THE GREAT AMERICAN WEST

by James D. Horan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 3, 1959

Handsome in format, superbly illustrated but indifferently written, this latest book by the versatile and prolific author of Action Tonight, The Wild Bunch, The D.A.'s Man, etc., is an attempt to portray, pictorially and textually, the entire history of the American West from Coronado (1540) to the ""last frontier"", the opening of the Cherokee Strip in the early 1890's. As might be expected in a book of this scope, the attempt is not completely successful: the hundreds of illustrations, many of them previously unpublished photographs, are often badly arranged and lack proper explanatory notes; the slapdash text, written in high school-history style, covers too much territory too quickly and in too short a space, with resulting unavoidable historical gaps and misstatements, faults from which the recently published book on Catlin and his paintings, in many ways similar to this volume, is refreshingly free. A book to be leafed through at leisure, this weighty, expensive and beautiful volume will be an excellent gift-book for amateurs in Western history, photograph enthusiasts, and devotees of Indians, Badmen and railroads; seasoned historians will value it for its range of pictorial documents and deplore it for its many irritating inaccuracies.

Pub Date: Dec. 3, 1959

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1959

Categories: NONFICTION