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Summary
Summary
His name was David Crockett. He never signed his name any other way, but popular culture transformed his memory into "Davy Crockett," and Hollywood gave him a raccoon hat he hardly ever wore. Bestselling historian Michael Wallis casts a fresh look at the frontiersman, storyteller, and politician behind these legendary stories.
Born into a humble Tennessee family in 1786, Crockett never "killed him a b'ar" when he was only three. But he did cut a huge swath across early-nineteenth-century America--as a bear hunter, a frontier explorer, a soldier serving under Andrew Jackson, an unlikely congressman, and, finally, a martyr in his now-controversial death at the Alamo. Wallis's David Crockett is more than a riveting story. It is a revelatory, authoritative biography that separates fact from fiction, providing us with an extraordinary evocation of a true American hero and the rough-and-tumble times in which he lived.
Author Notes
Michael Wallis is the author of the bestseller Route 66 and the highly acclaimed Pretty Boy .
John Pruden is a professional voice actor who records audiobooks, corporate and online training narrations, animation and video game characters, and radio and TV commercials. An AudioFile Earphones Award winner, his audiobooks include The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, which was chosen by the Washington Post as the best audiobook of 2011.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Now known as a Disney coonskin-capped country caricature, David Crockett created a lasting persona built on his survival skills, embodiment of manifest destiny, and captivating storytelling, says Wallis. Offering only perfunctory coverage of Crockett's popularly imagined martyrdom at the battle of the Alamo, Wallis (Billy the Kid) sifts through his subject's substantial failures as a wilderness family man (troubled by debt, drink, and often abandoning his family) and business entrepreneur while also detailing overlooked professional successes such as his election to the U.S. and Tennessee legislatures. While Wallis illustrates the formally uneducated frontiersman's remarkable adaptability, Crockett's physical bravery against bears and moral courage in opposing aggressive mistreatment of Native Americans shine through as the defeated legislator finally suggested to his fellow Tennesseans that they "go to hell" while he happily left for Texas. Wallis's well-documented take on the famous pop culture hero reads like fiction, enhanced by flowing prose in portraying a flawed but fascinating frontiersman who faithfully carried a treasured rifle named after his estranged wife, Betsey. 60 illus. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
He wasn't born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, and he didn't kill a b'ar when he was only three. Even so, David Crockett was a force of nature, as this fine biography details.The Scots-Irish son of the American frontier, writes Wallis (Billy the Kid, 2007, etc.), became a legend within his lifetime and "died as a work still very much in progress." Yet much of what we know about Crockett is erroneous, thanks to fictions perpetuated over the course of nearly two centuries. David CrockettDavid, not Davywas indeed an accomplished hunter of bears, having killed more than 100 of them in seven months during 182526, as Wallis carefully records. But more than that, he was a frontier entrepreneur who "approached nature as a science and hunting as an art," earning a considerable income supplying furs for a hungry East Coast and European trade. As a politician, an endeavor in which hunting stories were guaranteed to liven up stump speeches, he fell afoul of fellow Tennessean Andrew Jackson early on, opining against several of Jackson's policies and views, particularly on the matter of what to do about the Indians. (Crockett opposed the relocations that would culminate in the Trail of Tears.) It was on the hustings, Wallis writes, that Crockett perfected a kind of bumpkin persona, wearing a buckskin shirt with two big pockets: "In one pocket he kept a big twist of tobacco and in the other a bottle of liquor," either of which worked to sway a voter. When Crockett's card in Washington played out, he left for Texaswhose Anglo secessionists, writes the author, desired freedom from Mexico at least in part because Mexico had outlawed slavery. There Crockett met his endbut not, as Wallis notes, in quite the way Walt Disney would have it.An excellent study likely to tick off the hagiographers.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Even before hi. martyrdo. at the Alamo in 1836, Crockett had become the proverbia. legend in his own time. Like others of that ilk, he was, and still is, a blank slate upon which many can impose their own characterizations. He was a rugged frontier individualist, a folksy humorist, a fierce Indian fighter, and then a fierce defender of Indian rights. Efforts to glean th. rea. Crockett are complicated by Crockett's own efforts to add to his mythology. Wallis' examination of the man behind the myth is both well written and engrossing; yet, he succeeds primarily in revealing the contradictions in Crockett's life, without adequately explaining what molded them. This is a chronological biography that begins with Crockett's antecedents in Ireland's Ulster province and then traces David's rough-and-tumble upbringing on the Tennessee frontier, where his tavern-owning father briefly hired him out to a passing stranger to alleviate his debts. Wallis emphasizes that his rather turbulent childhood was essential in forming Crockett's restless spirit. Wallis also offers some interesting insights into Crockett's political career and his relationship with Andrew Jackson. His move to Texas was motivated by a desire for land rather than opposition to the supposed tyranny of Santa Anna.--Freeman, Ja. Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Captivated as a child by the mythical Davy Crockett as presented by Walt Disney during the 1950s, Wallis (Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd) endeavors here to find the man behind the myth; he notes that Crockett always referred to himself in writing as David, but his mission is not specifically to debunk the mythology that surrounded Crockett so much as to present a readable and folksy account of the actual facts of Crockett's life. This is not an academic study that contextualizes Crockett in relation to many of his contemporaries or explores the milieu in which he thrived. Like Daniel Boone, Crockett was viewed as the quintessential frontiersman, but historians seem to have shied away from Crockett since a Mexican diary revealed in the 1970s that he did not die in the heat of battle at the Alamo but was instead executed as a prisoner. Wallis concludes by arguing that we should celebrate Crockett for how he lived. VERDICT Lay readers will enjoy this biography, and if it leads them to want to learn more about Boone as well, they will enjoy Robert Morgan's Boone: A Biography.-John Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.