Rating: 
Summary: Overly Hyped
Review: I found this book to be overly hyped. Many of the so-called "discoveries" were already surfaced in other books, most of which had limited small or Univ. press runs. It is well written. My guess is that the other reviewers are new to the James story matter, acting like this is the greatest book on the subject. And as for accuracy, Stiles has a man killed during the Russellville, Kentucky robbery of 1868, when there were NO fatalities. Some people want to believe real hard that this book is what the hypemeisters claim it to be. It is not a balanced account, I'm sorry. The author glosses over Jayhawker and Union Militia "death squads" to make Jesse James into a larger than life villain. Most of the letters attributed to Jesse [their authorship has ALWAYS been in question] do not mention anything political but are alibis given for non-participation in a given robbery.
Rating: 
Summary: Read it for yourself...
Review: I have just finished a careful reading of this book, and it is one of the most remarkable books on American history I have ever read. Instead of being simply a compilation of facts and speculations about someone who lived underground for his entire life, this beautifully written book is a sweeping story of how the United States went through the Civil War and the years that followed. The author knits together the lives of one remarkable person after another, including Jesse and Frank James, their larger-than-life mother, Zerelda, the outlaws' friends and enemies (such as John Edwards and Allan Pinkerton), together with the story of the community the James family belonged to, as it was torn apart during the war. The most astonishing thing this book reveals is how important Jesse James was in the politics of his times, and how he understood that and tried to use his fame to promote the Confederate cause.I frankly don't understand the angry reviews that some have posted on Amazon. This is a very careful, thoughtful book, with almost 100 pages of endnotes (and bibliography) that explain the author's reasoning as well as sources. Clearly he's telling us what he thinks, but he never goes overboard. So who gets to decide what an "error" is? Were they videotaping robberies, so we know exactly what happened? Some of the critics seem to think they have special, secret knowledge. One thing that is especially silly is that the people who are attacking Stiles's book go on and on about the fact that the endnotes mention Michael Bellesiles, a historian who is now the subject of an academic investigation. I was curious, and I checked: I found only a couple of mentions of Bellesiles in the notes, and they say things like, "Bellesiles's work has come under harsh criticism." One of the Amazon reviewers says things about Stiles's book that just aren't true (claiming that Stiles says there were few guns in Missouri before the Civil War, and only one man in three had a gun--none of that's in here). Then again, one man said he was basing his comments on a pre-publication proof, which is not the same thing as the actual book, and so the critics may have been too lazy to read the real thing. This is a book worth reading. It is wonderful. I have never read a biography like it.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent history
Review: I have read many books on the James brothers. This book and Yeatman's are the two best. It is hard to figure out the complaints of some of the other reviewers. Did they read this book? They are quoting errors that are not to be found in this book. Anyway, it is excellent history and very good, fast-paced and interesting reading.
Rating:
Summary: A truly brilliant biography
Review: I loved this book. I have had a fascination with the Civil War in Missouri, and Jesse James, for many years, and I have to say that this is far and away the best thing ever written on either topic. The book is brilliantly written, but it is also packed with new insights and new reseach. For example, the author uses probate records and newly discovered letters from Watkins Mill State Park to put new light on Jesse and Frank's father, Robert James, and on the hardships faced by Zerelda, his widow, after he died in the Gold Rush. Stiles does something that no one else has done before when he looks at the family's slaves, trying to understand their lives and how slaveowning made the James and Samuel family what it was. And the portrait of the Civil War in Missouri is genius. Stiles shows us that there was a lot more going on that simply Missourians fighting invading Kansans. He uses new sources, including a report by the Missouri state legislature and reports by the provost marshals (including some reports missed by everyone else who has written about Jesse James) to show how much the war there was a real neighbor-against-neighbor struggle that the James boys plunged into wholeheartedly. I could go on and on about the new insights Stiles has, such as the way he explains the differences between the various state militia forces as no one else has. When he gets to Jesse's bandit years, he uses governors' papers in the Missouri State Archives to show that the first bank the bandits robbed, in Liberty, was owned by the Radical Republican officials of Clay County where Jesse lived. Stiles explains something that I never realized: The bandits were really robbing express companies when they robbed trains, so the notion that they were Robin Hoods punching the big bad railroad companies in the nose is nonsense. He explains Jesse's letters to the press like no one else ever has, showing just how political a fellow he was. I could go on for much longer. Best of all, this book is beautifully written. The author doesn't force us to slog through every possibility when it comes to each robbery. He paints a portrait, then uses his footnotes to explain his reasoning. His reasoning is consistently sound--he's vivid, but he's not just making stuff up. Don't be fooled by any bad customer reviews. If you didn't know, there are a lot of Jesse James buffs who are glued to one version of his life, and don't like a really fresh, well-written account of his life by someone outside their club. The leading historians of Missouri and Western outlaws (including William Parrish, Christopher Phillips, and Richard Maxwell Brown) looked over the book before it was published, and they gave it a big thumbs up, as have such historians as James McPherson. This book is reseached like a doctoral dissertation, but it is written like a novel--not because the author is making it up, but because it is simply well-written.
