The Last of the Mohicans Lib/E: (1826 Leatherstocking Tales Lib/E)

In 1757, the English and French are engaged in a savage, bloody war for control of the North American continent. Making tenuous, shifting alliances with various Indian tribes, the two European powers struggle to gain the upper hand on unfamiliar, forested battlegrounds. Caught in the middle is Hawkeye, a white scout who was raised among the Indians. Not fully belonging to either world, he has retreated from society to live in the untamed woods of upstate New York. By his side are Chingachgook and the young Uncas, last of the vanishing race of Mohicans. Together, the three embody a code of moral courage, self-sufficiency, and loyalty, and share a deep trust and friendship. Cora and Alice Munro, the daughters of an English commander, are on their way to join their father. Escorting them through the alien wilderness are Alice's fiance, Major Duncan Heyward, and the treacherous Huron warrior Magua, whose attraction to Cora and hatred for whites make him a vengeful, insidious enemy. When Magua betrays his party to the Iroquois, it is up to Hawkeye and his band to rescue the beautiful sisters and escort them through hostile Indian country. Through a series of heroic fights, escapes, and adventures, bonds are deepened, lives are lost, and the danger heightens, building toward an epic showdown. Written in 1826, The Last of the Mohicans was one of the first great novels of American literature and one that has consistently captured the imagination of generations of readers. It established a mythic image of the American frontier as a setting for thrilling adventures and introduced such archetypes as the "noble savage", embodied by Chingachgook, and the rugged and honorable frontier hero, embodied by Hawkeye.

About the Author :
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), the first major American novelist, was the son of a wealthy landowner who founded Cooperstown, New York. He attended Yale and served in the navy before turning to writing, winning international fame with The Spy (1821). After The Pioneers (1823), public fascination with the character of Natty Bumppo led him to write a series of sequels that gradually unfold the entire life of the frontier scout. Stefan Rudnicki is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and a multiaward-winning narrator, named one of AudioFile's Golden Voices. Read by David Birney, Paul Boehmer, Emily Janice Card, Gabrielle de Cuir, Rosalyn Landor, John Rubinstein, Stefan Rudnicki, and Mirron Willis

Review :
"The book that gave birth to the genre. Like so many later Westerns, Cooper's story is a sentimental yarn about a frontier already lost--that of upstate New York in the mid eighteenth century. From its first pages, Mohicans sweeps readers into a chase narrative in which woods-wise men come to the rescue of damsels in distress." -- "Publishers Weekly" "The beauty of the unspoiled wilderness and sorrow at its disappearance, symbolized in Hawkeye's Mohican Indian friends, the last of their tribe, are important themes of the novel." -- "Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature" "This novel remains the most popular of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, a classic story of the French and Indian War. The battles and exciting pursuits, which constitute the book's plot, are rounded out by interesting Indian lore and descriptions of the wilderness." -- "Masterpieces of World Literature"