The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour: Unabridged Selections from The Frontier Stories: Volume II: What Gold Does to a Man: The Ghosts of Buckskin Run: The Drift: No Man's Mesa [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio CD]

Louis L'Amour (Author), Jason Culp (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 26, 2004

With more than 120 titles still in print, Louis L'Amour is recognized the world over as one of the most prolific and popular American authors in history. Though he met with phenomenal success in every genre he tried, the form that put him on the map was the short story. Now this great writer – who The Wall Street Journal recently compared with Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson – will receive his due as a great storyteller. This volume kicks off a series that will, when complete, anthologize all of L'Amour’s short fiction, volume by handsome volume.

Here, in Volume Two, is a treasure-trove of 35 frontier tales for his millions of fans and for those who have yet to discover L'Amour’s thrilling prose – and his vital role in capturing the spirit of the Old West for generations to come.


From the Hardcover edition.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

L'Amour published 90 novels, 27 short story collections, a memoir, 2 nonfiction books, and even a volume of poetry. He is the only novelist to win both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. This is the second volume of his western stories to be released posthumously. The 30 tales collected here reflect the qualities on which L'Amour's timeless popularity is based: memorable protagonists, excellent plots, moral clarity, and plenty of action. About half of these tales feature Chick Bowdrie, a tough-as-nails Texas Ranger with a Holmesian ability to analyze a crime scene. Bowdrie solves a 20-year-old kidnapping, ends a nascent range war, and brings to justice the killers of 14 outlaws slaughtered in an ambush, among other heroics. Beyond the Bowdrie offerings, the standout tale in the collection may be "Law of the Desert Born," in which Shad Marone, on the run for a crime he didn't commit, draws his pursuers into a trap in which only one man will survive. Great reading from a genre master. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"L'Amour never writes with less than a saddle creak in his sentences and more often with a desert heatwave boiling up from a sunbaked paragraph. A master storyteller.... for reading under the stars."—Kirkus Reviews
 


From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Random House Audio; Abridged edition (October 26, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0739313681
• ISBN-13: 978-0739313688
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.5 x 5.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,004,311 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"I think of myself in the oral tradition--as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man in the shadows of a campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered--as a storyteller. A good storyteller."

It is doubtful that any author could be as at home in the world re-created in his novels as Louis Dearborn L'Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally "walked the land my characters walk." His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L'Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.

Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L'Amour could trace his own in North America back to the early 1600s and follow their steady progression westward, "always on the frontier." As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family's frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.

Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L'Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs, including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, and miner, and was an officer in the transportation corps during World War II. During his "yondering" days he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.

Mr. L'Amour "wanted to write almost from the time I could talk." After developing a widespread following for his many frontiers and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L'Amour published his first full length novel, Hondo, in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 120 books is in print; there are more than 300 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.

The recipient of many great honor and awards, in 1983 Mr. L'Amour became the first novelist to ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life's work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.

Louis L'Amour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the L'Amour publishing tradition forward with new books written by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, not great, July 26, 2008

By 

G. Conover - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour: Unabridged Selections from The Frontier Stories: Volume II: What Gold Does to a Man: The Ghosts of Buckskin Run: The Drift: No Man's Mesa (Audio CD)

I've been a fan of Louis L'Amour for as long as I can remember and I have always liked the audio tapes, and now CD's, that let me listen to the stories when I am driving. But I do have a couple of complaints about The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour Volume One and Volume Two. First, it would be nice if they listed the titles of the short stories, but they don't. There is no where on the CD itself, the CD case, or the slip cover with the titles of the stories. Why the big secret?

Second, and more important, neither of the readers, John Bedford Lloyd for Volume One and Jason Culp for Volume Two are good at doing voices. Their natural voices are great but then they try to change their voices for various characters, instead of simply reading with their natural voice, and that significantly detracts from the stories. And neither is any good at doing women's voices and shouldn't try. It is embarrassing. It is also embarrassing when Culp does the voices of some of the heros - they come of as either 10 or 12 year old whiny kids (as in The Drift) - or not very bright adults. What is the point? If different voices are important then they should use more than one person to read the story. If not, dispense with the attempt since it detracts from the stories.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Louis L'Amour Rocks!, November 12, 2008

By 

David M. Ballew "bavanut" (Burbank, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume II: The Frontier Stories: 2 (Kindle Edition)

I love Westerns, and I absolutely love the way Louis L'Amour tells his Western stories. Granted, there's not always a lot of suspense with regards to the outcome (L'Amour seems not to have been enamored of downbeat, twist, or morally ambiguous endings), but there's often considerable suspense along the way. The writer was a national treasure, and if your tastes run along the same line as mine, this book will be your personal treasure.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, October 5, 2010

By 

Mary K. Baylor - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 2: The Frontier Stories (Hardcover)

I bought this book for my son. He very much likes the book and reads it a little at a time, because he isnt ready for it to end.