The Deerslayer

By: James Fenimore Cooper

Narrated by: Raymond Todd

The Deerslayer is the first of the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. Here we meet Natty Bumppo as a young man living in upstate New York in the early 1740s. The action begins as Bumppo, called "Deerslayer", and his friend Hurry Harry approach Lake Glimmerglass, or Oswego, where the trapper Thomas Hutter lives with his daughters, the beautiful Judith and the feeble-minded Hetty. Hutter's floating log fort is attacked by Iroquois Indians, and the two frontiersmen join in the fight.

Public Domain (P)2001 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

very thought-provoking book

shines light on the great simpler times and creates much feeling by the end of the read

Great classic

If you could sum up The Deerslayer in three words, what would they be?

Very historical and important classic on the history of this country and why it is what was before the liberals took over

What other book might you compare The Deerslayer to and why?

Last of the Mohicans

Have you listened to any of Raymond Todd’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Have and he was good

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

no

Any additional comments?

Just great

A glimpse into the past

Listening, instead of reading permitted me to imagine more vividly what JFC intended to portray in this story. I would have struggled with the accents and pronunciations. The narrator did a fine job distinguishing between the characters.
I appreciated the historical context through the lens of his time and not our current pc. It’s no wonder The Deerslayer has remained a favorite.

Happy to have read Deerslayer

Classic American story. The reader was very good. Interesting that when Deerslayer was written, 1841, there was awareness of the sad consequences of colonization on Native Americans. Cooper understood that the notion of White cultural superiority was a poor myth, that Spirituality is not unique to white Christians and that not all Christians follow the teachings of their bible. The writer dwells overlong on moralizing, hitting the reader repeatedly and at great length on the fact of cultural equivalency , that Europeans and Indians each have their respective ‘gifts’ that are suited to their respective circumstances. Cooper is unduly harsh in judging Judith, not granting her the possibility that her love for Deerslayer revealed her basic goodness. She deserved better.

Interesting

The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper was written in 1841. I found the story interesting. The more formal writing typical of books written in the 1800s was fun to hear, but I discovered I kept wanting to push the story along as it seemed very slow. I thought it was a good idea to reread a classic and remember what the world was like at that time in America.

I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book is twenty hours and fifteen minutes. Raymond Todd does a good job narrating the book.