Rating: 
Summary: misleading
Review: book looks impressive by its size, but misapplies many of the footnotes. have to be carefull when reading this book. many statements made without proper facts to back them up.
Rating:
Summary: By far the best book on the Alamo so far!!!
Review: Cover to cover, the best book on the history of the Alamo defenders. Wonderful illustrations throughout this book.
Rating:
Summary: Three cheers for three roads!
Review: Davis has pulled off quite a coup - a marriage of history and intrigue. How these three individual lives converged at the Alamo is the plot and the mystery and Davis held me spellbound, even though we all know how it ends. Stripped of the myths actually makes these three stand taller, even though they were far from perfect (even felonious at times). This lengthy treat moves very quickly. Great, great read!
Rating:
Summary: Finally - The REST of the story!
Review: Ever since I was a introduced to Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, the 1950's television series created by Walt Disney and Fess Parker, I was awe-inspired by his legend and death at the Alamo. To a lesser degree, James Bowie and William Barrett Travis held similar positions in my mind. This does not discount or minimize in any way the contribution and ultimate sacrifice of the other 200 or so volunteers at the battle of the Alamo.
But I always hungered for more information about these men, what made them "tick", and what motivated them to make that valiant last stand. This book by William C. Davis has finally filled that void for me. I can't say enough good things about it!
As another reviewer has pointed out, the end notes are nearly 200 pages in length and add considerable detail and depth to the narrative. I found myself not only flipping back and forth to review them, but reading them one after another as if they WERE the narrative itself!
The research that the author has obviously done on his subjects is almost beyond belief. He presents these three individuals with the detail and depth that finally allows us to begin to view them on a more human level. He removes the bigger than life legends that surround them, revealing not only their strengths of character, but weaknesses as well.
In short, I cannot recommend this book more highly. It is a truly great piece of work. Thank you, Mr. Davis!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Helped me learn about Crockett
Review: Had to do a report on Crockett for school.Got this book, opened, read, took notes. Wrote the paper, based on my notes from this book. Got an A on the paper. In other words, great resource material-valuable if you wish to know the differences between Fess Parker's "Davy Crockett" and the real David Crockett.
Rating:
Summary: Three Roads to the Alamo
Review: How closed did David Crockett come to being presidient of the United States? Closer than you might think. That's one of the many interesting issues covered in "Three Roads to the Alamo" This book is deep and well researched. The foot notes were as interesting as the book itself. Most Bubba Texas history buffs never considered Crockett, Bowie and Travis until they bite the big bullet. We sometimes forget that Davy Crockett was not much more than a tourist. He had just lost an election and made one campaign promise that he kept. He said, "If I lose this election I'll either go to hell or Texas." He chose Texas. His travels led him to San Antonio at a time that coincided with the defense of the Alamo. James Bowie was a land swindler that forged a lot of Spanish land grants in Louisiana and did a poor job of that. He was kind of hiding out from creditors and enjoying his new squeeze, a pretty local girl from a influential San Antonio family. She died of typhus that rampaged the area and Jim went into a depression that kept him from a timely exit from San Antonio. William Travis was thriving in Texas with a law practice. Only after he had sneaked out of Alabama leaving a family and lots of debt. This book does a great job of explaining how these three men came together and rose above their short comings to lead a brave defense of the Alamo.
Rating:
Summary: History Defeats Myth Again
Review: I am a Texan who has grown up with the Alamo story. When I was younger, it was the ultimate hero story to me. In my later, supoosedly-wiser years, I saw it as a silly, overblown, pointless, jingoistic tale about some ne'er-do-wells who foolishly got themselves killed for no good reason. After reading Three Roads to the Alamo, I think both versions are true. The book constitutes three long, thick, thorough biographies of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis. Most Americans have heard of "Davy" Crockett and most have heard of the "Bowie Knife." All Texans have heard of James Bowie and William Travis. I live in Travis County, which contains Austin, the capital of Texas, and I live down the street from James Bowie High School. But other than knowing that Travis and Bowie were commanders at the Alamo, I knew very little about them, and most of what I "knew" about them turns out to be untrue myth, as convincingly demonstrated throughout Three Roads to the Alamo. William C. Davis sticks to the facts in his narrative and disposes of myths in the footnotes, which are vital reading. The facts of Crockett's life are fairly well-known but still interesting. Davis shows Crockett as a Perot-esque plain speaker, trapped late in his career by his own mythology, tirelessly repeating his tired complaints against Andrew Jackson. Finally voted out of office, he goes to Texas and joins the small band of Texians defending the Alamo against Mexican invasion and is killed with the rest. A prior reviewer gives this book only 2 stars for the sole reason that Davis rejects one version of Crockett's death, which appears in a Mexican soldier's diary, that has him surrendering and being bayonetted by Mexican soldiers. When this diary became publicized a few years ago, there was a small furor because surely the great Crockett would never have surrendered. The diary had to be a forgery or a lie. This furor demostrates the powerful hold that the Alamo myth has over Texans. Crockett HAD to go down fighting, not surrendering. Davis's book is refreshing because he looks at such things objectively, always putting forward provable facts over made-up myths. He