Jesse James - T.J. Stiles

In this brilliant biography T. J. Stiles offers a new understanding of the legendary
outlaw Jesse James.
Although he has often been portrayed as a Robin Hood of the
old west, in this ground-breaking work Stiles places James within the context of
the bloody conflicts of the Civil War to reveal a much more complicated and significant
figure.


"Carries the reader scrupulously through James's violent, violent life.... When [Stiles] calls Jesse James the 'last rebel of the Civil War; he correctly defines the theme that ruled Jesse's life." -Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove via The New Republic

Raised in a fiercely pro-slavery household in bitterly divided Missouri,
at age sixteen James became a bushwhacker, one of the savage Confederate guerrillas
that terrorized the border states.
After the end of the war, James continued his
campaign of robbery and murder into the brutal era of reconstruction, when his reckless
daring, his partisan pronouncements, and his alliance with the sympathetic editor
John Newman Edwards placed him squarely at the forefront of the former Confederates'
bid to recapture political power.

With meticulous research and vivid accounts of
the dramatic adventures of the famous gunman, T. J. Stiles shows how he resembles
not the apolitical hero of legend, but rather a figure ready to use violence to command
attention for a political cause-in many ways, a forerunner of the modern terrorist.