McMurtry, Larry

Average customer rating:

TYPICAL McMURTRY
Snow on the Roof-fire in the chimmney
A re-awakening of an aging oil tycoon's sexual life
Not the best, but not bad
Good to visit Duane

When the Light Goes: A Novel
Larry McMurtry
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Telegraph Days: A Novel
Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846--1890
DUANE'S DEPRESSED
The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America
TEXASVILLE : A Novel

ASIN: 1416534261

Book Description

In this masterful and often surprising sequel to the acclaimed Duane's Depressed, the Pulitzer Prize- and Oscar-winning author of Lonesome Dove has written a haunting, elegiac, and occasionally erotic novel about one of his most beloved characters. Duane Moore first made his appearance in The Last Picture Showand, like his author, he has aged but not lost his vigor or his taste for life.

Back from a two-week trip to Egypt, Duane finds he cannot readjust to life in Thalia, the small, dusty, West Texas hometown in which he has spent all of his life. In the short time he was away, it seems that everything has changed alarmingly. His office barely has a reason to exist now that his son Dickie is running the company from Wichita Falls, his lifelong friends seem to have suddenly grown old, his familiar hangout, once a good old-fashioned convenience store, has been transformed into an "Asian Wonder Deli," his daughters seem to have taken leave of their senses and moved on to new and strange lives, and his own health is at serious risk.

It's as if Duane cannot find any solace or familiarity in Thalia and cannot even bring himself to revisit the house he shared for decades with his late wife, Karla, and their children and grandchildren. He spends his days aimlessly riding his bicycle

(already a sign of serious eccentricity in West Texas) and living in his cabin outside town. The more he tries to get back to the rhythm of his old life, the more he realizes that he should have left Thalia long ago -- indeed everybody he cared for seems to have moved on without him, to new lives or to death.

The only consolation is meeting the young, attractive geologist, Annie Cameron, whom Dickie has hired to work out of the Thalia office. Annie is brazenly

seductive, yet oddly cold, young enough to be Duane's daughter, or worse, and Duane hasn't a clue how to handle her. He's also in love with his psychiatrist, Honor Carmichael, who after years of rebuffing him, has decided to undertake what she feels is Duane's very necessary sex reeducation, opening him up to some major, life-changing surprises.

For the lesson of When the Light Goes is that where there's life, there is indeed hope -- Duane, widowed, displaced from whatever is left of his own life, suddenly rootless in the middle of his own hometown, and at risk of death from a heart that also doesn't seem to be doing its job, is in the end saved by sex, by love, and by his own compassionate and intense interest in other people and the surprises they reveal.

At once realistic and life-loving, often hilariously funny, and always moving, though without a touch of sentimentality, Larry McMurtry has opened up a new chapter in Duane's life and, in doing so, written one of his finest and most compelling novels to date, doing for Duane what he did so triumphantly for Aurora in Terms of Endearment.

Customer Reviews:

TYPICAL McMURTRY.......2007-06-11

Very good read. Am proud owner of all Mcmutry's books. Since I am in the same age group as Duane I can relate to him quite a lot.
Pete

Snow on the Roof-fire in the chimmney.......2007-05-31

I enjoyed this book, even more then Duane's Depressed. I'm glad that there are books that celebrate that season of life. Enjoy.

A re-awakening of an aging oil tycoon's sexual life.......2007-05-30

One of the pleasures of reading fiction comes from meeting characters on the pages of a novel you truly would want to encounter in real life. My personal introduction to Duane Moore, the protagonist in Larry McMurtry's WHEN THE LIGHT GOES, comes late in his life. But Duane seems like an endearing fellow nonetheless, and he and I might have a few things in common to discuss over a beer.

Duane first appeared as a rowdy young "good-old" Texan in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (1966), though he wasn't a major character. Subsequently he became the focus of McMurtry's writing in TEXASVILLE (1987) and DUANE'S DEPRESSED (1999). While Duane has been around for many years, I must confess that WHEN THE LIGHT GOES represents our first formal introduction. Therefore, I may be at somewhat of a disadvantage in discussing his life experience.

