Customer Reviews

To The Last Man: A Story of the Pleasant Valley War

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Of all of Zane Grey's books, this one rates in my personal top three favorites. The story itself is outstanding. Lots of suspense and gunplay, with a hopeless romance injected to keep your mind engaged. This story is especially good as it is loosely based on an true blood feud which happened in Pleasant Valley, a town in the Tonto Basin area of Arizona. Therefore, you can visit the site, see where Zane set his novel, and know that while Grey's may have been a fictional account, a feud DID happen, right where you are standing. The town is now called Young, by the way, to get rid of the stigma associated with the Pleasant Valley War. During a cross country trip, I took the time to drive out to Young just so I could see for myself where it all happened. I recommend every Zan Grey fan take the time to do so. I also read the account of the actual feud (available at the Tonto Basin Historical Center), and several key elements in Grey's novel are true. There was only one active participant who survived the feud, and the bit about the battle pausing so the ladies could bury their dead husbands to keep hogs from eating the corpses actually happened.

This is the first Zane Grey book I've read and I loved it.

The story is about a son coming to Arizona to help his cattle-ranching father for a pending feud with sheepherders in the 1870's. On the way there he meets a woman sheep herder and falls in love--only to discover later that she is the daughter of his father's arch enemy.

As the tale unfolds its mixture of action and romance, the book becomes impossible to put down. The detail in which he describes the action scenes leaves you feeling like you are right there in the middle of the gun fight. The romance is sweet and endearing.

At times, some of the descriptions of the landscape seemed a bit wordy, but did not detract from the overall story.

I picked this Kindle version and other PD books up on a whim, figuring the 99 cent price was worth it, and I hadn't read the original in over 25 years. I got more than a buck's worth of enjoyment out of it!

Looking at what this group has alos published, they have a lot of other classic books available for the Kindle. Now, after reading this book, I see they are offering 25 Zane Grey classic westerns on the Kindle for 99 cents.

A lot of these PD books formatting leaves something to be desired, but this one was pretty good. We're in a recession, so I like to see the pricing of these digital books right where they should be.

The Kindle version of this novel is almost unreadable due to missing punctuation and run-together sentences. It seems to have been scanned, run through the OCR software, and published without benefit of proofreading and editing. It's a shame, really. It's a rousing story but I'm having a hard time slogging through it due to the poor quality of the text.