7/01/2008

Jim Bowie - Robert Hollmann


Jim Bowie. By Robert E. Hollmann.


Dallas: Durban House Publishing, 2006. Frontier Legends Series. 115 pp. pbk ISBN 1-930754-81-7 $9.95 http://www.durbanhouse.com/


Odessan Hollmann, http://www.lonestarlegends.org/bio.aspx, follows up his Davy Crockett with this very readable biography of equally famous Texas adventures of Jim Bowie. The device to introduce the young reader to Bowie is Bowie’s own dog, Gator, named so for a gator fight. Years after Bowie has died at the Alamo, Gator reminiscences for his young pups about his life with the frontiersman. The text moves right along, from a dog’s point of view. Hollmann again brings his young readers to a personal level of the subject, this time Bowie, by Gator’s inclusion of personal matters including Bowie’s first meeting with and the later loss of his wife, Ursula Veramendi, daughter of the former governor of Coahuila y Tejas. From the origin of the keen edged Bowie knife on to the fall of the Alamo, Gator and Bowie, the narrative clips along with little underbrush to slow down the young reader. There are glancing encounters with Austin, Houston, Milam, Travis, Neill, and others as. Hollmann does introduce youngsters to Bowie’s part in the Battle of Nacogdoches in 1832, but the story line thereafter is mainly the Revolution. Bowie’s relationship with Crockett is emphasized.
OHOT: http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/BB/fbo45.html

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