After a two-week trip to Egypt, Duane returns to his Texas hometown of Thalia and to his oil-drilling business now being run by his son, Dickie. Thalia is Duane's lifelong residence, and the title of the novel is in part a reflection on the demise of the west-Texas community. There is little left in Thalia for Duane other than his office, the family home he generally avoids, and the few surviving employees of his company. Two years earlier, Duane's wife, Karla, died in an automobile accident, and Duane now confronts the lonely life of a man in his late 60s with very little to inspire him.

Thus, it's expected that WHEN THE LIGHT GOES would be about loss, death and growing old viewed from many different perspectives. But what may be surprising is that this is primarily a tale about the reawakening of Duane's sex life, told by McMurtry in glorious and full detail. The light may be going out in Thalia, but it's burning brightly in Duane's libido.

Indeed, the opening line of the novel is a reference to the breasts of Annie Cameron, a young oil engineer who has been hired by Duane's company. The relationship between Duane and Annie is the cornerstone of the book, and it turns out to be a relationship that, in many respects, is the opposite of what the reader expects from the initial meeting in the Thalia office. In fact, the role reversal for Duane and Annie may be one of the more interesting aspects of WHEN THE LIGHT GOES. Equally intriguing is Duane's relationship with his psychiatrist, Honor Carmichael, whose method of treatment for Duane can only be described as somewhat non-traditional.

Larry McMurtry is an author of great renown. LONESOME DOVE, his 1985 western epic, won him a Pulitzer Prize, and in 2006 he received an Academy Award for the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. McMurtry continues to turn out wonderful novels that touch upon the foibles and vagaries of the human condition. Duane Moore may not be Rabbit Angstrom, but in McMurtry's hands, he is a character who has much to say about life. I hope that WHEN THE LIGHT GOES isn't Duane's final opportunity for observations on the human condition, because I would like to hear a little more about his life outside of the bedroom.

--- Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman

Not the best, but not bad.......2007-05-21

If you have read and enjoyed the other books in this series, then by all means you should read this book. It's a rather quick read and gives us exactly what's been going on in Duane's life.

On its own, however, the book is not that great, as many of the scenarios in the book (expecially the sex-related ones) seem rather far-fetched at best. If you have not read the other books prior to this one, I would not suggest starting with this one. If you only want to read one book in the series, read Texasville. I think it's by far the funniest and has the least amount of rediculous sex content which seems to infuse many of the other books in this series. But overall reading the series was an enjoyable one and would recommend it.

Good to visit Duane.......2007-05-18

Not McMurtry's creative best but I enjoyed looking through Duane's eyes at his small town life and revisiting old characters and meeting some new ones. It's good that it is short.

Folly and Glory: A Novel (Berrybender Narratives)

Average customer rating:

unfailingly entertaining McMurtry
Read the entire series straight through
Grisly Reconciliations
Folly and Glory
Separating the wheat from the chafe

Folly and Glory: A Novel (Berrybender Narratives)
Larry McMurtry
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Family Saga | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

By Sorrow's River: A Novel (The Berrybender Narratives)
The Wandering Hill: A Novel (Beryybender Narratives)
Sin Killer: A Novel (Berrybender Narratives)
Boone's Lick : A Novel
Streets Of Laredo : A Novel

ASIN: 0743262727

Book Description

As this final volume of The Berrybender Narratives opens, Tasmin and her family are under irksome, though comfortable, arrest in Mexican Santa Fe. Her father, the eccentric Lord Berrybender, is planning to head for Texas with his whole family and his retainers. Tasmin, who would once have followed her husband, Jim Snow, anywhere, is no longer even sure she likes him, or knows where to go to next.

In the meantime, Jim Snow, accompanied by Kit Carson, journeys to New Orleans, where he meets up with a muscular black giant named Juppy in whose company they make their way back to Santa Fe. But even they are unable to prevent the Mexicans from carrying the Berrybender family on a long and terrible journey across the desert to Vera Cruz.

Starving, dying of thirst, and in constant, bloody battle with slavers pursuing them, the Berrybenders finally make their way to civilization, where Jim Snow has to choose between Tasmin and the great American plains, on which he has lived all his life in freedom, and where, after all her adventures, Tasmin must finally decide where her future lies.

With a cast of characters that includes almost every major real-life figure of the West, Folly and Glory is a novel that represents the culmination of a great and unique four-volume saga of the early days of the West; it is one of Larry McMurtry's finest achievements.

