Four Against the West, Joe Pappalardo
Four Against the West, Joe Pappalardo
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Four Against the West
The True Saga of a Frontier Family That Reshaped the Nation - and Created a Legend

Author: Joe Pappalardo

Narrator: Jim Seybert

Unabridged: 11 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/26/2024


Synopsis

Roy Bean was an American saloon-keeper and Justice of the Peace in Texas, who called himself "The Only Law West of the Pecos". He and his three brothers set out from Kentucky in the mid 1840s, heading into the American frontier to find their fortunes. Their lifetimes of triumphs, tragedies, laurels, and scandals will play out on the battlefields of Mexico, in shady dealings in California city halls, inside eccentric saloon courtrooms of Texas, and along the blood-soaked Santa Fe Trail from Missouri to New Mexico. They will kill men, and murder will likewise stalk them.

The Beans chase their American dreams as the nation reinvents itself as a coast-to-coast powerhouse, only to be tested by the Civil War. During their saga, the brothers become soldiers, judges, husbands, guerillas, lawmen, entrepreneurs, refugees, fathers, politicians, pioneers, and—in Judge Roy Bean's case—one of the Old West's best known but least understood scoundrels.

Using new information gleaned from exhaustive research, Joe Pappalardo's Four Against the West is an unprecedented and vivid telling of the intertwined stories of all four Bean brothers, exploring for the first time how their relentless ambitions helped create a new America.

About Joe Pappalardo

JOE PAPPALARDO is the author of the critically acclaimed books Inferno: The True Story of a B 17 Gunner’s Heroism and the Bloodiest Military Campaign in Aviation History, Sunflowers: The Secret History and Spaceport Earth: The Reinvention of Spaceflight. Pappalardo is a freelance journalist and former associate editor of Air & Space Smithsonian magazine, a writing contributor to National Geographic magazine, a contributor to Texas Monthly, and a former senior editor and current contributor to Popular Mechanics. He has appeared on C-Span, CNN, Fox News and television shows on the Science Channel and the History Channel.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Stacey on November 21, 2024

Four Against the West by Joe Pappalardo This book is the true saga of Texan Roy Bean and his brothers. He was a justice of the peace and wanted to create his fortune with the America dream. The stuff these brothers got up to… oh my goodness! I’d never heard of them before but there is a lot of new i......more

Goodreads review by Dan on October 27, 2024

My thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an advance copy of on the history of the American West as shown through the eyes of 4 brothers, one of which will be very familiar to fans of western novels and movies, though his real exploits make his fictional stories seem tame. America is a count......more

Goodreads review by Nicole on November 19, 2024

Growing up as the child of parents who liked to watch old Westerns and then growing into a passion with a passion for history, I had a vague idea of who Judge Roy Bean was when I saw this book available to request on NetGalley, and all those things combined to make it a book I wanted to read. Having......more

Goodreads review by Richard on February 01, 2025

If you're one of those people who knows anything about the American West in the late 1800's, you've no doubt heard of Judge Roy Bean "The Law West Of The Pecos." But did you know there were other Bean family members as well and some of them actually accomplished more than Roy - he was just the most......more

Goodreads review by Sallie on October 30, 2024

This was not a quick read but a fascinating, fully documented account of the South West history from the lives of the 4 Bean brothers. I knew very little about the history of the South West from the period of the Civil War, Indian uprising, or the wildness of the part of our country and I feel that......more