Word: frontier
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Louis Dearborn L'Amour may be the most famous obscure author in America. He hardly ever makes the bestseller lists, nor is he yet a darling of the literati, like Mystery Writer John D. MacDonald. But today over 100 million copies of his frontier and western novels are in print. Moreover, he and his publishers have done it without full-page ads or talk-show hype. The latest of his 77 volumes, Lonely on the Mountain, is the 16th episode of the long and winding Sackett saga, tracing the fortunes of a frontier family from the 17th century...
...native North Dakotan, the rugged, soft-spoken L'Amour feels that his popularity comes from the same wellsprings that brought Ronald Reagan to prominence: "They say the cowboy is a dead, romantic figure. But there's a little cowboy in all of us, a little frontier. People don't want to go back to those days, but they want to go halfway back. Their problems are too big now, they can't solve them, people want action, positive values. If you think about it, that was what they were saying on Nov. 4. Those...
MCGINNIS stuffs the book with telling snapshots. Though he doesn't travel with any particular theme in mind, the pictures in his montage, realized in great, often tragic detail, are shrewdly observed. There is the casually inhuman toughness of the last frontier, where, when a drunk, drooling Indian lurches and almost collapses on the author's table in a diner his companion barely looks up as he says "Fuck off, partner." There is the disturbing impact of the short-sighted greed of the oil industry...
...plopped down on the permafrost to make as much money as possible as quickly as it could. And the men were there only to make sure the machinery did its job. Alaska was not part of their dream. It had never been, for them, a goal, a destination, a frontier for them to explore as they explored new levels of themselves. It was just like Saudi Arabia Indonesia, East Texas, the North Sea--a place under which oil happened to be. They were an occupying army, bloodless mercenaries...
McGinnis' book, like its subject, is unfinished. He packs it with the energy, diversity, and extremity of our last frontier, but he leaves it too raw. It becomes construction noise and restless people passing through. Alaska has not made any sense of itself yet, and neither has McGinnis. There is too little attempt to understand what he has recorded. Nevertheless, he presents the real scene, the graceless complete one. It has the robust glow and toughness of the Alaska that is one huge ragged edge of America...