Rating:
Summary: Grand history that gets the details right
Review: I saw the author speak on CSPAN, and I decided that I had to get this book. He was very gracious about other writers about Jesse James, including Ted Yeatman, whose book seemed like the last word on Jesse James when it came out a couple of years ago. Well, Stiles has Yeatman beat by a longshot. This is old-fashioned grand history that goes from the James farm to Civil War battlefields, Pinkerton's offices, bank and train robberies, and even the White House. I love a big story, and Stiles tells it very well. Jesse James is at the center of it, but the book ranges far and wide to explain the times, so as to better explain the James boys. Jesse really makes sense to me like he never did before. As a matter of fact, Jesse's story has never been told so well. This is a real page turner. And even though the story is so big, the author gets the details right. He explains all manner of things that no one, and I mean no one, has ever understood when it comes to the James-Younger gang. Like why it made sense to rob trains, who really hired the Pinkertons, and how the Civil War really went in Missouri. (Now I understand where all the Union men came from). Stiles even found gunfights that the outlaws got into that no one mentioned before, like one at Civil Bend near Gallatin after the Corydon robbery. For fun, I looked up the old newspaper stories about that one on microfilm, and I'll tell you, Stiles got it right, like everything else in this great, great book.
Rating:
Summary: Could Not Put It Down
Review: I've been reading about Mr. James off and on all of my life. I thought this was by far the best book about him I'd ever read. It really makes you understand him and the social forces that produced him. He was a member of an assassination squad during the civil war and had more in common with the viet cong than your idea of a conventional confederate soldier. He was really a twisted sociopath who was one scary individual. He and his brother were also extremely cunning and intelligent, that's what made them so frightening and also hard to apprehend. This isn't just talk--their father was one of a handful of people in Missouri who had a Masters degree at that time and was the founder of Liberty College, a respected school that still exists. These were not lightweights. The testimony of the pinkertons who went into Missouri to try and get a line on these guys is riveting, suspenseful, and fascinating. Trust me, getting too close to these guys was extremely dangerous to your health. My favorite annecdote: one pinkerton detective who was grossly over-confident slipped into Clay County (home of the james boys) and located the ex-sheriff, a man he knew would be sympathetic to his quest. He informed the sheriff he intended to go to the James farm and pretend to be a down-on-his-luck working man looking for a job... Unfortunately, he couldnt dissuade the detective who was found, forty-eight hours later, hands bound behind him, one bullet through his brain. These were very, very dangerous dudes. If you are fascinated with the James gang buy this book and you won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Could Not Put It Down
Review: I've been reading about Mr. James off and on all of my life. I thought this was by far the best book about him I'd ever read. It really makes you understand him and the social forces that produced him. He was a member of an assassination squad during the civil war and had more in common with the viet cong than your idea of a conventional confederate soldier. He was really a twisted sociopath who was one scary individual. He and his brother were also extremely cunning and intelligent, that's what made them so frightening and also hard to apprehend. This isn't just talk--their father was one of a handful of people in Missouri who had a Masters degree at that time and was the founder of Liberty College, a respected school that still exists. These were not lightweights. The testimony of the pinkertons who went into Missouri to try and get a line on these guys is riveting, suspenseful, and fascinating. Trust me, getting too close to these guys was extremely dangerous to your health. My favorite annecdote: one pinkerton detective who was grossly over-confident slipped into Clay County (home of the james boys) and located the ex-sheriff, a man he knew would be sympathetic to his quest. He informed the sheriff he intended to go to the James farm and pretend to be a down-on-his-luck working man looking for a job... Unfortunately, he couldnt dissuade the detective who was found, forty-eight hours later, hands bound behind him, one bullet through his brain. These were very, very dangerous dudes. If you are fascinated with the James gang buy this book and you won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary American history
Review: If more history books were written like this one, more Americans would know about their history. This is an exciting biography of a vicious American terrorist, of the same lineage as John Wilkes Booth and Tim McVeigh. Today it is more important than ever to understand how men like this develop and think, because there are more of them than ever, and their causes have surprisingly wide political support.
