Real Dirt on America's Frontier Outlaws

(Hardback)

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Description

Learn the real stories behind the infamous renegades of the West.

The rebels and bandits of the American Westlike Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kidhave always made for thrilling tales of gunfights, heists, and outlaws. From the beginning, penny dreadfuls, Wild West shows, dime novels, and urban legends romanticized and magnified these renegades and their wild American spirits. These tales, however, dont capture the truth of the Wests outlawsnor do we hear about other lawless individuals, such as Pearl Hart, Belle Starr, or the Bloody Espinosas. Jim Motavalli returns with The Real Dirt on Americas Frontier Outlaws to give a real and more inclusive look at the old West and the dangerous figures that immortalized it.

Reviews

the list of frontier outlaws is extensive, so the author had to be selective in these 240 pages. He managed to cover more than a dozen desperadoes in the longer entries and adds a handful more in his last chapter . Readers will no doubt think of outlaws left out of the mix, but we can at least enjoy Motavallis entertaining treatment of this bunch of baddies. * HistoryNet *

Author Bio

Jim Motavalli writes for the New York Times, CBS MoneyWatch, NPR's Car Talk, AOL, Mother Nature Network and TheDailyGreen.com (Hearst). He is author or editor of multiple books, including Forward Drive: The Race to Build Clean Cars for the Future and Naked in the Woods: Joseph Knowles and the Legacy of Frontier Fakery. Motavalli is a two-time winner of the Global Media Award from the Population Institute, and hosts a radio program on WPKN-FM in Connecticut, with frequent live music. He lives in Fairfield, Connecticut.