Rating: 
Summary: A thoughtful, much-need reinterpretation
Review: Lets face it: the last definitive biography of Jesse James came out quite some time ago. This book was a much-needed reinterpretation of a man who was indeed romanticized as latter day Robin Hood. To say that Stiles is biased because he's from the North makes as much sense as saying that the only unbiased viewpoint possible is from a Southerner. As modern biographies tend to be more probing about character, psychology and motivation, and takes into account formative experiences, I think we're seeing a much more compelling picture of James as someone who experienced early brutality and who learned to give as good as he got. In this way, Stiles is more respectful and fairer to his subject than James fans with an emotional attachment give him credit for. A must-read for anyone who is interested in American History.
Rating: 
Summary: The life and times of America's most famous outlaw.
Review: Most everyone in the United States has at one time or another watched a television program or movie that is supposed to portray the "real" life of Jesse James. Unfortunately, most of these stories, while entertaining, are pure hogwash. T. J. Stiles on the other hand seems to have given us a true-life story of the famous outlaw. A story that, thanks to the author, is highly readable and easy to understand while still delving into some of the deeper aspects of the regional history of western Missouri. Stiles has told the story of Jesse's background, a background that contributed much to the man he would become. His strong willed mother of course was a driving influence but there were many other factors that may have had just as much influence on young Jesse as did his mother. For example, Jesse's family was not only a slave owning family but owned several more slaves than the average Missouri slave owning family. His father, a Baptist minister, had fought to keep abolitionists out of his church and early in the war his brother Frank had fought in the regular Confederate army. It was Frank in fact who first joined the Confederate guerrilla movement in Missouri with Jesse following in his brother's footsteps. After the war many of the guerrillas had a tough time adjusting to life under Radical Republican rule and like the Klan in the rest of the south they took up arms to break the Radicals. Slowly, Jesse emerged as the most flashy and outspoken of the post war bandits and became the hero of many of Missouri's Confederate citizens. When newspaperman John Edwards began to champion the James-Younger gang Jesse James became a symbol of resistance to Radical rule. Edwards did indeed use Jesse James to further his cause but Stiles argues and argues well that Jesse understood his role well and was happy with it. Of course Jesse and Frank James did not rob the rich to give to the poor, they robbed for themselves but as Stiles points out, they chose their targets carefully so as to avoid becoming unpopular. In short, Jesse James was probably the first bandit in American history to plan his acts with an eye toward the possible political results of his action. Stiles says James may have been the first terrorist in history. That may be taking it a bit far but the author does make an interesting argument and does so without putting his readers to sleep. Great book!
Rating:
Summary: Well Documented & Very Readable
Review: My grandfather was named after Jesse James. My family came from the southeastern Missouri and western Kentucky areas, and I had long wondered about the history of the KY-MO region. This book did a superb job of putting together the events and the context of the Civil War years. The author's research was incredible; he rebuilt the trails in detail, and made "history talk" through the people who were actually there. This book is one I would greatly recommend to anyone with an interest in American history.
Rating:
Summary: superb book, well written, and well thought out
Review: One of the family legends on the Chester side of my family is that my grandfather saw the James' gangs' horses being watered on his uncles' farm just outside Dundas, Minnesota (a few miles from Northfield) when he was a toddler. Since it seemed plausible, I accepted it as possible and felt some fascination for a grandfather whose life spanned a period from the "wild west" to walking on the moon! In reading the book, however, I discovered that the event occurred a few years before Grandpa Chester was born (1880). The author's comments about the gang's stopping on a farm near Dundas to get water to wash wounds, though, leaves me wondering if my great grand uncle did indeed play some small part in the drama at Northfield. This makes the story of the outlaws' exploits a little more personal for me, so Mr. Stiles' book Jessie James: Last Rebel of the Civil War immediately caught my attention.
I'm not quite certain what I expected of the tome; probably a pulp fiction type work on the violent career of Jessie James full of colorful detail. What I got was a surprise. I have to apologize to the author, a fellow Minnesotan, because what he has produced, while a colorful account of a violent career, is also a wonderful history of the Civil War and its aftermath.
