Good account of the mountain men during the heyday of the fur trade in the American West. More of a character study of several men and of the time. Not an exact history. ( )

Part fiction, part history, Win Blevins' book shines in one of the rare, unimpeachable periods of American history. The American rawland of the West is evoked beautifully ("God's finest sculpturin's to roam in" (pg. 166)) and its characters, the larger-than-life mountain men, were, as Blevins notes on page 291, quite often white men who adopted Indian ways rather than enforcing the reverse. The vitality of the land breathes through the pages of the book.

Give Your Heart to the Hawks works better as fiction than as history; as history, it is often dry in the telling, despite some fascinating interludes regarding mountain craft and sexual relations with squaws, among other things. But Blevins is open-hearted about this, stating from the off that he is primarily concerned with history "as a rendering of felt experience" rather than dates and abstract causes (pp17-18). In this, he is very effective, particularly early on in the book, and the reader gets the dirt of the West under their fingernails, and feels the cool of a mountain stream and the warmth of a buffalo skin and the thwack of a Blackfoot arrow.

Having established its literary quality, the book loses its way in the middle before returning with a brief flourish at the end. But it never loses its sense of immersion, and Blevins buys into it completely. For example, on page 71 one mountain man wants to make a map of the West and "have it published back in the States"; the reader realises with a start that this land is not yet considered a part of the USA. It is unexplored territory. If you accept the book's inherent eccentricity, Blevins will take you on a journey. ( )

I did not actually finish this book. Even after a good deal of effort, I could not really get into. Such is life at times. ( )