesting than the prose they supported.
I came away feeling he tried to pack too much into this one volume, ending with veneer rather than solidity. There is very little new and much is missing, especially from the early colony and Republic era. John Coffee Hays, Ben McCulloch, and RIP Ford were three interesting early rangers, but there has been enough written about these great Ranger leaders. It is high time for someone with Utley's credentials to focus on telling the stories of the men who rode with these most famous Ranger leaders. The stories of such men as old Rufe Perry, Christopher Acklin, Alsey Miller and Arch Gibson go largely untold yet without them Hays, McCulloch, and Ford would hardly have achieved such success.
Overall the book is very readable but fails to provide the details and motivations of individual rangers I so hoped to see. I give it two stars for the bibliography and endnotes.
My advice is to skip this one and go for the Frederick Wilkins ranger trilogy.
Copyright 2003 Patrick Shannon Clyde
All rights reserved.
Rating: 2
Summary: Meaningless Effort.
Comment: I am not sure what I read. Whatever it was, it was not what the title asserted. Thin and vaccous, the history is not grappled with. The reader is left with the feeling that the author pulled back from his subject matter.
Everything is big in Texas, especially our tall tales. Whopper telling is a prideful art form. No where is it practiced to perfection better than in the telling of how this great state came to be. Separating fact from myth and outright fiction is a very difficult thing to do even for a respected historian like Robert M. Utley. At best this book is the most general of overviews. You will find nothing new here.
Rating: 3
Summary: Rather Stilted
Comment: This work is a chronology of events in the history of the Texas Rangers, but I didn't find it very engaging. There is detailed background that leads up to significant events, the locations and individuals involved, but what actually happened is often only marginally enacted. Following many of these events, the reader is left with a superficial understanding of what took place. And while the bibliography is extensive, I doubt all of it was accessed. Missing are accounts from diaries, journals, past interviews, even newspapers of the period to add depth and color. This is history written in a library. It will introduce you to the major players and many events, but I imagine its been done better elsewhere. I thought the recent publication date would unveil newer detail or revelation. Not so. Many of these events could be looked at with less than sympathetic enthusiasm. These were men confronting dangerous situations in a violent era. With courts and legal apparatus often in the hands of the "bad guys," the Rangers often reverted to summary justice and dragged in the corpse. Mr. Utley cautions the reader not to judge the actions of those days of warring Indian tribes, vigilantes, overt prejudice, and gun-toting outlaws in light of today's standards. That's a liberal dose of constraint to ask. In a curious final chapter, A Summing Up, the author advises that others covering the same ground as himself might draw different conclusions, but that is the nature of history. It seems somewhat self-deprecating, and rightfully so.
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Title: The Men Who Wear the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (Modern Library (Paperback)) by Charles M., III Robinson ISBN: 0375757481 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 05 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Texas Rangers by Walter Prescott Webb ISBN: 0292781105 Publisher: University of Texas Press Pub. Date: 1965 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Kings of Texas : The 150-Year Saga of an American Ranching Empire by Don Graham ISBN: 0471394513 Publisher: Wiley Pub. Date: 13 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Six Years With the Texas Rangers, 1875 to 1881 by James B. Gillett ISBN: 0803258445 Publisher: University of Nebraska Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1976 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State by Randolph B. Campbell ISBN: 0195138422 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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