The Call of the Canyon

Rating:
Summary: Years later Call of the Canyon Still Tugs at the Heartstring
Review: First let me say I am am avid western book reader and author myself. I regard Zane Grey's Call of the Canyon as one of the most powerful romance books ever written. I know many people who regard this and Rider's of the Purple Sage, to be Zane Grey's best books, and amoung the best adventure fiction books ever. Each year visitors by the thousands do their best to retrace the footsteps of these eastern lovers who had Gone West. It is a tale that never seems to go out of fashion, and indeed seems to fulfill some great need in each reader lucky enough to hear the Call of the Canyon.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful romantic Western.
Review: The story set in the 1920s New York and Arizona is a wonderful romance. The descriptions of the canyons and desert make me want to pack up the car and head out for an extended vacation in Arizona right away. The descriptions are indeed moving.
The downside of the novel for me is just a little bit too much "philosophy" out of the post WW1 era. Grey harps a little to much on his ideal American Woman, American Family, the contrast between the idle rich in New York and the working folks out on the range in The West. There is way too much writing on the plight of W.W.I vets when they returned to America. But in spite of a lot of pages devoted to teaching Grey's message there is a wonderful romantic story to be enjoyed.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting view of life from the early 20th Century
Review: This is my first Zane Grey book I've ever read. I was expecting an old-fashioned Western with cowboys, six shooters, "purty" school marms and villians in black hats. This book isn't about that at all.
What it is is part condemnation of America's shoddy treatment of its returning soldiers after World War I, and part condemnation of the modern women of the times.
Zane Grey, using the voices of his fictional characters, rants against "modern feminine unrest" (AKA feminism), the immoral dress of the flapper (Heavens, her ankles are showing!) and says the women are, and I quote, "idle, luxrious, selfish, pleasure-craving, lazy, useless, work-and-children shirking, absolutely no good."
In one memorable scene, Grey has his heroine Carly preaching about the evils of such things as motion pictures, automobiles, jazz, birth control and plucking eyebrows. Oddly, Grey seems to be obsessed with a low birth rate in the nation and refers several times in the book to the fact that women aren't having babies like they should. It makes me curious as to what exactly was going on in the early 1920's.
So while this book wasn't what I was expecting it to be, it turned out to be an interesting take on what post-World War I America appeared to be to one man.