There is a lot of interesting research here about entertainment in the Old West, but the book also becomes quite repetitive. Each chapter has a different theme, but they circle back to the same information as the previous chapters to support it. This book probably could have been a short essay. ( )

Readable, and well-researched, and pretty much the book I'd hoped it would be. The first couple chapters could be called an overview, though they're a little scattershot, but when the author turns to more specific topics the focus improves. He's quite good at biographical sketches, of which there are many. I've quibbles about his presentation on a couple points where I already knew the material, so I'd probably check for another source before quoting this book, but even so the book's valuable.

The research is entirely on secondary sources, but the bibliography's quite impressive and the footnotes are kind of fun. Agnew's well-read on western history.

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By 2011 one would think that Agnew's publisher, McFarland, would have figured out how to build a table of contents for a Kindle book. Apparently not; there's a hyperlink TOC but the Kindle table's perfunctory. This is particularly frustrating because someone's gone to the trouble of heavily controlling the text formatting, which shows that someone at the publishing house has read the proper documentation.

I've a similar complaint about the footnotes, which aren't linked within the text. ( )