Down the Long Hills: Amazon.ca: Louis L'Amour: Books

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11 Reviews

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
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Average Customer Review

4.1 out of 5 stars (11 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars ONE OF L'AMOUR'S BEST, Jan 27 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Down the Long Hills (Paperback)

DOWN THE LONG HILLS is a story of courage, passion and drive and who cares if the hero in question is but seven years old. Good literature was never about strict adherence to historical or physical fact. We usually call those history or science, respectively.

No, in this book L'Amour seems to let his confident writing skills and his imagination run free. He asks the reader to imagine what would happen if a frontier-trained lad, Hardy Collins, was forced to make his way cross country with nothing more than a three-year-old girl, Betty Sue Powell, a wonderful, almost magical horse, Big Red and a head filled with the knowledge gained from working side-by-side with a loving but tough western father, Scott Collins.

Together, Hardy, Betty Sue and Big Red brave everything from the weather to a grizzly to scummy horse thieves, all the while being tracked by a Cheyenne brave who wants this horse of horses. The story flows extremely well culminating in a classic L'Amour showdown.

A great western for the entire family.

And if you ever get a chance to see the movie of the same title you'll love it too. It's about as faithful an adaptation to an original book as I have ever seen.

Douglas McAllister

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1.0 out of 5 stars HISTORIAN MY FOOT, Dec 24 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Down the Long Hills (Hardcover)

I don't buy Comanches on the Oregon Trail. I don't buy two kids as the lone survivors of a Comanche massacre of a wagon train on the Oregon Trail, who have to travel west for hundreds of miles from the scene alone to make it with a big stud horse to find the boy's Pa at Ft. Bridger. I don't buy the boy's father trying to find them and following tracks of a horse where the horse hasn't yet trod. I don't buy the two kids not finding a soul on the deserted Oregon Trail because it's late in the year. Someone rode that trail often, day and night every day of the year, over every foot of the trail, from the time it was opened, either Army, or civilian travel was constant. This is malarkey by a man who had a reputation as a historian based on reader ignorance, not his own knowledge. That and PR hype.

Sorry, this is baloney and so are most of his other books and stories. For example, Hondo, where his reputation as a "historian" was first born in a PR conference. In Hondo it is obvious that Looie first wrote just a book, set roughly in the never-never land of traditional Westerns. When his promoting geniuses tried to make it over into a historial tour de force, they fell on their faces, and did him no favor so far as reputation went. Bank account is something else.

I recall standing in my back yard while my horse shoer stopped and spit tobacco juice and said, "I was readin' Hondo last night. It's fairly obvious that when he said "there was no water between Lordsburg and the Fort, he meant Ft. Huachuca over there. What did he think that is over there behind me?" He motioned toward the nearby San Pedro River. "It's sure as hell between Lordsburg and the fort. And get this: this clown is carryin' a forty pound saddle across the supposedly waterless desert. What the hell for? You wouldn't make a mile with a saddle. But is sure looked good in the picture on the cover of the book. If they called this guy Looie Manure they'd come closer to the truth. I threw the damn book in the wastebasket."

Looie was a good old boy who wrote an interesting story, and I don't begrudge him his readership any more tahn I begrudge fast good joints their customers who may not even know what a five star restaurant is, or care, but let's not take that historian" business too seriously.

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5.0 out of 5 stars the best, Oct 21 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Down the Long Hills (Paperback)

You cannot put this books down. I try to forget it so I can read it again every few years. Not like L'Amour's other books, the shoot em up, good guy gets the girl. This one is different.
Not that I have the most exalted taste, but I was an English major and now am a librarian, so I have read a few books...This is a winner.
Anyone age 10 and up can read it and love it. Read it to kids a little younger than that.

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Read!
We read this in the car driving home from a vacation with our 4 children, aged 12 and under. We all loved it, from parents to kids! Read more

Published on Jun 30 2003

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitely five stars!
I have read all of L'Amour's books, and this is one of the first ones I read (at the same age Hardy is in the book - 7). Read more

Published on Jun 3 2003 by elanorh