Frontier Partisan Bookshelf

I Gave My Heart to the Hawks

August 4, 2012
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Back when I was a mere stripling I spent hours trolling the shelves of Bob’s Valley Bookstore in the old hometown. It was there that I first saw the Frazetta covers on the old Conan paperbacks I would soon steal from my brother (OK, he let me read them). The racks held all kinds of [...]

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Born For Games

July 23, 2012
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I’ve been musing lately on sport. Watching the fallout from scandal at Penn State, we’re reminded that football is god and country at most major American universities. By the end of this week, the whole world will turn its eyes toward London for the Olympics. And here at home, I’m ridiculously invested in a summer-long [...]

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Bob Paul gets his due

July 17, 2012
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Fame is a hussy. Like her sister Luck, she tends to bestow her charms on the unworthy (sorry Frank). If she were a lady like Justice, Bob Paul would be a legendary Western lawman. There would have been a wildly inaccurate but morally uplifting 1950s TV show about him, and the movies would revisit his [...]

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The Spirit of Outdoor Adventure

June 12, 2012
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Most of us are familiar with the art of Philip R. Goodwin — even if you don’t recognize the name. That famous Winchester logo, with the scout galloping across the prairie, his trusty lever action rifle cradled in the crook of his arm? Goodwin. Philip R. Goodwin was an Easterner, born in Connecticut, but he [...]

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History Channel hits the X ring with Hatfields & McCoys

May 31, 2012
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Hatfields & McCoys was damn good. Gritty, authentic in tone and feel, well-paced, well-acted. I’ll be owning it on DVD; it’ll be well worth multiple viewings. Apparently, it was a hit: Some 13.4 million viewers of the first part, making it the highest-rated basic cable movie premier ever. That bodes well for Frontier Partisan Cinema. [...]

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Frontier Partisan Cinema — For Greater Glory

May 17, 2012
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Every once in a while, Hollywood surprises the hell out of you. What are the odds that a studio would take on a historical drama about an obscure religious rebellion in Mexico in the 1920s? Yet “For Greater Glory” hits theaters on June 1. The movie is a passion project of Andy Garcia, who has [...]

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Safari to Gorillaland

May 1, 2012
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I stumbled upon a very cool site last week and thought to share it with my compadres of the silicon trail. (Best I can do right now with multiple deadlines staring me down like a pissed off Cape Buffalo). Gorillaland is the Web home of Greg Cummings, a conservationist and author of a thriller that [...]

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The Renaissance Frontier

April 17, 2012
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For most of the 15th and 16th centuries, the most important frontier in the world was the bloody sword’s edge that divided Christian Europe and the Islamic Ottoman Empire. The epic, centuries-spanning struggle reached a savage peak when the forces of the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent attempted to take the Mediterranean isle of Malta, the [...]

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The Siberian Frontier

April 10, 2012
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Stephen Bodio has announced an exciting development: the publication of A.A. Cherkassov’s 1865 “Notes of an East Siberian Hunter,” translated by Vladimir Beregovoy of Virginia. Bodio contributes a foreword. Visit Stephen Bodio’s Querencia for details, including ordering information. I’ll definitely be picking up a copy. Bodio’s foreword encapsulates what I find so endlessly fascinating about [...]

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The strange and twisted saga of Forrest Carter

April 4, 2012
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I’d be hard-pressed to name two novels that affected me more growing up than “Gone to Texas” (“The Rebel Outlaw Josey Wales”) and “Watch For Me On the Mountain” (aka “Cry Geronimo!”) by Forrest Carter. Somehow I missed his most famous work, “The Education of Little Tree,” which I’ve never read. But those two novels [...]

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