Customer Reviews

And Not to Yield: A Novel of the Life and Times of Wild Bill Hickok

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This book moves at a snail's pace. As "a novel of the life and times of Wild Bill Hickok" it does nothing to draw the reader in, and care about the characters. When the extensive dream sequence appears in the middle of the book, I was left wondering what King Arthur and the knights of the round table had to do with Wild Bill. Did I miss something? I suppose this is some inferior use of metaphor, but there had been no effort to set it up, and therefore it lacked relevance.
Like the other review here I can't understand how this was a winner of the Western Heritage Award for Best Western Novel. I will stick with Spur award winners from now on. For readers who are looking for true western literature with metaphor and imagery, check out Win Blevins "Stone Song." That was a Spur award winner, and one of the best western themed books I've ever read.

While reading "And Not To Yield" I was constantly reminded of better novels, such as Thomas Berger's "Little Big Man". Eickhoff sets out to accomplish many of the things Berger did in his tale of the life of a wild west hero, but the narrative is always just a little flatter and tamer and the events just a little less exciting than those of Little Big Man. I realize Berger was writing a fictional account, but surely the life of Wild Bill Hickock could have produced a more gripping biographical novel. This is just a dry recounting of Hickock's career with some dreams and visions of mythological characters thrown in, in an attempt to provide Hickock with motivation.

And perhaps I'm nitpicking here, but Eickhoff's choice of words in at least one instance was very poorly researched and jarringly anachronistic: In chapter 29, on page 190, we learn this about Hickock's early enemy in the Rock Creek incident: "McCanles had a number of "wannabes" hanging around him at the time..." 'Wannabes' is a word first used among fans of the singer Madonna in the mid 1980s to describe those who dressed and acted like her. 'Wannabes' does NOT belong in the vocabulary of a gunfighter of the 1860s and 1870s. I'm really kind of shocked that Eickhoff and his editors included this word. Sycophants, henchmen, cronies, sidekicks, emulators... Any of these would have been better than 'wannabes'.

I don't really understand how this novel won the 2005 Western Heritage Award for Best Western Novel, but I guess western stories are few and far between today and the judges had little to work with.