Customer Reviews:

unfailingly entertaining McMurtry.......2007-05-09

You have to read all the berrybender novels. Sheer entertainment, as are all McMurtry's books. There are four books in the Berry bender series. You probably will be better off starting with book number one but they can all stand on their own for a wonderful, quality read.

Read the entire series straight through.......2006-09-13

I don't think of this as a separate book. This is the conclusion to the Berrybender tale, as Return of the King was the conclusion to Lord of the Rings. These four books are all one book to me, and must be read consecutively, with no reason to read anything else in between.

I'm fond of the characters. I feel a loyalty to them, having gone through their travails with them.

One thing that takes some getting used to is that McMurtry kills off so many of the characters. He mixes this with comedy, believe it or not, especially in the first book, Sin Killer. I don't take the violence as seriously as I would have without the comedy. Come on, Lord Berrybender poking out his son Bobbety's eye with a fork? You have to be kidding. I take it that way. For that matter, the boy is named Bobbety? That's funny right there.

Because I take the entire story with a grain of salt, and just enjoy it for the ride, I'm not bothered by the extreme violence. It reads like black humor to me.

The strength of the series lies in the adorably spoiled behavior of Tasmin and, later, her daughter Petal. Without Tasmin, this series would be nothing at all.

I even get a kick out of how McMurtry sends Lord Albany Berrybender, that self centered but brave fool, to the Alamo with Davy Crockett. It almost reminds me of Where's Waldo.

Throughout the book we keep being shown that Jim Snow doesn't love Tasmin, but other men do, and that Tasmin wants to return to England but Jim Snow never would. Their marriage seems like a temporary thing.

This final book doesn't completely resolve Tasmin's life for the readers, but does give some sort of conclusion to her marriage with Jim Snow. I think Tasmin will be traveling across the pond a number of times in her life.

One thing I took from this book is the barbarity of the American Indians. Oh my god! They are usually portrayed so positively, as the poor Native Americans who the evil Europeans dispossessed.

Anyway, Larry McMurtry made Tasmin my friend. I've been through so much with her, and she is so likeable in her annoying way. I have to give the series five stars, and I refuse to differentiate one book from another. It's all one book.

Grisly Reconciliations.......2006-07-16

If you haven't read the earlier books in the series, I strongly encourage you to read them first in the correct order (The Sin Killer, The Wandering Hill and By Sorrow's River) before tackling this book.

Should you read this series? Had I known how bloody, painful and unpleasant the details would be, I wouldn't have started.

Since Lord Albany Berrybender first arrived in the United States with a major part of his family (at least the legitimate children) and a small army of servants, he's been looking forward to shooting everything in sight. In this installment (the last) of the four-part series, Lord Berrybender gets a chance to shoot at the most dangerous game of all . . . but rues that he missed a chance to kill a grizzly bear.

This story is not for those who are easily depressed. The book opens with Tasmin Berrybender totally distraught by the murder of her beloved Pomp Charbonneau. To make matters worse, she's pregnant . . . and not sure whether the father is her husband Jim Snow or Pomp. After giving birth, she's still depressed and sends Jim away.

The Berrybenders find themselves under arrest in Santa Fe for two years . . . both to line the government's pocket and to entertain the governor's wife. Lord Albany finds himself smitten with a teenage mistress . . . a liaison that has dangerous consequences for the party. While in Santa Fe, we learn about how the Mexicans liked to deal with Native American outlaws and pursue their private pleasures.

But all is thrown into disarray when the governor is dismissed and a troop comes to march the Berrybenders to Vera Cruz in anticipation of war with the United States. Jim Snow escapes and tracks the group to rescue the Berrybenders. But before he can do that, he has to rescue the Mexican army. The march becomes a death trek like those in many of the earlier books . . . as cholera and slavers take their toll. Jim Snow had been a captive slave, and he takes the slaver attack very personally . . . which leads to a remarkable confrontation in which Jim has the epiphany of his life.

The Berrybenders end up in Texas just in time for the war for independence.

Tasmin and Jim come to a final understanding about their marriage and everyone who has survived has to scope out a new plan for the rest of their lives as they limp into St. Louis.

