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Title: The First Frontier

Subtitle: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America

Author: Scott Weidensaul

Narrator: Paul Boehmer

Format: Unabridged

Length: 16 hrs and 15 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-02-12

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 145 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier - the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground - when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land.

The First Frontier traces two and a half centuries of history through poignant, mostly unheralded personal stories - like that of a Harvard-educated Indian caught up in seventeenth-century civil warfare, a mixed-blood interpreter trying to straddle his white and Native heritage, and a Puritan woman wielding a scalping knife whose bloody deeds still resonate uneasily today. It is the first book in years to paint a sweeping picture of the Eastern frontier, combining vivid storytelling with the latest research to bring to life modern Americas tumultuous, uncertain beginnings.

Members Reviews:

Worth a listen

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

Yes, but it was not as enjoyable as I had anticipated (I was really looking forward to it). However, it was well worth it.

What other book might you compare The First Frontier to and why?

Fred Anderson's The War that Made America, which covers some of the same period and events. In fact, if I hadn't listened to Anderson's book first, I would have a even higher opinion of this one, but Anderson often is more to the point and presents things in a clearer way. For instance, it was quite clear in Anderson's book why Washington became an aide to Gen. Braddock, but it wasn't in Weidensaul's account.

What aspect of Paul Boehmers performance would you have changed?

It was OK, but I found myself falling asleep more often than usual. His reading is somewhat flat, but not bad.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Immediately! Couldn't wait.

Any additional comments?

While I hate PC as much as anybody, I do not agree with another review's criticism. This book did not seem to me to present the Indians in a particularly PC way; to me, the presentation seemed fair and objective. The Indians were no saints, they could be treacherous and cruel, and the book does not hide this. What it does do is make us understand the complexity of the Indians' world when the Europeans started to wreak havoc. We tend not be be insufficiently aware of how many they were before the Europeans came, and how complex the relationships were between different tribes. The great interest of this book is to give us a better sense of how things must have looked to Indians, and of the tragic misunderstandings between Indians and Europeans in addition to the Europeans' rapacity and prejudices. And even apart from inadvertently killing off nine-tenth of the native population with the germs they brought, on the whole the Europeans certainly behaved worse than those they considered inferior, often to their own detriment.

Bad narration kills it

I found the writing of The First Frontier passing fair but the narration is so bad I had to put it down after a an hour or so.