Tag: Book review

Lonesome Dove

The greatest story ever told:  That’s Larry McMurtry’s blockbuster work, Lonesome Dove.  We’ve touched on it before with our book review on Revolver – Sam Colt and the Six Shooter that Changed America.  This is another book review, and a movie review, too, as Lonesome Dove was also made into a four-part TV special three decades ago.

McMurtry wrote Lonesome Dove in 1985.  It was loosely based on the true story of Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, and their third cattle drive north.  I have a copy of Lonesome Dove that I bought when it first came out, and I’ve probably read it a half dozen times.  Sometimes a few years will go by before I see it tucked away in the bookshelf, and I’ll pull it down and take a few days to read it again   Even though I know what’s coming next (I almost have it memorized), I still enjoy reading it.  It’s that good.

Motown Productions did the Lonesome Dove four-part television mini-series in 1989.  Most of the time a movie based on a book gives up a lot, but this one did not.  When it pops up as a re-run, I’m in.  I’ve probably watched it no fewer than five times.

The scenes in both the book and the TV series (which stayed faithful to the novel) are well crafted and memorable.  Several stood out, including the river crossing water moccasin attack, McCrae’s taking out a group of renegades while rescuing Lorena, Call’s horse-collision-takedown of an arrogant and abusive cavalry officer, and the bar room scene in which McCrae puts his Colt Walker to good use teaching a surly bartender western etiquette (that one is my favorite).

If you’ve read the book or seen the TV series, you know what I’m talking about.  If you haven’t, you need to. Trust me on this one one, folks.  The next time Lonesome Dove is on TV you’ll want to see it, and if you have a chance to grab a copy of Lonesome Dove, you should do so.

More ExNotes reviews are here.

Book Review: Revolver

My daughter buys books for me, and she has a knack for finding great ones she knows I will enjoy.  The latest in a long line of successes is Jim Rasenberger’s Revolver:  Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America.  I enjoyed the book on many levels because I’m a shooter, I like biographies, I’m a student of business success, I like to read about mechanical things, and I love history (especially the history of the American West).  Revolver checked all the boxes.

Samuel Colt was anything but an overnight success, but successful he sure was.  He was one of the key figures in our Industrial Revolution, and he made the concept of interchangeable parts and mass production work well before Henry Ford came along.   Colt started out as sailor on a merchant vessel, he became a huckster selling laughing gas exhibitions, he failed at his first attempt to build a firearms manufacturing business, and then he succeeded wildly when he worked with Samuel Walker, the Texas Ranger who guided Colt’s design of the famous Colt Walker.  Revolver delves deeply into all this, including the Colt Walker story, and a grand story it is.

On that topic of the Colt Walker:  The Walker was the .44 Magnum of its day, a gun so over-the-top in size and power that as Colonel Colt observed, “it would take a Texan to fire it.”  I always thought it would be cool to own a Walker, but Colt only made 1,100 of them, and originals don’t come up for sale too often.  The last one that did went for over a million dollars.  The blogging business is good, folks, but it ain’t that good.

Robert Duvall as Gus MacCrae in Lonesome Dove, the greatest story ever told (in my opinion). Gus carried a Colt Walker.

Uberti, a company in Italy, manufactures a replica of the original Colt Walker, and reading Revolver gave me the push I needed.  I ordered one this morning.  Good buddies Paul and Duane are both black powder aficionados, and I figure they can give me the help I’ll need learning how to load and shoot these historical weapons.

Uberti’s modern copy of a Colt Walker (one of these is headed my way). Colt manufactured just over a thousand Walkers in 1847-1848. Originals sell for something north of a million dollars.

If you’re looking for a good read, pick up a copy of Revolver.  I believe you’ll enjoy it.

More Tales of the Gun are here, and more product, book, and movie reviews are here.

Book Review: The Arsenal of Democracy

We watch our Google Analytics regularly, and one of the things that impresses us is what impresses you.  You might be surprised to learn that our most frequently visited pages and blogs are the product reviews, and in particular, the book reviews.   That’s one of the reasons why I want to get the word out to our readers about one of the best books I’ve read this year:  A.J. Baime’s The Arsenal of Democracy.

I first read A.J. Baime’s work in The Wall Street Journal, where he does a weekly piece on interesting cars.  You know, cars with a story behind them.  Cars that are still driven regularly.  I’d subscribe to The Journal just for those stories, although that newspaper has much more going for it than just Mr. Baime’s car stories. (The WSJ has objective reporting, something sorely missing in The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, two papers that lean so sharply left it’s amazing they’re still standing.)  I like A.J. Baime’s WSJ articles, and when I learned he also writes books, I was in.

In a word, The Arsenal of Democracy is great.  It’s a wonderful book weaving together the stories of World War II, the Ford family, Detroit’s wholesale conversion to war production, the application of mass production to weapons manufacturing, the logistics of building major manufacturing facilities in the middle of nowhere, and Ford’s production of the B-24 Liberator.  Ford built B-24 bombers at the rate of one an hour (actually, they did slightly better than that by the end of the war), and there’s no question Ford was a major factor in our military success.  Baime made it all read like a novel, but all of it actually happened.

Folks, trust me on this:  The Arsenal of Democracy is a great book.  I think it’s one you should consider adding to your list if you haven’t read it already.  You can thank me later.

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Book Review: Berezina

Berezina, by Sylvain Tesson. Save your money, folks. This one’s a snoozer.

Damn, it sounded good, and the book review I read last week in The Wall Street Journal (which I must have read too quickly) made it sound like an interesting read.  And the cover looked good, too.  It had to be good:   Five guys riding from Russia to France in the dead of winter, retracing Napolean’s retreat from a military disaster, on three Ural motorcycles.  I love motorcycle adventure books.  How could it not be great?

Well, let me tell you how.  Berezina is the name of a river Napolean crossed on the way back from Moscow in 1812, and in colloquial French it’s become a term for anything that’s a disaster.   It’s an entirely appropriate title for this book.  I was hoping for stories about riding in the cold, riding from Russia to France, the challenges in riding motorcycles not known for reliability…in general, a good adventure read.  What I found was a lot of intellectual drivel laden with three-dollar words talking almost exclusively about Napolean and his retreat.  Somehow, for the most part, the author managed to do this without describing the areas he rode through, and without hardly mentioning the bikes or the ride.  He spent a lot of time imagining the misery experienced by Napolean, his army, and bizarrely, his horses.  I would estimate that less than 5% of the book was about the riding.  Getting through this story was a slog, even though the book was mercifully short.

I realized all of the above in the first few pages, but I kept reading and hoping it would get better.  It didn’t.  Berezina reminded me of another motorcycle adventure that was mostly about things other than motorcycle riding (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I also found to be a slog when I read it 50 years ago).  Zen, however, at least spent some time on the bike and the riding.  In Berezina there was precious little of that, and what little there was wasn’t nearly enough.  Save your money, folks.  The best thing about Berezina was that it was only $15.

There’s an old saying:  You can’t tell a book by its cover.  In this book’s case, never were truer words spoken.

If you want a great read about a real motorcycle adventure, buy a copy of Riding the Edge, Dave Barr’s epic story about his ride around the world on a constantly-failing Harley.  If it has to be about riding Russia in the winter, try Riding the Ice, Barr’s sequel about a trip across Siberia in a sidecar-equipped Sportster.  Either of those books is a great read.  Better yet, buy both books.  You can thank me later.

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