Customer Reviews

Education of a Wandering Man

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This was the book that L'Amour had on his desk in galleys when he died in 1988. I have used this book in my Freshman Composition classes for seven years. It is a marvellous book. I suspect that L'Amour did not really want to write it because he did not like to brag about himself. There is no bragging in the book, just the flat out reality that he was curious about the world and his curiosity could be fulfilled by reading. It is a great tribute to audodidacticism, a fancy word for the power of self teaching. I find the book inspiring and an important read for an adolescent, although I have had older students say that it made them readers. I am not much of a fan of L'Amour's westerns, but this book is one of my all-time favorites.

The Education of a Wandering Man is the story of one man's love affair with life. It is also amazingly well-written and shows Louis L'Amour to have been a thoughtful, philosophical man as well as an adventurer. Ironically, I haven't read his novels. When I tried to after reading this book, I concluded that his autobiography is a far greater work than his novels. I suspect that's because his own life story is a far greater story than any fiction could possibly be, plus he focused mainly on the western. I really wished he had branched out into the historical novel. He started to with The Walking Drum but that was at the end of his life and he didn't have time to follow with more novels that would cover the history of the world. As the other reviews emphasize, he began his wanderings at the age of 15 and from then on educated himself by reading. As a special bonus, at the back of the book is a list of the books he read each year from 1930-1935. It shows how widely he cast his net. If ever you want to show a teenager why reading is important, give him this book with the reminder that Louis L'Amour was a bestselling author for most of his life.

I have read a few books by L'Amour, but this tops them all. It opens the reader's mind to the many different opportunities that exist in life. I think that a lot of times, as we go through life, we get bogged down by the general routine, and we never stop and think of the different possibilities that await us. We too soon accept the conventional way that has been trodden before, and never consider different possibilities. L'Amour's zest for learning and reading is contagious, and the reader cannot help to have the desire to emulate the rigorous study that L'Amour underwent. I think people who love to read, and enjoy learning about different aspects of the world, will enjoy this book. I also think this is essential for the aspiring writer, because it gives the reader a personal look at the challenges L'Amour went through to achieve his dreams.

I also think this book is essential for sixteen year olds like the previous reviewer. If the kid would have opened his mind he may have realized that there are things in life beyond "cars, games, girls, and electronics." He may have also realized that literary works from previous times, such as "black and white" movies, and this book, can provide rich, intriguing and entertaining shades on the world. But such is the ignorance of youth, and the "Nintendo generation."

You will have to forgive me for this review because I truly think L'Amour is a great writer. I've read and enjoyed many of his westerns and even his few ventures into other genres. I admire the fact that he learned from his travels and devoted a great many of his wandering days to reading. However, I can't tell you how disappointed I was in realizing that this is the closest I would come to reading L'Amour's autobiography. Over and over as I read, he mentioned some adventure in passing and I begged for more. But, instead, he would introduce me to some book he read at that time. Knowing of his books is great, but his wandering experiences surely contributed just as much, if not more, to his future bookwriting career. Yet he passed over them as if they barely occurred. What a loss! Perhaps he gave some reason for not writing a true autobiography. I don't know. All I know is that I completed the book with a respect for the man's love for reading but an empty sense of dissatisfaction for all that he left out.

Unfortunately, this is the closest L'Amour fans will come to a true autobiography of a great American and writer. L'Amour starts this book with a reference to his high school class graduating while he was on a steamer in Indonesia. Thus, L'Amour sets the stage for his lengthy discussion of becoming self-educated through books, and experience.

In this book, L'Amour presents lists of books he read during his wandering years in the 30s. I particularly enjoyed the part where he described the difference between a hobo and a bum. Accoring to L'Amour, hoboes were not freeloaders, they just used the rails to follow the crop picking from one part of the country to the next. A bum, on the other hand, has no intention of working, and looks for handouts. This distinction was an eye opener to me.