Rating: 
Summary: The Man and His Time
Review: In 1861 delegates from around Missouri (a slave state) gathered in St Louis on 4 March to decide whether or not they would secede from the United States and join their fellow Southerners in South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas in the Confederate States of America. All but one of the delegates to the convention voted to remain in the union. In effect, Missourians had rejected their supposed Southerness for an amalgamation of Northern and Western identities. By 1880 the party synonymous with secession and race related violence in the Reconstruction South, the Democrat Party, had gained a virtual hammer lock on political power in Missouri leaving the unionist Republican Party out in the cold. How did this happen? In "Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War", T. J. Stiles says that the answer can be found in the life of the rebel outlaw Jesse James. Stiles believes that Jesse was both a cause and an effect of this political revolution. James began his life in Clay County, Missouri, in the area of Missouri known as 'Little Dixie'. He grew up in a slave holding family. By the outbreak of the Civil War Jesse's father had already died on the gold fields of California and his mother had remarried to a jellyfish of a man named Reuben Samuel. Jesse's mother Zerelda was the person who wore the pants in the family and she brought Jesse up as a Southerner. That meant that when it came to issues of secession, Zerelda and her children were firmly in favor of it. Jesse became a partisan during the Civil War and fought in various guerrilla outfits that came to be known as bushwackers. It was during the war that Jesse learned his violent ways. His was a personal war fought against Unionist neighbors and abolitionist radicals. Jesse killed and terrorized across a wide swath of Missouri. After the war, Jesse became involved in postbellum Missouri politics as a champion for the Confederate identity that he and many other members of the Democrat Party hoped to fashion for the state. While Jesse started on his career as a robber, Stiles says that it was the alliance he formed with a newspaperman named John Edwards that cemented his image as a persecuted former rebel/Robin Hood figure. Jesse and Edwards tried to give his targets a political importance while all the while pronouncing Jesse's innocence. Stiles says that Jesse became a center piece of postbellum Missouri politics because of what he represented. To a wide population, Jesse represented the Confederate culture that many Missourians wish to fashion for the state. In the 1870s, Missouri politics was dominated by three sects: Republicans who wished to create a Northern identity, Unionist Democrats who were mostly in favor of forgiving and forgetting the Civil War atrocities, and the Confederate Democrats who wanted to roll back the clock. Stiles believes that Jesse was a large reason why the two wings of the Democrat Party managed to work together against the Republicans at this time because he helped to galvanize support against the radical program of the Republicans. But beyond Jesse's political significance, Stiles does a great service in destroying the myth of Jesse James. Jesse was many things, among them were cold-blooded murderer, robber, horse thief, racist, and terrorist. Too often men like Jesse James have taken on a mythical hero status in American history. We do not do this because we like to reward evil; we do this because we like to forget evil. We as a people have an unsettling habit of forgiving people the cruelest evils because we don't like to hold a grudge or we just don't bother to learn history. Jesse has become a hero figure in America, as have many of the other outlaws of this time period. Stiles vividly reminds us that most of Jesse's victims were unarmed, peaceful people whose only 'crime' was in either being a Unionist or African American. Stiles has presented a good biography of Jesse James butthe prose he uses to tell often distracts from it. There were many passages in "Jesse James" where I very nearly chuckled at Stiles's writing. Much of the figurative language he uses wouldn't be fit for a soap opera or off-Broadway melodrama. That aside though, T. J. Stiles's biography of Jesse James is an important work of defining both the man and the time he lived in. There are very few biographical works that successfully incorporate both a life and an era. Stiles's book should be read if only for that reason.
Rating: 
Summary: Violentization?
Review: JESSE JAMES, LAST REBEL OF THE CIVIL WAR takes its subject seriously. There are sixty-nine pages of footnotes, sixteen pages of bibliography.
This is not your conventional biography. Stiles theorizes that James was not the Robin Hood kind of brigand, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, he's been made out to be by innumerable Hollywood movies and TV shows. Rather he was a product of the bushwacker guerrillas who ravaged Missouri during the Civil War and he kept at it right up until his death in 1882. Stiles also maintains that James was a political outlaw in that part of his purpose was to unseat the Radical Republicans who governed Missouri after the Civil War. Stiles equates James to the modern terrorist.
Quite a bit of the book is devoted to Jesse's relationship with John Newman Edwards, a newspaper editor and "voice of the Confederate wing of the Democratic Party in Missouri." Edwards extolled the James gang as rebel heroes, compares them to "men who might have sat with Arthur at the Round Table, ridden at tourney with Sir Launcelot or worn the colors of Guinevere." He also edited and published Jesse's letters ridiculing the Radical Republicans and President Grant.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that this is a dull history book. The gang's tangles with the Pinkertons and their Northfield make entertaining reading. The book also fills in some gaps. For instance, there's no doubt Jesse was a murderer. He was involved in a mass execution of union troops during the days he spent riding with Bloody Bill Anderson. These guerrillas defiled the bodies of their victims and took scalps. There's little doubt that Jesse murdered John W. Sheets during a bank robbery as well as the cashier during the Northfield raid and the conductor and two passengers during a train holdup; he even murdered one of the gang members, Ed Miller, Clell Miller's brother. Stiles relates a theory about how Jesse got that way called "violentization." According to sociologist Lonnie Athens, there are four stages: brutalization; belligerency; violent performances "during which the subject pushes through a psychological barrier, and actually inflicts pain on another person"; and virulency, where others fear and applaud the violence. All of these steps fit Jesse like a glove.
The ending of the book is rather disappointing and anti-climactic. Stiles's description of Bob and Charlie Ford's murder
adds nothing new. The final chapter,"Apotheosis," examines various scholarly takes on the James gang. This gives Stiles another chance to belittle any romantic notions about the outlaws that remain. Stiles spends half of a page telling us what happened to the surviving principals. Frank never spent a day in jail and he and Cole Younger died in bed.
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