Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: mining life, salt war, village arabs, Lincoln County, Silver City, New Mexico Territory (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The boy who would become Billy the Kid (1859–1881) was born Henry McCarty, perhaps in the Irish immigrant wards of New York City. Not much is known about his parents, and it's difficult to trace his whereabouts until his family turned up in Silver City, Colo., in the early 1870s. Both the facts and the legend pick up in 1877, when Henry—already known to some under the alias Kid—shot a man who was bullying him and began a life on the run. Wallis's reconstruction of the Kid's exploits is engrossing. But even more, Wallis (Route 66) shows Billy the Kid as a product of his era, one of profound social dislocation. Billy the Kid was, indeed, only the most legendary of a generation of "desperate men" who knew how to handle a gun. At the same time, a new kind of sensationalist journalism was being created, and reporters were more than happy to contribute to the creation of a myth. Wallis, the host of PBS's new American Roads, writes clean prose, occasionally enlivened by a particularly lovely turn of phrase ("the liquid rustle of cottonwood leaves"). Over the decades, countless books have been written about the infamous outlaw, and this is surely one of the best. 60 illus. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"It is a moral tale of a kind, to which Michael Wallis has done full justice." Frank McLynn, Literary Review "Following Wallis's search for the real Billy the Kid is a fascinating experience." Elmore Leonard" --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. (March 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393060683
• ISBN-13: 978-0393060683
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #136,170 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best Billy the Kid book in many years., March 6, 2007

By	J. Jacob Levenson "Levy78" (austin, texas) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As someone who was born in Southeastern New Mexico and raised in Texas I have been enthralled with Billy the Kid and the events that gave rise to his fame since my earliest memories. I don't consider myself a Billy the Kid scholar, but I have read a dozen or so books, seen most Billy the Kid sites and have spent many hours over the years contemplating the young outlaw's life. Michael Wallis effectively works off the proven facts (which are few)of one Henry McCarty alias Henry Antrim, alias Kid Antrim alias William H. Bonney alias Billy the Kid, to give us a great working backbone with which to study The Kid. When Wallis fills in the holes between the facts, he doesn't lead us on and uses logic and reason to create plausible scenarios based on Billy's time and location to create a fluid line from Billy's youth to his death and beyond. Mr. Wallis substantiates much of what is said in this book by quotes from people that knew and rode with The Kid, newspapers of the time and notes taken from other credible Billy the Kid researchers such as Robert Utley.
Michael Wallis really brings to life the mostly likely childhood The Kid experienced. The author does a superb job of taking the reader back to the Western Frontier of the 1870's. We get an idea of how the times Billy grew up in influenced him and the pivotal events in the young man's life that propelled him down his path, that in retrospect, appears to almost be destiny. The only part of The Endless Ride that perplexed me to a degree is how Wallis manages to only touch on a surface level the events The Kid is most famous for. However, I don't think Wallis' intention was to give an indepth portrayal of The Kid's deeds as an outlaw on the lamb, but rather, approach the story of The Kid, with less study on his events an 'outlaw' and more focus on the creation of Billy in the mind's of people then... and now.
Simply, this is one of, if not the best, Billy the Kid books I have ever read. Wallis' reserach is impeccable and his writing style sophisticated and fluid. Without a doubt, The Endless Ride is the best read yet to give great and accurate insight into Billy before he was 'Billy The Kid', where more than half of the book is focused. This book is a must read for any fan of Billy the Kid and an excellent starting point for any individuals wishing to get swept away in the legend that is The Kid.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mediocre and too long, not as PC as you might expect, though, July 18, 2008

By	David W. Nicholas (Montrose, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride (Paperback)

I wanted to like this book. The author, with his subtitle and thesis ("The Endless Ride") implies that he's going to look into not only Billy himself, but his myth and legend. Instead, what we have here is a lengthy biography replete with guesswork and innuendo, and lots of padding, some of it vaguely worthwhile, some of it not, really.

Billy was an interesting character, if only because of how little is known about him, and how many people have been almost hypnotized by his mythical persona. I was hoping that the book would concentrate on this aspect of his life: instead, it spends most of its words discussing the life and the possible origins of Billy. The author is well-versed in the story of Billy's life, and in the circumstances of his fame and death. He's also very conversant in the various rumors, stories, and theories about Billy's origins and roots. That's all very well and good, but beyond that there isn't much here, to be honest. For one thing, the book isn't as long as it appears. The publisher used pulpy paper, which makes a 328-page book look longer. They put a picture at the front of each chapter, and inserted a large picture section in the middle of the book. With chapter breaks (which result in blank pages frequently) and other devices, this book isn't really that long.

Much of what's in the book isn't directly related to Billy anyway. Imagine my horror when in the first pages I ran across a reference to America's "love affair with guns," turned to the bibliography, and discovered Michael Bellesiles' book "Arming America" in it. For those who aren't aware, Bellesiles was the darling of the gun control set when he released "Arming America" in 2001, right up until it turned out he'd fabricated or distorted much of the evidence for his thesis, which identified a large conspiracy among 19th-Century gun manufacturers to fabricate a "frontier myth" which would include settlers who carried guns, when (according to Bellesiles) everyone went unarmed in the frontier era. Anyway, Bellesiles lost his job teaching at Emory University, and the Bancroft Prize his book won was revoked, the first time that's ever happened. No historian, including most of the liberals who were supporters of his, takes him seriously any more. Unfortunately, Wallis appears not to have gotten the memo.

The PC angle of the book turns out, in the end, to be not quite as bad as you'd think. Wallis uses Bellesiles for context, but when he discusses the Lincoln County War, he becomes much more common-sense-oriented. He basically thinks that the whole war was between two groups of greedy oligarchs who used the various gunmen as pawns in a deadly game of Monopoly. That might not be a completely fair opinion, to those who have a side they root for in reading the history of the war, but it's always been closer to my opinion than anything else I've read. I don't think it particularly PC: the author makes it clear that both sides engaged in back-shooting, skullduggery, and general viciousness.

I generally enjoyed this book, within limits. I wish the author had been a little less interested in injecting his 21st-Century politics into a biography of a 19th-Century person. It also could be a bit better organized. There's a lengthy passage at the beginning where the author discusses Billy's origins, and then later in the book there's a chapter where the author skips back and discusses the possibility of Billy being part Mexican-American. All, or most, of this would have probably been better-placed in an appendix. Frankly, you wonder what the point to the publication of this book was: there's almost nothing here, that I could see, that's not contained in Utley's book. That being said, this isn't necessarily a bad book. Recommended, but only guardedly.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not Impressed, June 6, 2007

By	Impecunious fan (Lakeville, MN USA) - See all my reviews

To raise a dissenting voice, I found this book to be a journalistic deluge of speculation presented as fact, irrelevant padding (a whole chapter on P. T. Barnum?), and inaccurate factoids (Percy Bysshe Shelley died of TB?) used to fill out the narrative. _The West of Billy the Kid_ is much, much better and more readable.