Also, his discussion of walking outof th eMojave desert hit close to home, as I was born and raised in the area he described. L'Amour was a great researcher, and wrote from both personal experience and knowledge. This is an enjoyable book and has even been included in numerous literature courses in various universities. Throughout the book, L'Amour emphasizes the value of education through experience and self-guided reading; however, he never degrades formal education as a route to discovery and self improvement.

Reading "Education of a Wandering Man" made me realize how very little I know of the history of this planet. It caused me to see the world through different eyes. This gave me a whole different perspective on time and the transitory nature of nations and kingdoms. Every age comes and goes...all things are born, mature, and die out. L'Amour had a fluent visual way of passing this wisdom on to the reader. L'Amour demonstrated in his own life that anything is possible if one learns all that he/she can and dares to move ahead--to recognize opportunity and take advantage of it whenever and wherever it presents itself. We are only held back by by the limitations we place on ourselves. The theme of this and all of L'Amours works reveals the value of obtaining knowledge without bias, and the importance of personal integrity.

This book's overall premise is that there is no single way one should live one's life. Sadly, that's a message not often repeated, especially to children and young adults. While I haven't read any of L'Amour's westerns, I found his autobiography fascinating, and a real wake-up call to me at a certain point in my life. Also, his life is as fascinating as any adventure novel.

The "Education of a Wandering Man" is not a jaunty title for an autobiography or a collection of true life adventures even though some hype written by the publisher suggests that it might serve those purposes. L'Amour genuinely offers this work as a memoir about his education Reviews on this site that suggest this book is an excellent account of L'Amour's adventures exaggerate its merits. Those that criticize it for failing in that goal are correct but miss the point that this was not L'Amour's purpose. Rather than being for an audience of adventure or biography readers, this memoir would be of interest to people doing academic literary criticism of L'Amour or collecting the kind of material that would appear in the footnotes for a L'Amour biography.

It is easy to understand why L'Amour wrote this memoir. He had little formal education and in his early years this kept him from getting various desirable jobs. Although literate and well read, he also found himself initially lacking the skills to be a creative writer. Thus the education that he gave himself had considerable effect upon his life. The two components of L'Amour's education were extensive travel and reading. For most of his youth L'Amour traveled not as a tourist but as a common laborer, seaman, or soldier. He could not plan his reading or afford to buy many books. He read from whatever books he found in libraries or such places as cabins at isolated mines.

In the memoir, a biographer will find the three types of subject matter needed to analyze L'Amour's intellectual development. First, there are some colorful anecdotes and a larger number of prosaic factual statements about where he traveled and worked. Second there are lists of books that L'Amour read at various times in his life. Third there are statements of his opinions on various matters. But the analysis of all this will be a hard job because L'Amour rarely singles out any particular event as something that caused him to form an opinion. He lists books that he read but does not give details of what he thought about them. For example, he writes "I read Crime and Punishment while in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I had heard much of Dostoevsky but was surprised by this book - surprised and very impressed. Several times I turned back to reread sections of the book. At the time I was working in a sawmill, off-bearing on the green chain". He then goes on to explain what "off-bearing on the green chain" meant in sawmills of that day. But he does not elaborate on why he was impressed by Dostoevsky. In fact, the above example is atypical because in most instances L'Amour simply states that he read a certain book and not whether he had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of it. A more typical passage is "My reading in the library continued with Why We behave Like Human Beings by George A. Dorsey, Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Will to Power by Nietzsche, a volume of essays by Schopenhauer, and another by William James".

L'Amour has kept the secrets of his private life to himself. For example, he says that he left home at age fifteen half way through the tenth grade, but he gives no details about this decision, which probably involved some serious thought. It is often said that war has a profound effect on soldiers and that it defines the most vividly remembered time of their lives. However, L'Amour gives us only a few pages about his preparation to go to war and of his experiences in Europe we get only a single paragraph:

"As it turned out, my time overseas was spent in the European Theater of Operations. I did what I was given to do and they gave me four Bronze Stars for doing it reasonably well. I spent time in England before D-Day, traveled in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Germany and made some good friends in France who are my friends still."

