Customer Reviews

Cowboys, Mountain Men, and Grizzly Bears: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of the Wild West

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Matthew P. Mayo is a master of starting as irresistibly close to the action as possible. In his fiction and his non-fiction, he opens with just enough that you care about his characters and then he hits that character fast and hard. Mayo's sentences are lean, tough and graceful. His writing has a powerful sense of moment and of scene, of gesture and of other human subtleties.

Cowboys, Mountain Men, & Grizzly Bears and Bootleggers, Lobstermen & Lumberjacks tell fifty tales each of some of the most harrowing moments in their respective regions. These aren't dry recountings or glossy propaganda.

Bootleggers, Lobstermen & Lumberjacks contains stories of swamp fights, death rides, and massacres, of pirates, rum-runners, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things in the face of extraordinary circumstances.

Cowboys, Mountain Men, & Grizzly Bears features stories about gunfights, death marches, and grizzly wrestling, of narrow escapes, deadly winters, and cannibalism.

These are gritty stories - stories, as he says in the introduction of Bootleggers, of "showing courage, resolve, and pluck in one's daily life, of being tough and uncompromising in the face of adversity." Indeed, both of Mayo's Grittiest Moments books read like Loren D. Estleman and Jim Thompson got together to re-write a Stephen Ambrose history book.

My husband read this in the evenings before bed to his sons and I. Some of the stories are a bit gruesome, but he loves to read aloud and the boys enjoyed the stories of some hearty men of yesterday.

Matthew P. Mayo is a miner of unexpected gems. In Cowboys, Mountain Men & Grizzly Bears: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of the Wild West, Mayo unearths little-known characters with extraordinary tales. These tales are short, loaded with action and chalked-full of colorful characters and vivid scenes. Mayo has an uncanny ability to bring characters and scenes to life by using authentic, western language of the time. He's a master of western writing. If interested in bawling grizzlies, ruthless villains and impressive heroes... read these stories!

Each story is about two pages long. You get the very short versions of each. Does not go into a lot of depth but a great introduction to some of the people of the wild west. Great bathroom book.