The New York Times calls this a “fascinating revisionist biography,” but I am not familiar enough with the traditional biography of Jesse James to know what the new angle is — perhaps, all of the brutal killing when he was a pro-slavery militant during the Civil War. I reviewed the first half of this a few weeks ago, and those comments stand.
As I got further in Jesse James’ life, it was interesting to read about his public relations efforts; for example, he used to issue press releases and leave them on the trains that he robbed. Also, I liked reading about how monetary policy was affected by politics before, during, and after the Civil War … it reminded me that there is this other pop history book about the history of money that I have been meaning to read for a while.
This book has some very interesting bits, but like many histories it suffers from big gaps in time where there is not any direct evidence of what was going on with Jesse James’ life. (Now, as I mentioned earlier, I prefer gaps to long, clearly made-up sequences about a historical figure’s inner life, but that is just me.) Stiles tried to fill in the gaps with analysis of the historical and social context of outlaws in the Sourth before, during, and after the Civil War. Those parts were really boring, in part because he mainly seemed to be having an argument with other history writers instead of presenting us with a compelling story or theory. And there is no reason for that stuff to be boring. It has OUTLAWS, the old west, the war, money, trains, probably hobos for gods sake — basically a lot of things that make for good reading and there is no excuse for making me feel like I was in a boring high school class during those parts of the book.
I think I am going to see if the library has that money history book, though.
