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Taken Ford's The Searchers continued a century-long pursuit The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend By Glenn Frankel Bloomsbury, $28
The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend
The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend sounds blandly utilitarian as a title-safe enough for your Uncle Pete who enjoys those old cowboy pictures. Yet these words are loaded. The "American Legend" proves much more far-reaching than the 1956 John Ford film, spreading out across 180 years of U.S. history and touching on national identity, racial obsession, sexual panic, and the need to tell stories about ourselves. Veteran journalist and author Glenn Frankel has developed a fascinating design for this wide-ranging volume; even if I disagreed with certain observations, I couldn't help thinking, what a brilliant idea for a book.
The first part of the title goes beyond the movie, too, for the book is not just about The Searchers but about searchers. They are a varied group tied together by a central incident: the abduction of 9-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker by a Comanche raiding party in East Texas in 1836. Cynthia Ann lived with the tribe for 24 years before being violently seized again and returned to white society along with her youngest child, after which she...