Stories of Christmas and the Bowie Knife by J. Frank Dobie

 

“The gift without the giver is bare.” Gifts can be manufactured, some beautiful, many useful, but giving-out feelings can’t be—though they can be cultivated. The love and cheer associated with Christmas will always be the best thing about it. How often just a good word that conveys the word-giver’s generosity of spirit enriches people! I remember the “Merry Christmas, sir!” of a gray-haired woman scrubbing stone steps at a college in Cambridge, England, during the war; and recollection of her sturdy, cheerful, kind nature brightens my world. I can hear my mother’s “Christmas Gift” or “Merry Christmas” as I write these words. Whoever heard her greeting received a gift, for she meant every syllable of it, felt every tone in it. Sunrise, starlight, silence of dusk are never trite. Generous feelings and cheering words are never trite. Merry Christmas!

A brief volume from Western historian Frank Dobie.

I adore Mr. Dobie’s work [some of which is reviewed on this blog] and t’is the season for Christmas tales so…

The first half, our Yuletide section is more a terse remembrance than a narrative—sweet but not essential.

As for the second half of the book regarding the legendary Jim Bowie and his fabled knife…

It is good folklore but has little to do with actual history.

Dobie presents it as such so there is no quibble with him “making claims.”

It is a brief twofer volume—again not essential but I am not sorry at all I spent a little time with it.

Merry Christmas!

The Sun Dance Murders by Peter McCurtin

 

I drove through places you never heard of Flora Vista, Kirkland, Shiprock. There was no air conditioning in the car, and it was at least as hot as hell. At Durgin Springs I stopped to have a look at the wrecked post office. I talked to two of the survivors, both local whites, but there wasn't much they could tell me.

A Neo-Western from 1970. Seems to be a mix of Mickey Spillane transported to Elmore Leonard’s Southwest Mr. Majestyk territory, add some Billy Jack American Indian Movement politics, fake “red man” mysticism and you have a potent mix of some very un-PC seventies era sex, violence, casual racism and beaucoup misogyny.

I can get behind such vibes often—I find S. Craig Zahler’s excesses works of art.

Here, though,…here, while written with brisk craft, the non-stop “I’m a lady-killin’ bad-ass” narrative becomes laborious.

In a short dose, perhaps, but we are expected to follow these adventures for 156 long pages.

Our hero is so damn Manly there is never a doubt that all of the feminine species will throw themselves at him and all males of the species will be intimidated and/or laid low in bursts of violence.

I might have enjoyed this one far more when I was much younger and read the first few Mack Bolans with avid attention.

I am no longer that younger me.

If everything here that turned me off to the book sounds like your cuppa, well, giver ‘er a go.

Not badly written, just too much…way too much.