About this title: Sides's extraordinary book brings the history of the American conquest of the West to ringing life. It is a tale with many heroes and villains, and at the center of it all stands the remarkable figure of Kit Carson--the legendary trapper, scout, and soldier who embodies all the contradictions and ambiguities of the American experience in the West.
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Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Anchor Books
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781400031108ISBN:1400031109
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. CLEAN AND BRIGHT INSIDE. MINOR USE WEAR. FEW SMUDGES. MARKS ON COVERS. LOOKS GOOD. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 578 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Doubleday
Date Published: 2006-10-03
ISBN-13:9780385507776ISBN:0385507771
Description: Very Good. This is a very nice hardcover copy. Binding is tight and square. Text is clean, bright and unmarked. DJ has some wear. Careful packaging and fast shipping. read more
Edition: Book Club (BCE/BOMC)
Binding: Board Hard Back
Publisher: Doubleday
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780385507776ISBN:0385507771
Description: Very Good++ in Very Good+ jacket. "Hampton Sides' extraordinary book brings the history of the American conquest of the West to ringing life. " from the jacket. This is a black board hard back in Very Good++ condition with a Very Good+ jacket. Book Club Edition. This is a very solid and clean book with very good edges. There is only light spine end wrinkles. The pages are tight, bright and no names. The jacket is very bright and clean with a little top edge wrinkle. 460 pages including index & ... read more
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Anchor Books, New York, New York, U.S.A.
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781400031108ISBN:1400031109
Description: Very Good. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" Light edge wear and corner crease very light spine crease. binding is straight and tight, text is unmarked. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Anchor Books, NY
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781400031108ISBN:1400031109
Description: Fine. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 578 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. One tiny crease on corner, slight shelf wear, no creasing on spine, almost like new. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Doubleday 2006
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780385507776ISBN:0385507771
Description: ISBN 9780385507776. Hardcover copy in very good condition with very good dustjacket. DSW-35-4. First Edition. Dustjacket included. read more
"This is an excellent biography of a famous American pioneer--Kit Carson. What sets it apart is its humane treatment of a complex figure. Carson appears to have been the "real deal," not a manufactured hero.
The book proceeds by interweaving several story lines, which can be somewhat confusing at times but, in the end, this serves the author well. Among the story lines--Kit Carson's exploits, the Navajo leader Narbona's story, General Stephen Kearney's episodes, and so on.
Kit Carson's role--from trapper to hunter to scout to military officer--is the glue that holds this book together. In the process, the reader learns a great deal about the events of the 1830s through 1860s that transformed the United States. The Mexican War dramatically expanded the size of the country; the American conflicts with the Indian nations opened new territories for settlement and economic development; the Civil War ended slavery (although, ironically, perhaps not in the southwest, as Native Americans sometimes served a similar role after the Civil War); the West was opened for development.
What humanizes this book is the treatment of Carson. He was sometimes mercurial (with an occasional burst of temper); he was a person of action, and he sometimes was cruel and brutal; he was also a person of honor; he had a perception of the larger picture in the West, and could see that white aggression was the real problem--not marauding Indians.
On a personal note, the book traces Carson's family lives (he had at least two real families, one with a native American wife), his struggle to be a good husband and father while he was off on one adventure or another most of his life.
This is a strong biography which is set in a larger context. It is well worth looking at."
"Pretty badass. An epic historical overview of the American West structured (very) loosely around Kit Carson's life and travels. Sides has a knack for addressing the heinous treatment of Native Americans by the American government (and individual Americans, many of them soldiers) without ... how can I say this? Erm, it's like he's as appalled as any sentient moral being should be and completely disgusted, but he still retains that kind of uniquely American joy in the idea of the West as a frontier and fortune-maker and utopian ideal. The two schools of thought shouldn't seem to mix, and probably can't if you were to write a cogent philosophical essay about the topic, but I think that they still do in most of us. And they seem to in Hampton Sides, which I appreciated."
"When the Pulitzer for fiction was handed out in 2006, I was adamant it had been given for the wrong book ("March"). "Blood and Thunder" should have had the honor hands down. I was actually angry over this. The clarity of thought and expression in this chronicle goes way beyond your ordinary history of the West. Not just a biography of Kit Carson, though he is used as the fulcrum which balances western expansionism with Native Americans (primarily the Navajo), this is a comprehensive discourse on immorality of Manifest Destiny and the second genocide on this continent by Christian hordes. Yet it is fair-explaining equal arguments for actions incurred.
The author gives a great deal of thought and description to the warrior Narbona. In fact he lavishes wonderful character descriptions to all of the Indian leaders. It is, perhaps, this very equanimity in the writing that gives the book such a powerful presence.
Before reading "Blood and Thunder" I was a Kit Carsonphobe. I would tell people not to visit his home or grave. I felt the need to enlighten visitors to Santa Fe and Taos on the villainy of the man. I would not take people to Fort Sumner and the Bosque Redondo. I was a bit extreme in my denunciation but I wanted people to know Carson was not the hero of mythmaking pulp novels of the 19th century (known as 'Blood and Thunder's').
I've tempered my insubordinate spirit on poor Mr. Carson-mostly because of this book. While I still despise the whole concept of Divine Right (xenophobia is what it is), the author's insight into the political nightmare in Washington after the Civil War helps place a great deal of what happened in perspective.
This is much more than an unfathomable story told on an epic scale. The descriptions of the land, the culture of the Dine (Navajo) and the sheer panorama of the New Mexico land where the drama played out is described with passion and exuberance.
The author even writes poetically on mundane subjects-for example here is a wonderful little toss off paragraph on bells (which are still BIG deals in Santa Fe):
"On the night of September 24, 1846, bells rang over the city, incessantly, crazily, as they always did when something was afoot. From the six churches they clanked and clanged, filling the streets with a maddening metallic din. The Santa Feans loved their bells and used them to announce every occasion-weddings, masses, even races and fandangos. Their sound was far from dulcet, for most of the bells were decrepit and cracked, some having been forged centuries earlier in Castille and shipped by galleon across the wide ocean and then hauled nearly two thousand groaning miles north from Mexico on the desolate wagon road, the Camino Real, which long served as the town's only umbilicus to the civilized world. Through their long sojourns, the bells had been splashed with brine, dropped in silty arroyos, and pecked by bullets. They had seen revolts and massacres, and had endured several centuries of a steady faith's ringing in the extremes of a high desert clime. Even though the bells were tarnished and streaked with verdigris, they remained the pride of the town, enduring relics from a time when the crown of Spain reigned as the greatest power on earth.""
"Damn but Native Americans really got the shaft. I didn't realize until reading this book that slavery extended beyond the Emancipation Proclamation in the form of Indian chattel captured by New Mexicans (and Texans, etc.). I didn't realize that Arizona was at least partially formed because racist New Mexicans wanted New Mexico to be a slave state. I also didn't realize that the Indian Wars were fought at largely the same time as the Civil War. Madness. A good book; one that uses Kit Carson as the focal point of a look at the way Plains Indians, particularly the Navajo, were beaten into some semblance of a Christian, agricultural existence. All the while, all the "Americans", including Carson, see the transformation as an inevitability, and when the change doesn't take hold, see the extinction of the American Indian as a sort of God-ordained, unstoppable thing. Good times."
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