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Customer Reviews of The West

A beautiful and moving documentary
This is the best documentary I've ever seen. Peter Coyote's narration is wonderful. The skill with which the story of the westward-moving Americans is interwoven with the tragic story of the displaced Native Americans is truly amazing. The beautiful scenery of the western U.S. is intermingled with photographs from the past. Despite having learned the history of the West every year in school growing up, I learned many new things watching this documentary. It's definitely worth watching.

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Selective History
I looked forward to viewing this, since the history of the west is so rich. It would have been very difficult to present a comprehensive documentary of its history, but it seems that in this case Ives doesn't even try. He is consumed by victimology. It is perfectly appropriate to give a comprehensive account of the Native Americans and the great injustices that were done to them, although much was left out about the different tribes, regions they inhabited, culture, etc.. I would expect that this would be a major part of the series, which it was. Unfortunately, the rest is literally drenched with some sort of guilt-driven quest by the director to include every persecuted group of people, and individually outline their plights (blacks, chinese, mexicans, mormons). The message has become terribly boring by now. Whites bad, everyone else good. And only a passing mention of the Donner party? Believe it or not, you get a much better history overall from Kenny Rogers' "The Real West".

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Dreary P.C. stuff
Yes once more the academic liberals have hijacked what could be an interesting subject and turned it into a P.C rant. There is not much history here and given the biases that are so evident throughout the series, I am guessing that we should take all statements with a great grain of salt.