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Title: Sacagawea's Nickname: Essays on the American West by Larry McMurtry ISBN: 0-940322-92-7 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: 09 November, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.29 (7 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: STAY WITH LONESOME DOVE
Comment: I love Larry McMurtry's writing for its own sake but found this book to be a little over the top. Instead read any of the four great books from the Lonesome Dove series.
Rating: 3
Summary: Great And Dull At The Same Time
Comment: Sacagawea's Nickname purports to be McMurtry's essays on the Old West. Well, yes and no. Maybe half the book is that and it's really good! McMurtry is extremely insightful on this theme. His views on Bill Cody as a businessman, Annie Oakley as America's original liberated woman,Lewis and Clark, western pulp fiction, the Missouri River, Oh and Sacagawea and her various names...all great stuff.But the other half is the author commenting on other author's comments on the West. Dull.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Fun and Informative Read for Western History Buffs
Comment: In Sacagawea's Nickname, McMurtry provides a well-reasoned, persuasive argument designed to induce contemporary writers and historians to take into account all theoretical aspects of Western history while making their interpretations. While it might seem, at first glance, that the author is exceedingly critical of authors whose take on Western history skews to the revisionist, this is not necessarily the case. Generally, McMurtry praises the scholarship of such individuals but alludes to their failure to consider anything but the evils of manifest destiny. McMurtry argues that such individuals are so hell-bent on dark revisionism that they have lost sight of the fact that Western mythology has become an intricately woven part of the equation.
Conversely, McMurtry also warns against those who would mythologize for the sake of financial gain alone, such as in the spirit of Ned Buntline, Buffalo Bill Cody, Zane Grey, or even Time-Life books. This rather fuzzy delineation between fact and fiction is, perhaps, best demonstrated by McMurtry's essay Inventing the American West. McMurtry writes of Kit Carson's attempt and failure to save a woman who had been kidnapped by Indians. Carson tells of how a dime novel was found in possession of the murdered woman, which portrayed Carson as a hero in slaying hundreds of Indians.
McMurtry fully embraces neither the revisionists nor the traditionalists, but alternately praises and critiques both in an attempt to bring them closer together for the betterment of Western historical scholarship. It is remarkable that a book comprised of twelve separate essays should conduct such a strong central theme.
It is difficult to be critical of such a subjective work as this for, in fact, McMurtry is only espousing his own subjective views on existing literary works. It would be easy to dismiss this as merely a collection of thoughts and reviews. However, McMurtry is clearly one of the most respected authorities on the American West, and his arguments should be given great consideration.
The pages of Sacagawea's Nickname carry not only McMurtry's theories on the state of Western scholarship, but also the caveat of an acute historical observation. As described in the above summary of his essay Sacagawea's Nickname, McMurtry hypothesizes that Clark and Sacagawea may have harbored an unknown degree of romantic feelings for one another - A hypothesis daringly based on one word written by Clark and to be found only once in over twelve volumes of the expedition's edited notes. The word, the reference for the essay and the book's title, is Janey.
McMurtry suggests that the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition should be a starting point for anyone interested in pursuing the study of Western History. I argue Sacagawea's Nickname should be a primer for anyone who is interested in or already studying Western history. Its pages provide a wholly entertaining and cognitive basis for academic research and writing of Western history from an historical and literary perspective.
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Title: The Wandering Hill : A Novel by Larry McMurtry ISBN: 0743233034 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 13 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: By Sorrow's River : The Berrybender Narratives, Book 3 by Larry McMurtry ISBN: 0743233042 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Sin Killer : The Berrybender Narrative, Book 1 by Larry McMurtry ISBN: 0743451414 Publisher: Pocket Star Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Crazy Horse (Penguin Lives) by Larry McMurtry ISBN: 0670882348 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: January, 1999 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Lords of the Plain : A Novel by Max Crawford, Larry McMurtry ISBN: 0806129085 Publisher: Univ of Oklahoma Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: March, 1997 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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