About book Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody And The Wild West Show (2005)
The Old West is a unique time and Buffalo Bill an intriguing and unusual character. That he created and managed the immensely sucessful Wild West Show should have made him enormously wealthy, and yet he ended his days with practically nothing. His show was very popular with the audiences of the day, people were fascinated by the Wild West - for them recent history, but a time passed and gone.Buffalo Bill told so many tall stories about his life that it has been difficult to seperate fact from fantasy, this is something the author has managed to untangle to best present the real William Cody.The book also covers the history of his show and looks at just about every significant character and infleunce associated with it. The level of detail is very thorough and the author provides some insightful perspectives of society in 19th Century USA. I did not find the interpretations of the symbolism of the Wild West show so interesting, like reading a literature review but this was the only downside of an excellent, detailed, thorough and fascinating biography.
Ok, this book really has two parts. The part that I liked was the actual biography part. I didn't like so much the sociology/anthropology/psychology part of the biography. Did you know for example (per this guy) the American in Bram Stoker's was based on Buffalo Bill and the fact that he's incompetent is a commentary on the way that Stoker sees the frontier, etc...? Yeah the more that I'm thinking about the book the lower down it goes. Like I said, if you enjoy biography read it, but be prepared to skip some in the middle.
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