With due respect to the feelings of the anonymous author of the negative review of the book and of Mr. Mock, I really don't think Stiles is "anti-southerner." The history of Jessie James appears to be well documented, despite his life in hiding and his efforts at misinformation. Especially those individuals who survived him--in fact survived their own time and place in history to become anomalies and curiosities in the 20th century-and including his elder brother and his own children, ensured that much of the history of Jessie and his peers were made known and kept alive for later generations. While they were obviously motivated by personal agendas to embroider these tales and to aggrandize their own part in them, there is no reason to assume that their memories of events need necessarily be in error. They were, after all, there. Where there is outside evidence that the witness is fabricating, the author makes this known. Certainly there have been stories that James survived beyond his documented demise and lived incognito in various other states. DNA studies have already laid these legends to rest.
The true value of the book lies, not so much in the story of the James brothers and their gang members, as in its look at the Civil War from the point of view of a single state, most importantly a border state and on its effect on the history of a family, two of whose members became well known. Here was a microcosmic example of the national conflict that makes the event and its impact on those alive at the time very real.
Too often books on the Civil War limit their discussions to descriptions of battles, to the careers of generals, and to the politics of North and South. A tip of the hat is given to the divided loyalties that extended to families, often in the form of "brother against brother" rhetoric. A discussion of the "common soldier" is limited to quotes from diaries. Certainly all of this helps create a mental picture of the conflict, but it remains very superficial. Furthermore, much of Civil War literature remains focused on the events of the Eastern front with a digression to the West only in so far as events there clarified Grant's career and bring him into the picture. Stiles' biography of Jessie James corrects this lack of intensity and humanness.
The state of Missouri more than any other is noted as The State that suffered Civil War atrocities long before the actual conflict began. As the US expanded westward following the Mexican American conflict that added territory to the country, the issue of "slave" verses "free" loomed large. It was not merely a problem of whether slavery would extend to the western states, but whether balance of control of the US Congress would tip to North or South with the introduction of slave or free states into the union. The confrontation was intense. Exchange of blows on the senate floor exhibited the emotional intensity of the period and the degree to which feelings could be and were acted upon.
Stiles' study of the James family illustrates the issues of the day: lack of women's rights, slavery, the degree to which families that lost male head of household were at risk of poverty or exploitation, the sense that Missouri and Kansas were at the center of political conflict between North and South even before the war, and the effects of these social issues on the mental and emotional character of young people growing up at the time. Stiles especially points out the difference between the personality of Frank James who was significantly older during the conflict and that of his brother Jessie who was still a boy at the time it started. His discussion of the "violenization" of Jessie James by members of the bushwackers' gangs, rings of sociologists' studies of big city gangs in the late 19th and early 20th century. The desensitization of very young individuals to violence, to brutalization of helpless victims, and to the upside down value system that made heroes of the most vicious perpetrators of such violence sounds a lot like the behavior of gangs in Chicago, Detroit, and New York, even today. As some of the other reviewers note, it is also reminiscent of the behavior of modern day terrorists, members of fundamentalist groups world wide not excluding our own Christian brand.
Probably more than most books on the conflict, Jessie James: The Last Rebel of the Civil War makes it evident that the social problems of the country that brought about the conflict did not simply go away after the official end of the war. More than most books on the topic, it becomes evident that one doesn't change attitudes and lifestyle mores by winning a war. It's the old saw, "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." Even now conflicts over these issues continue, despite the passing of almost 150 years. If feelings can still run high over civil rights here and now, whether between black and white or Christian and Moslem, than war was and is not the answer to the problem.
A superb book, well written, and well thought out.
Rating: 
Summary: Starts well, bogs down
Review: Really falls apart around the middle of the book, degenerating into a lot of minutiae...and Jesse himself is never fully characterized, as most of the book is about those around him (or just alive at the same time).
