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Rating: 
Summary: A great story
Review: Charles Fletcher Lummis was a phenomenon--journalist, poet, cross-country tramp, outdoorsman, hunter, newspaper and magazine editor, historian, archaeologist, folklorist, photographer, publicist, Indian rights activist, librarian, preservationist, museum founder, and prodigious lover of dozens of beautiful women. His life story makes for fascinating reading. This book is marred by some factual errors (a "new millennium" did not begin in 1900, and the territory of the Chiricahua Apaches was not "as big as Europe"), but the errors are mostly inconsequential (this is popular history, not a scholarly treatise). Thompson has told a great story, and he has done it very well.
Rating:
Summary: Mark Thompson does a fantastic job
Review: Charles Lummis is a very interesting person in American and Southwest history, but author Thompson goes way beyond what most biographers would do and produced a richly researched and highly readable story. I read this book in my car, under a streetlight, while my wife attended a Christmas function. Does that tell you how interesting it is? I've passed Lummis's home/museum thousands of times but never visited--now I will.
Rating:
Summary: a fascinating man of his time!
Review: Mark Thompson's long & deeply researched biography of a forgotten, complex American born just before the Civil War, is fascinating. Over a long & restless life, Charles Lummis became a poet, prolific letter writer, journalist, photographer, archaeologist, editor, champion of Spanish heritage in the Americas, & Indian Rights advocate - the classic workaholic of the late 19th & early 20th Centuries.It was his TRAMP ACROSS THE CONTINENT in 1884, which he weekly serialized in newspaper articles, that catapulted him into the public's eye. In time, as his assignments for the newly-formed Los Angeles Times, took him deeper into the Southwest which would capture his heart & soul, & closer to the American Indians for whom he would advocate mightily, he caught the ear of a President. Theodore Roosevelt came to consider Lummis a vital part of his "cowboy cabinet," & often invited him to Washington. Lummis enjoyed a life-long influence, via his editorials & many books, on the way Americans thought of themselves. In this era of bland plasticity, AMERICAN CHARACTER, reminds us of how individualistic, passionate, offensive & charming our forefathers were. It also reminds us of how devastating was our impact upon the people & the land in a time when a man could bemoan the wholesale slaughter of buffalo & Indians, while not batting an eye as he shot other critters just for the thrill of it! In the light of today's political correctness, Charles Fletcher Lummis' love life was as gilded with misogyny as you would expect from a man of his time - he kept his first marriage secret all through his Harvard years. As in every other aspect of his life, his thirst for affection & companionship was both utilitarian & fascinatingly eccentric. AMERICAN CHARACTER: Charles Fletcher Lummis & the Rediscovery of the Southwest, has been named by the Western Writers of America as Winner of the 2002 Spur Award in the biography category.
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