American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett

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From Publishers WeeklyLevy presents a sympathetic but unremarkable biography of the legendary frontiersman in colloquial if occasionally florid prose (an election loss "burned into Crockett like a brand searing a cow's flank"). Those whose image of Crockett was formed by the cultishly successful Disney treatment will find much that is familiar: the Indian fighter with Andrew Jackson, the congressmen from Tennessee and, finally, the Texas patriot who died defending the Alamo. But Levy (Echoes on Rimrock: In Pursuit of the Chukar Partridge) offers more (although not a lot more) in the way of background and complexity, and is willing to expose some of Crockett's deficiencies without making judgments: Crockett clearly indulged his wanderlust at the expense of his wife, a strong figure in her own right, and was, for a variety of reasons, an ineffective, bumbling politician. But despite his faults, readers will find Crockett likable and talented. In Levy's view, Crockett's abilities were expansive, and he opines that Crockett's bestselling 1834 autobiography "prefigures by some fifty years the literary genre of 'realism,' with nothing remotely like it" until Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And Crockett's falling out with President Jackson over, in part, Jackson's brutal Indian Removal Act of 1830 is to the frontiersman's credit. B&w illus. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistCrockett was born in 1786 in Tennessee and died at the Alamo in 1836. In his brief lifetime, he became a folk hero, a three-time congressman, and a potential presidential contender. In this meticulously researched book, Levy chronicles Crockett's remarkable rise to fame. For most of the first half of his life, Crockett lived from day to day, driven by the barest necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. He married and then rented a small farm, and the couple had two sons and a daughter; his wife died from complications after their daughter's birth. He fought in the War of 1812 against Great Britain and later became a magistrate, the first step in his career in public life. In the end, as Levy has it, Crockett transcended the facts of his life to become an enduring symbol of possibility, remembered not for his deeds or his greatness, but for the tenacity of his spirit. George CohenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved