Ninth Biennial Report of the State Board of Education of the State of Michigan Book

I got this for free out of a wheelbarrow of books a neighbor put out, so technically I didn't break my (loosely) self-imposed ban on buying more books before I reduced my TBR pile.

L'Amour says this isn't really an autobiography, but is supposed to focus on how he educated himself. He wanders enough to make it a pretty good, if incomplete autobiography. The byways are often more interesting than the main story. His education was mostly from reading, wandering, & talking to people, but he places an emphasis on the first. I'd love to see a list of all the books he mentions, but a Google search didn't bring up such a thing. There is one in the back of the book.

While most of the books he wrote were pretty simple, he went to some pains to be historically accurate in some ways. He certainly bent the rules a lot more gun fights & show downs than actually took place, though. Still, they're fun books & there are some that are fairly profound. Two that come to mind are Bendigo Shafter: A Novel & The Lonesome Gods, favorites of mine. Both these protagonists grow up learning much the way L'Amour did & he uses phrases in those novels often in this book.

I didn't enjoy the last 1/3 - 1/4 as much as the first. He repeated himself & lectured more. I didn't care for that tone, but still found interesting facts. Too many of the books are just mentioned by title at times. It would have been nice to know a bit more about them. I have read or attempted to read some that he mentioned. His ability to read dry, complex texts obviously exceeds my own.

The Wikipedia article on him

is technically accurate, but lends a different slant than what I'm getting from this book. It says, "...eight years, they skinned cattle..." making it sound like Louis was with all or part of his family. According to him, he wasn't. He left home at 15 & did come back to help his parents move from OR to OK, but was otherwise out on his own. Apparently he grew big early & easily passed for several years older than he was.

An interesting tidbit from the move with his parents. They stopped at a ranch where Louis had worked to spend the night & he mentioned something about Butch Cassidy. The ranch owner replied that Butch had dropped by a couple of days ago to swap a couple of tires for a saddle. L'Amour explains that while the world thought that Cassidy had died down in Bolivia, many folks in WY, CO, & UT knew better & that. Except for the Pinkertons, everyone liked him since his holdups never killed anyone. (I'll take that with a large grain of salt.) I read the bit through several times, but could never decide if either L'Amour or the rancher were joking or serious. There is very little evidence either way for the life or death of Cassidy.

I've read both theories in other books, too.

On the way home I was listening to the second section of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. A character says that one of the best things about books is that you can shut them when you need to think, unlike the TV & advertising of the book's world. I got home & read some of this book. The epigraph to one of the chapters I read was "A book is a friend that will do what no friend does - be silent when we wish to think." - Will Durant, the author of Story of Civilization
Kind of neat getting the same sentiment from two such different sources within an hour of each other.

I'd love to give this 5 stars, but it was a bit too uneven for that. It was a good book & I'm glad I read it. I'm fairly sure I'm not going to keep it, though.