convincingly shows that the diary is hearsay and that similar stories were told about Crockett and others, and ultimately concludes that it is impossible to tell how Crockett died from the sources. I find this honesty refreshing. However, very little is actually about the Alamo. It is mostly about the interesting lives of Crockett, Bowie, and Travis. Bowie's tale in particular is fascinating. I wanted to strangle him throughout most of the book. This guy started out with an ingenious but disgusting slave-laudering scheme, smuggling slaves through Mexican-owned Texas. Then he blatantly and poorly forged hundreds of fake Spanish documents purporting to give him ownership and thousands of acres of Louisiana and Arkansas. The false claims screwed up title in both states for decades after Bowie died at the Alamo. He also obtained a fraudulent "debt" that the federal government supposedly owed $42,000 on. Bowie never acknowledged that the claims were false, instead trying to bully federal officials in the South and Washington into officially recognizing his claims. Even the Bowie Knife turns out to have been made by his brother and used by Bowie only once. Crockett came to Texas to escape debt, abandoning his pregnant wife and daughter. He did not come to Texas because he had to kill a man for shaming his wife, as I had heard before. He was basically nothing but a coward. But then the rogues end up fighting the Texas Revolution, and suddenly the hero in them comes out. I forgave all their faults. Davis shows that the truth is stranger and more interesting than fictional myth. I drove by Bowie High School the other day before getting to the part where Bowie turns into a hero. I wanted to scream out my window for the school to change its name. Now that I have finished the book, I say let Bowie have his school. Maybe that just shows that I am impressionable. I don't know. All I know is that I loved this book.
Rating:
Summary: Minus the Mexican view
Review: I can fully endorse the previous reviews here. This is a wonderful piece of historical writing. The only thing missing to give it full classic status is the lack of the Mexican viewpoint. I wish Davis had included the life of Santa Anna and called it Four Roads.
Rating:
Summary: At Last, The Real Story
Review: I have always suspected that the events I "know" about the Alamo were not entirely accurate, and now, from reading Three Roads to the Alamo, I find that most of what I knew was myth or outright fabrication. But the really interesting discovery is that the truth is much more evocative than the myth.
A biography of any one of these men would be a quite a job by itself, but William Davis has written three meticulously researched biographies and has combined them into the definitive history of the Alamo. Don't be deterred by the length of this book; serious researchers will appreciate the detail, but for the rest of us Davis writes in a smooth and satisfying style. Once their mythology is stripped away, Bowie, Crockett and Travis come to life as real men, and we follow their fascinating lives as their paths lead them toward their fate. We become immersed in their stories, as if they were characters in literature.
If you could only read one book about the Alamo, Three Roads to the Alamo would be your best choice.
Rating:
Summary: Riveting and worthy of its length
Review: I sheepishly admit to being one of those people for whom a 790-page book on the Alamo is not at all excessive. In "Three Roads to the Alamo" William C. Davis fills those many pages with a narrative that seems to me the most authentic, objective, and substantiated account connected to the well-known but often-distorted events of 1836. As the title indicates, Davies' organizing focus is on the biographies of the three American principals at San Antonio: David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Travis. He traces their lives in interleaved chapters that follow a generally chronological path. None of the three turn out to be anything near the paragons of virtue and/or honesty depicted in the standard accounting. Courage they most certainly had, but in Davies' retelling it was a courage born of self-interest and opportunism. Of the three, only Crockett's story leaves us feeling any great sympathy toward its subject. Still, even in this revisionist account, their lives maintain an unsurpassed power to both instruct and excite. Bowie is depicted as a land-speculator of the most dishonest kind. He achieved his fortune largely by forging Spanish Land Grants in Louisiana. Davies shows that in this he was hardly unique, although perhaps an over-achiever. Travis led a short and mysterious life, and his character remains elusive despite Davies' prodigious research. Like many of the Alamo defenders, he came to Texas to reinvent himself and to leave behind a failed past. Davies does his best to sort out the details of that abandoned past life. Crockett's road to a legendary death is well-told here in all its diversity. Davies is especially convincing in dealing with Crockett's political career, characterizing it as one marked by "naïveté, miscalculations, and simple blunders." And the author's detailing of the manipulation of Crockett by the Whig press and party leadership gives a dimension to the story that is not often treated. Despite a generally cynical portrayal, the author also provides ample evidence of Crockett's more appealing traits, which go far in explaining why this defeated ex-Congressman was received with such enthusiasm in Texas. The events at the Alamo actually take up a small portion of the book, but a "small portion" here is still a substantial serving. There are also approximately 160 pages of Notes. I'd advise the reader not to skip them. Davies not only discusses there some of the major controversies of his subjects' lives and of the war's details; he also relegates some of the best stories to those pages - presumably because of their debatable legitimacy. While Davies deals effectively with the ambiguities of the mission's final battle, I feel his most vital accomplishment is in showing his three subjects to be "in every way men of their time." In this sense, the book is as much about the dynamics of American life in the middle third of the 19th-century, and of Texas as an exemplar of American values, good and bad. It's also a damn good read.
| 
