Customer Reviews

The Daybreakers (Sacketts)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I give this novel five stars, but with a sigh and a caveat. You can't compare L'Amour to anyone but authors in the Western genre, and he is head and shoulders above most of them. I have read many books in my day; some of them uplift me, some of them have changed me, some of them have made me a better person. Louis L'Amour's books will do none of these things...BUT! You will seldom find a more entertaining read. Open a L'Amour western and the action just thunders off the pages. You can almost smell the gunsmoke. His action scenes are well -written, and, in spite of what another reviewer said,
his characters are better drawn than those by most other western writers. Yes, they are fictional, and the things they do are largely fictional. L'Amour writes of a Wild West that should have been, full of bad guys but also full of plain-speaking, mountain-bred, six-shooter totin' Good Guys who are more than capable of taking care of themselves. The satisfying thing in these novels is that you just know the bad guys are going to run right up against Our Hero and boy, are they gonna pay for their misdeeds...! You can't wait for that to happen, and L'Amour delivers the goods in each and every book. This Sackett novel is probably the best of the series and is a great example of L'Amour's writing. Read this, enjoy it at the level at which it should be enjoyed, and get ready to ride the wild west with the Sackett boys!!

I read The Daybreakers in one sitting and not since discovering Conrad,Asimov,and Vonnegut in high school had a book so strongly introduced me into a new genre of fiction. The Daybreakers is the best Sackett book I have read to date. With beautiful imagery of the new american west and thoughtful page devotion to its characters and setting. It has great gunfights and a quick-paced story to back them up. I now find myself as big a fan of the warm frontier years as I was of the cold sterile future. I recommend this book to anyone with enough time to give this great story.

The Daybreakers is truly a western classic. It tells the tale of two brothers who find themselves alone heading west trying to find a better life for themselves and their family. Along the way they encounter battles from Indians, Renegades, Outlaws, Land-Grabbers, and the betrayel of a good friend. An adventure filled tale packed with gunsmoke, Spanish Haciendas, and the perfume of lovely senoritas. You will not be making a mistake with this one, a prime example of how action/adventure should be. Lamour is at his best with The Daybreakers.

One of my favorite childhood authors was Robert Louis Stevenson. The excitement/tension in his books is palpable. I get that same feeling w/Louis L'Amour.
It's a simple story simply told. I survived a 12 hr. marathon Xmas shopping trip by reading this book between stores. Great characters & great action... Consistent themes include education,family & honor. The Sacketts are a family for the ages. This uis a great place to start the Sackett Saga!

I accumualted 105 louis l'more paper back books over a 3 yr period and read every one. i found that he was extremely knowledgeable of the time he wrote about and researched every adspect. Was living in the center of the area he wrote about. i am a newbie kindle owner (1 Week)and was greatly surprised to find all of the books i had lovingly accumulated and then lost, available on kindle, i am rereading them all and starting with the beginning of the sackett series. hope all who get a chance will do the same and enjoy as much as i have

This happens to be the first Louis Lamour that I have read, but from discussing it with other Lamour fans I have found that this book is one of his best. I really enjoyed it and although I am relatively new to his books (only 7 so far) it is probably my favorite. Lamour has opened the Western genre to me and I am now an avid western reader. This is definitely a good one to start with.

This is a superb Western. It tells the story of our country's rise to greatness with the emergence of self-sufficient families who tamed a harsh wilderness. A glorious tale by America's best teller of tales. If you need a fix now Louis is gone, try Shane or Aymond.

The first of L'Amour's famous Sackett series is the story of Tyrel and Orrin Sackett, brothers from Tennessee. Forced to leave their home for their part in the bloody end of the Sackett-Higgins feud, they hook up with gentleman scholar Tom Sunday and old time mountain man Cap Rountree, and carve out a new life for themselves in the cattle country along the Purgatoire and Santa Fe. But other men, like Jonathan Pritts, are also intent on staking a claim on the country, and they are prepared to run off the old Mexican settlers to do it. All that stands in Pritts' way is the family of a tough old Mexican don - and Tyrel and Orrin.

The Sackett family may be L'Amour's most famous creation, but they're not his best work - his real masterpieces are Kiowa Trail and High Lonesome. While The Daybreakers may not be L'Amour's best, it's definitely one of the better Sackett novels, nearly as good as Tell Sackett's debut novel and vastly better than Mustang Man, The Sackett Brand, Sackett's Land, or Lonely on the Mountain.

The Daybreakers has an epic sweep lacking in many of L'Amour's novels, covering many years. Tyrel is a thoroughly likeable character, although he is slightly bland, and his brother Orrin doesn't engage so strongly. The villainous Pritts is appropriately slimy, although he is upstaged by his daughter Laura, one of L'Amour's more memorable villains. But Tom Sunday is the book's most remarkable feature: a good man gone bad, a hero undone by his own character flaws, and he lends the story a mournful, tragic note that is very rarely found in L'Amour's generally upbeat fiction. You keep rooting for Sunday to turn himself around, right up to the very climax of the story, and Tyrel's ultimate gunfight leaves a very different flavor in your mouth from your typical Western story's finale.

The book is a bit bloated, notably by an unnecessary diversion of the action to Montana. There is also some silly posturing (though quite typical for the day) about how Indians "never owned any land," because they were always roaming and fighting each other for it; you might just as well say that medieval Europeans never owned any land because their barons were always fighting each other for it. Nonetheless, L'Amour's respect for, and understanding of, Indian culture remains well superior to many of his contemporaries and fellow Western authors.

David Strathairn delivered a number of good readings of the Sackett novels later on, but he can't quite find his stride in The Daybreakers. He sounds exactly the same as in all the Tell Sackett novels that he read, and indeed for the first five minutes I thought Tell was the narrator; nor is Strathairn able to put the same confidence and bonhomie into the reading that he mustered in his later L'Amour performances. Strathairn also reads the name "Purgatoire" by its old French pronunciation of "Per-ga-twa," rather than rendering it as "Picketwire," the way Tyrel and virtually all Anglos would have.

I wish I had read The Daybreakers first of the Sackett novels; it's not the best, but it's close, and the novel would have had more suspense and interest if I hadn't known part of the plot from reading later Sackett novels first. It's a good, solid Western, which is all the praise L'Amour would have wanted.

This is the best overall western I have read. At 18 Tyrel and Orrin Sackett leave the back woods of Tennessee and head west to make a better life for themselves and find a place to build a ranch and send for their mother and two younger brothers. They have many adventures along the way, including cattle drives, Indian fights, Bad Guys, Good Guys, friendship, family ties, gun fights, and of course, romance. In staying alive in the middle of thieves and cutthroats, it does not hurt that Orrin is very fast with a gun, but his brother Tyrel is even faster. It is the story of a poor family trying to find a better place in the world and in doing so they build a better place for all those around them. It is a story of the building of the American west. I highly recommend this book.

tell, tyrell sackett. Fantastic and realistic. This is one of the best ever (and I think the first) Sackett books by L'Amour. Fantastic 5* stuff