Blood and Thunder : The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West (Paperback)

from Stbalbach

Lots of adventure stories from the 1840s-1860s mostly in New Mexico. Kit Carson is the protagonist but there are many many others, if you can keep track. Gives due attention to Indian points of view, as well as Spanish and Mexican. There's a sense of rapid change, one period ending and another be...

from Narboink

Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of this book is how it covers such a vast amount of historical (and geographic) terrain so quickly and with such unencumbered ease. In a tale woven around a biography of Kit Carson, Hampton Sides accounts for the Mexican-American War, the settlement of C...

from iammbb

Another one of our purchases during our Santa Fe trip. Blood and Thunder tells the story of Manifest Destiny and the expansion of the United States using Kit Carson as its fulcrum. Sides follows Carson from his birthplace in Kentucky to his childhood home in Missouri and then, finally in his myri...

from Smiley

Well written and well researched biography of Kit Carson, juxtaposed against the Navaho story with the coming of Manifest Destiny Americans in the wake of the Mexican War. Reads fast. One problem. Sides, like all late 20th century authors and beyond, suffers from historical guilt and seems to pla...

from dchaikin

22. Blood and Thunder : An Epic of the American West (Audio) 
by Hampton Sides, read by Don Leslie (2006, 624 pages in paper format, Listened Apr 1-19) An excellent work of history, with a structure that gives it something of an accumulative affect. The first several chapters are not that strikin...