Cowboys

School Library Journal

Gr 6-8-- Flashily illustrated in full color, with old and new photographs as well as paintings of varying quality, Landau covers the period between the 1860s and the end of the ``golden age'' of cowboys, the late 1880s. There is good brief coverage of bunkhouses and how cowboys got nicknames. The rest is standard information, not necessarily closely related to the six books listed in the ``For Further Reading'' section. In a few places the writing is oversimplified, misleading, or poorly written. Better books are Russell Freedman's Cowboys of the Wild West (Clarion, 1985) or Leonard J. Matthews's Cowboys (Rourke, 1989)--and don't forget Smoky, The Cowhorse , by Will James (Scribners, 1983). --George Gleason, Department of English, Southwest Missouri State University, Springfield