Mountain Man: A Novel of Male and Female in the Early American West by Vardis Fisher Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Mountain Man: A Novel of Male and Female in the Early American West
Book Review: Remake of the "Crow Killer"
Summary: 3 Stars
This book is a redo of Thorp's "CROW KILLER" liver-eating Johnson. The name was changed to Sam but it was about Jeremy Johnson.Book Review: A Brilliantly Written & Beautifully Expressed Tale
Summary: 5 Stars
This novel is a lifelong passion for me. I read Mountain Man as a project with my father when I was 11, some 22 years ago. I associate this work with wide-eyed boyhood and love of nature. It rings of a time when America was still a wild frontier of hard men, bent on survival and self government. I refuse to apply 90s political correctness to this novel. Such intellectual revisionism had no place in Sam Minard's world, and therefore it has no place in the assessment of the work itself after the fact. I have read this novel at least 25 times, and find new and more rapturous moments in it each successive time. The love that Sam had for Lotus and the regard he had for Kate are two of the most shining examples of literary love I have ever encountered. This book is a glorious orchestration of a seldom taught period of American history and an Old West adventure tale of the first order. It recounts a time of great courage and brutality, portrayed fairly and with much class and distinction. It would have been easy to make it sappy and formulaic, but Fisher deftly avoids such tactics. Instead, he is as detached from this novel as "The Almighty" was from the characters of Sam, Lotus, Kate and the Big Sky wilderness: He created, then set free his creation to fend for itself. Waugh! This is as solid a novel as there is on this subject, if not the finest ever.Book Review: Fisher's novel is beautiful but relentlessly brutal
Summary: 4 Stars
Vardis Fisher wrote better novels than this but not very many. I can only echo the comments of others. From the first scenes, the author shows a country that is breath-takingly beautiful yet harsh and cruel. But Fisher is humane if honest. He is not racist, but his characters are. "Sam Minard hated the Blackfeet. ... Most of the mountain men hated all Indians." (page 14) "The contempt, on both sides, had its beginning in the earliest association of redmen and white.... Each thought the other fantastically stupid, and his low opinion of the other's mind and values gave zest to slaughter and scalping." (page 25) It might also be noted that Fisher, who was an atheist, has his characters speak frequently of "the Almighty," but it would be a mistake to construe from this that Fisher was religious.Book Review: Vardis Fisher's best
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this book many years ago, and believe it will be my next, again. It is a book one dare not discard,as the second and third readings get better. Vardis Fisher captures the essence of the mountains,streams, and one can smell the camp fire and relate to the colorful fractured kings english. The movie With Redford was good but the book is better.Book Review: Fosters a new appreciation of a unique era ... Jimi
Summary: 5 Stars
From the opening lines of this story, you feel like you're traveling with Sam Minard (renamed Jeremiah Johnson in the Robert Redford film) in the old west. Vardis Fisher weaves a tale that you can touch, smell, taste and see. I first read this book in 1980, and several times since then... and it always brings me back to a renewed appreciation for the American wilds. The movie was good, but doesn't begin to give you the flavor of the book.