5 comments about Old Jules (Armed Services edition).

1. Old Jules is not a bad book, it's just too long for one thing. The characters and their lifestyle are quite unique but their lackluster day to day existence needn't have taken up so many pages. If you want gripping, white-knuckle excitement, look elsewhere. The book is interesting from a historical point of view maybe but it just wasn't my kind of read. (Ho-hum........)



2. It's a long, boring book about some old dirt farmer out in bumf&*k, Nebraska beating his wife and having kids he doesn't love. The end.



3. This books tells of a pioneer emmigrant that survives the panhandle Nebraska, as a farmer(more his 4th wife than him), when most people thought it couldn't be done. What a great story of a man, and what he puts his family through. This is no Little House on The Prairie.



4. This is a book you can't put down once the first sentence leaps off the page at you. Vividly told, with accompanying pictures of the land and the people, it is one that was surely deserving of the literary honors it received upon it's first publishing. It is a story of a highly intelligent, manipulative, yet visionary man driven by many things; unrequited love which forever tormented him, an abusive inner nature that only needed the urging found on the untamed primitive Nebraska plains to emerge and effect the "control of others"; the obsession to "settle the country" and bring farms and families into a community that could survive all hardships toward a common goal. He was married six times; drove the weakest one of them into the insane asylum; and nearly drove his last and most tenacious wife to suicide during an incident where he struck her with a strand of barbed wire when she couldn't "hold a calf down firmly enough to keep it from kicking" while being worked.
   
   It is also a history of the Valentine, Nebraska area, backed by historical facts "gleaned from the newspapers" of the times for a series of incredible events; including vigilante justice, a brush with a pleasant horse thief ("Gentleman Jim") in the hills where he was saved only by his ignorance of the circumstances; inhumane treatment of the plains indians (but amazingly, not by Jules) and persecution of his own kind by still others.
   
   I found it amazing that Ms. Sandoz could write so objectively about her father in the effort to tell his story, but she considered it not only an honor, but a duty since he asked it of her on his deathbed; and I am sure the only reason that could be was perhaps at least partially due to the fact that Old Jules never established a bond with any of his children. They were a "product" to him; a means to accomplish a goal; a workforce. Therefore, it may have been easier for her to be brutally honest when writing of him.
   
   Perhaps it was meant to be that way. Because the story is in a class apart and therefore, I highly recommend it to anyone seeking Western American History the "way it was" (although assuredly not all families were headed up by an Old Jules) rather than the "way it is sometimes told" in movies and other types of literature. I have a "First Edition" of this book - a priceless item, it holds a very special place in my home library since my own parents were early settlers of Wyoming.



5. I found this book to be very interesting. I have ready only one other book by Mari Sandoz - but recognized many of the titles listed inside. It's a tough thing to write about your father - and capture the uniqueness. She was able to describe him and keep herself as a "bystander" when much of his disciplinary methods were directed at herself and her siblings. She was also able to give the reader a preview of what the Nebraska panhandle was like as it opened up to settlement and beyond. I have lived in the Black Hills about 30 years ago - and I could picture her descriptions of the land very well. This is a book that supplements historical accounts - a "looking glass" view into the life of one man and how he viewed his corner of that world. I especially liked the end where she listed all the people who came to his sickbed. He was a force - and the reader should decide a "force for what?"

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1. Bill and Lily have opened their wonderful lives for the reader to enjoy and respect. Many of the stories reflect the typical Alaskan family doing the exceptional things we do. But consider the span of nearly 100 years for both Bill and Lily, and what a great blend of traditional values and modern day growth and adaptation!

   And the best of all... How Honest!!

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