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(More customer reviews)While reading "Meriwether Lewis" in my spare time I kept track of the reviews on Amazon, and the review by LEllen quite surprised me. What she liked the least was what appealed to me the most. I prefer stories about people to the stories of events, to the extent that they can be separated. Heretical as it may sound to history buffs I was not interested in reading more about the expedition, but I was very interested in the story of Lewis' life. The background information of his personal relationships with Thomas Jefferson and William Clark, his search for a bride, his difficulties as a governor and as an author showed me the man behind the hero. Equally interesting were the explanations of the problems of integrating the Louisiana Purchase into the new nation, which gave me a sense of how much it was a Wild West that preceded the days of cowboys and Indians.
As to it being an extended treatise on his mysterious death, I gather that the author's new theory on the death of Lewis was indeed the point of the book, but the pages devoted to the days regarding his death are precious few compared to the life story that precedes them, though there were plentiful forebodings mixed into earlier pages.
As for the writing style, it was not Harry Potter but it was as readable as I expected in a scholarly work. I too was initially puzzled by the shifting from a straight chronological order to what seemed to be a topical treatment of different aspects of Lewis' life but I reluctantly adjusted to it. Perhaps the authors anticipated a more scholarly audience who would come to the book with a sense of the chronology already in mind. In any case though far from a history scholar, I was able to appreciate "Meriwether Lewis" for what it did well, giving a detailed and well researched history of Meriwether Lewis the man..
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