Rating:
Summary: Missouri Revelation: Prize Winner
Review: Recently I picked up this book off the "new acquisitions" display at one of the many branches of Baltimore County Public Library. I thought it would be more sensational than factual. Wow, was I wrong. This work will grip your attention from the opening salvo to the end and many tips and clues are given by this excellent author to additional materials. It covers Missouri history from fairly early in the 19th century to the threshold of the 20th century. If one has people who were part of Missouri society during that time frame,as I do, it goes a long way toward explaining what was said and not said in family stories and legends. The notorious James and Younger brothers had many copycat banditti in Missouri during the 19th century. This fine, well written and well documented work will help in launching one into a study of the period and in discovering data about these copycat thugs who often occupy space in the family history closets of many Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Tennessee and Kentucky families. This applies to families of both Union and/or Confederate extraction. It also serves as a remarkable expose of Missouri history with flashes of light which burst with brilliant clarity on many aspects of regional and U.S. national history of the time. Stiles manages to rip off the rhetorical and stylistic turgidity which seems to characterize so much contemporaneous U.S. history and makes the people seem more real from a 21st century perspective. His comments about the railroad scandals of the time reveals that Enron and WorldCom are not so new in their revelations of human greed and rapacity. I like this book and I intend to have my own copy quite soon. The photographs are remarkable. One can look at the photo of a youngish Jesse and perhaps be forgiven for thinking, Jesse looks like a sociopath should look. He was a handsome, rather cute type with a turned up nose but even in the black and white photo of the time, the eyes strike one as being of a madman. Not a screaming, raving, frothing-at-the-mouth madman, but a cruel, calculating, unstoppable mass killer who thrived on notoriety and newspaper publicity. "Jesse James, Last Rebel of the Civil War" would make a great TV miniseries or an even greater epic movie on the "Lawrence of Arabia" scale. N.B. I have acquired my own copy of this work since I wrote this review and I find I must agree with another reviewer. This is one of the most remarkable biographies I have read in a long time. It really should be considered for a Pulitzer Prize or at least some other notable prize. T.J. Stiles has penned a masterpiece of American biography. Ken Burns should look into this story for one of his PBS productions.
Rating:
Summary: The definitive biography for years to come
Review: T. J. Stiles has written an important and challenging new biography of Jesse James, a book that I believe will be the definitive biography of James for a long time to come. Although a short review here cannot do the book justice, Stiles approaches the Missouri bandit in a different manner from previous biographers, including Ted Yeatman who wrote an excellent and detailed biography of both James brothers. While Yeatman's book will satisfy those who want to know every detail of the James brothers careers, Stiles is a more interpretive history, placing Jesse James squarely within the era in which he lived, and assessing his role as an American legend. Stiles places Jesse James in historical context like no one else has before, making a strong case for James as an integral part of the post-Civil War fight against Reconstruction in deeply divided Missouri. This is indicated by the title of the book. He eschews comparisons of James with bandits like Butch Cassidy and other western outlaws, who had no social program or cause other than enriching themselves. James was a precursor of the modern terrorist, in Stiles' analysis, a political partisan engaged in manipulating the media and carrying out lawless acts while gaining maximum publicity for his white supremacist cause. For those who place Jesse James in the context of the Old West, as an outlaw on the lawless frontier, Stiles persuasively argues James never looked west, always south, and saw himself as part of the traditional slave-holding class of southern farmers, the class from which he hailed. This is a work of professional history, and not a book for buffs. If you want to know the minutae of every robbery, Yeatman's will be more satisfying. The book is amply footnoted, and its economic and banking analysis are heavy going at times, but the book is always challenging. There are conclusions Stiles draws that I can't always support, but there is no doubt that the author did what a reader hopes when reading a new interpretation- he challenged my thinking on several fronts. Well worth reading, and I imagine this book will cause much discussion and debate.
Rating: 
Summary: Anti-Confederate propaganda written by a lying yankee!
Review: T.J (Propagandist)Stiles ignorance of history & hate for Southerners & Confederates shines through in this book. Stiles got one thing right though, Jesse was still fighting the war, rightfully so! Never surrender a just Cause. ...Deo Vindice! Lastly, this book will be well recieved by yankee fools. But not any real truth seekers that know a bit in this area of history.
Rating:
Summary: Anti-Confederate propaganda written by a lying yankee!
Review: T.J (Propagandist)Stiles ignorance of history & hate for Southerners & Confederates shines through in this book. Stiles got one thing right though, Jesse was still fighting the war, rightfully so! Never surrender a just Cause. ...Deo Vindice! Lastly, this book will be well recieved by yankee fools. But not any real truth seekers that know a bit in this area of history.
Rating:
Summary: Learning from History
Review: T.J. Stiles account of Jesse James brings a new paradigm to the current day analysis of political terrorists. Stiles credibly reveals how images and time can thwart the facts and perceptions of people like Jesse James. His impeccable research and documentation gives the reader confidence that an accurate picture is FINALLY being painted.
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