His anecdotes, book lists and opinions are mixed together in a narrative that is approximately chronological. A person trying to read this book a series of adventures will be disturbed by what appear to be constant interruptions that give book titles or state opinions about topics in writing or education. A person trying to read this a history of L'Amour's intellectual development will be disturbed by the lack of detailed revelations about what L'Amour thought about the books that he read or his inner reflections about the events that befell him.

The memoir itself hints at reasons for its limitations. L'Amour states that when he studied people's lives that he always wished to have a list of all the books that they had read. So presumably L'Amour felt he had done his duty by providing the reader with such lists for his own life. As to which of L'Amour's opinions came from which specific incidents or books, it is likely no single book or person swayed him immediately. He writes of listening to various people tell about the same event and gradually sorting out the truth from this. In his reading he would have encountered many different opinions and circumstances dictated that he could not select books from one particular school of philosophy or one style of literature. In the memoir, L'Amour expresses definite judgments on a wide variety of subjects. These editorial digressions reveal him to be moderate and judicious. For example, it would to tempting to conclude from L'Amour's life that a writer should not worry about "book learning" and instead should see experiences in the world of "hard knocks". L'Amour does not put forth this grand generality. To summarize his opinions from various passages in the book, he says that his education was right for him but would not suit other people. In his youth, he did not seek travel in order to gather material for writing but rather out of economic necessity. He says it is unnecessary for writers to travel widely and that material for stories is easy to find. In his opinion, the problem is the presentation of the material. He advises that a would-be writer learn his craft by starting to write down words with whatever skill he currently possesses.

As memoir about education, I rate this a three stars out of five. It's main defect is that it reveals little about the internal thought processes of the author and those processes are significant part of education, especially self-education. L'Amour was an extraordinary person and if you want some advice about writing or some titles of good books about the history of the West, you should consult this book. But it will speak to you as would a talkative acquaintance, not as a trusted friend.

Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L'Amour should be required reading for all homeschooling parents, homeschooled teens, book-lovers, teachers - anyone who values education.

I am very familiar with Louis L'Amour's work. My dad had the complete, leather-bound collection of his western novels, and I read many of them when I was in junior high and high school. My favorite book of his is, by far, The Walking Drum, which wasn't a western, but a 12th century adventure novel. In spite of having read so many of his books, I had no idea that Mr. L'Amour was such an autodidact.

This book is a rambling memoir of his travelling years and the books that accompanied him along the way. He dropped out of school at age 15 at the beginning of the depression. He spent the next years of his life wandering the world as a merchant marine, boxer, logger, miner - you name it, he probably did it. But just because his formal education in school had ended, he did not stop learning. No matter where he was living, he found a library or bookseller - sometimes skipping meals and sleeping outdoors in order to fund his book habit. The list of books he read is astounding - books on every topic imaginable. He was especially interested in history and sought out source materials wherever he could find them.

This is the type of book that you will either love or hate. I loved it because it provided insight into the mind of one of my favorite authors and I found that mind to be far more fascinating than I ever expected. I have read dozens of his westerns and have found them thoroughly entertaining, but have noticed that most of his protaganists are very similar in many ways. This fact, I discovered, is not due to a lack of imagination or an "in-a-rut" formulaic method of writing. On the contrary, it is because L'Amour wrote himself into his characters and attempted to impart those things which have interested him in his studies to the reader. He intuitively understood what readers would enjoy because before and above being a writer, he was a voracious reader. His love of and enthusiasm for books that he revealed in "Education of a Wandering Man" was contagious and exciting for me as a fellow reader.

As I mentioned, however, some people will invetiably not like this book if they expect it to be a coherent story, a "birth to death" autobiography, or a nail biter. It is closer to a annotated bibliography to his early life along with interesting anecdotes and philosophical musings.

When I finished the last page of the book, I felt quite sad as I did not want it to end. I highly recommend it to those who love Louis L'Amour and who love to read books. It will make you want to turn the TV and radio off and sit down with a good book. It will also serve as a very comprehensive "recommended reading" list for those trying to find that next great book.