For those who like exciting action, this book has one spell-binding sequence as Jim Snow becomes a one-man army. If it hadn't been for that portion of the book, I would have rated the book at two stars.

Folly and Glory.......2005-10-14

Really enjoyed the book. "Folly and Glory", in my opinion, is better than Book 3, "By Sorrow's River" and equals "Sin Killer" and "Wandering Hill" in its emotional intensity and character development.

Separating the wheat from the chafe.......2005-07-14

In 1832, Lord Albany Berrybender chartered a steamboat to take him up the Missouri River on a hunting expedition. Albany is one of the richest aristocrats in England, and also a dissolute, selfish, old fool. Along for the ride are his wife Constance, six of their fourteen spoiled children, fifteen of nineteen servants, including a cellist and a botanist, an aging parrot named Prince Talleyrand, the staghound Tintamarre, and a gaggle of American talent hired to ease their way, including Toussaint Charbonneau, the guide for the Lewis and Clark Expedition many years previous.

In FOLLY AND GLORY, it's now three books and almost 4 years later into the saga, and what remains of the Berrybender party is under house arrest by the Mexican government in Santa Fe, now having been there for more than one and a half years. It's been time enough for Tasmin to give birth to twins, Petey and Petal, Bess to deliver Elphinstone, and Vicky to give Lord Albany another son, Randall. But Mexico is expecting trouble in its Texas province, so the central government decides to transfer the troublesome Americans and English in its New Mexico territory overland to Veracruz - a long and dangerous journey, and an opportunity for author Larry McMurtry to kill off superfluous characters so there are fewer lose ends to tie up at the series conclusion. Of the four books, FOLLY AND GLORY is the bloodiest and, if you've grown to care about the central characters, perhaps the most distressing.

I'd finally come to be absorbed in the serialized plot by the end of Book Three (BY SORROW'S RIVER), and I was hoping for at least a four-star finish. But, it wasn't to be. After a convulsion of death and killing - separating the wheat from the chafe - the final sixty pages straggle to a contrived and, for me, unsatisfying finale. Perhaps McMurtry had a publisher's deadline to meet, or maybe he just started out with too many characters. I mean, Lord Berrybender dying gloriously with Davy Crockett at the Alamo? Oh, puhleeze!

The most interesting persona to be introduced at this late stage is Petal, Tasmin's extraordinarily willful and difficult daughter. It would be amusing to see McMurtry build a new series around her, but I doubt that Larry has that left in him at this point in his writing career, of which LONESOME DOVE is perhaps the undisputed high water mark.

The entirety of the Berrybender series was, in retrospect, mildly engaging at best. After giving it spasmodic attention over three years, I can now move on.

Average customer rating:

A Big Five Stars. A novel to get lost in
long trips
My favorite all time Book!
The American classic novel
Review of Lonesome Dove

Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Manufacturer: Pocket
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

All 4-for-3 Deals | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Streets Of Laredo : A Novel
Comanche Moon : A Novel
Dead Man's Walk : A Novel
Lonesome Dove
Folly and Glory : A Novel (Mcmurtry, Larry)

ASIN: 067168390X

Amazon.com

Larry McMurtry, in books like The Last Picture Show, has depicted the modern degeneration of the myth of the American West. The subject of Lonesome Dove, cowboys herding cattle on a great trail-drive, seems like the very stuff of that cliched myth, but McMurtry bravely tackles the task of creating meaningful literature out of it. At first the novel seems the kind of anti-mythic, anti-heroic story one might expect: the main protagonists are a drunken and inarticulate pair of former Texas Rangers turned horse rustlers. Yet when the trail begins, the story picks up an energy and a drive that makes heroes of these men. Their mission may be historically insignificant, or pointless--McMurtry is smart enough to address both possibilities--but there is an undoubted valor in their lives. The result is a historically aware, intelligent, romantic novel of the mythic west that won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Book Description

Bestselling winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, Lonesome Dove is an American classic. First published in 1985, Larry McMurtry's epic novel combined flawless writing with a storyline and setting that gripped the popular imagination, and ultimately resulted in a series of four novels and an Emmy-winning television miniseries. Now, with an introduction by the author, Lonesome Dove is reprinted in an S&S Classic Edition.

Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry, the author of Terms of Endearment, is his long-awaited masterpiece, the major novel at last of the American West as it really was.

A love story, an adventure, an American epic, Lonesome Dove embraces all the West -- legend and fact, heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settiers -- in a novel that recreates the central American experience, the most enduring of our national myths.

Set in the late nineteenth century, Lonesome Dove is the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana -- and much more. It is a drive that represents for everybody involved not only a daring, even a foolhardy, adventure, but a part of the American Dream -- the attempt to carve out of the last remaining wilderness a new life.

Augustus McCrae and W. F. Call are former Texas Rangers, partners and friends who have shared hardship and danger together without ever quite understanding (or wanting to understand) each other's deepest emotions. Gus is the romantic, a reluctant rancher who has a way with women and the sense to leave well enough alone. Call is a driven, demanding man, a natural authority figure with no patience for weaknesses, and not many of his own. He is obsessed with the dream of creating his own empire, and with the need to conceal a secret sorrow of his own. The two men could hardly be more different, but both are tough, redoubtable fighters who have learned to count on each other, if nothing else.

Call's dream not only drags Gus along in its wake, but draws in a vast cast of characters:

-- Lorena, the whore with the proverbial heart of gold, whom Gus (and almost everyone else) loves, and who survives one of the most terrifying experiences any woman could have...

-- Elmira, the restless, reluctant wife of a small-time Arkansas sheriff, who runs away from the security of marriage to become part of the great Western adventure...

-- Blue Duck, the sinister Indian renegade, one of the most frightening villains in American fiction, whose steely capacity for cruelty affects the lives of everyone in the book...

-- Newt, the young cowboy for whom the long and dangerous journey from Texas to Montana is in fact a search for his own identity...

-- Jake, the dashing, womanizing exRanger, a comrade-in-arms of Gus and Call, whose weakness leads him to an unexpected fate...

-- July Johnson, husband of Elmira, whose love for her draws him out of his secure life into the wilderness, and turns him into a kind of hero...

Lonesome Dove sweeps from the Rio Grande (where Gus and Call acquire the cattle for their long drive by raiding the Mexicans) to the Montana highlands (where they find themselves besieged by the last, defiant remnants of an older West).

It is an epic of love, heroism, loyalty, honor, and betrayal -- faultlessly written, unfailingly dramatic. Lonesome Dove is the novel about the West that American literature -- and the American reader -- has long been waiting for.

Customer Reviews:

A Big Five Stars. A novel to get lost in.......2007-06-14

This is probably the most enjoyable realistic epic I have ever read. For weeks afterwards in my mind, I wandered the range with those cowboys. A magnificent work of art.

Also highly recommended are these novels about modern cowboys: "The Brave Cowboy," by Edward Abbey, "Goldenrod," by Herbert Harker, and "Finding Caruso," by Kim Barnes. Click here, then scroll down to read my reviews.
Brave Cowboy
GOLDENROD
Finding Caruso

long trips.......2007-06-06

It is difficult to find a "review" of Lonesome Dove here- what is posted falls mainly in the catagory of hagiography. In summary it is a good story well told by a master of the craft (writers must be born and not made- if McMurtry was born in 1936 and first published about 1960 he was a successful writer at 24).
Lonesome Dove is affecting because of two qualities- one disingenuous, the other writer's art. The first is the use of the quest format to capture the reader. Humans can't resist the heroic quest. It calls things they believe are best in them: unyielding idealism, selfless courage, willingness to accept change and confront the unknown. Characteristics that are almost never possessed by anyone anyone knows in real life. Here nearly every character is on a quest. The prominent include: moving cattle 2,000 miles for no good reason(when the mover has never moved a cow more than a few miles); reconnecting with a far away regretted lost love to whom the quester remains emotionally faithful; seeking a shinning city that might wash away the stain of past life; a quest in the direction opposite of the original (? a re-quest)to honor the dying "request" of the one person the quester loved. This book appears to try to answer the question: how many quests can one novel support?
The writer's art is found in the characterizations. McMurtry makes the reader care about most and believe in practically all of the characters. They tend to be representative and uni-dimensional but they are deep enough in their personalitites (something accomplished by liberal use of self doubt)to make it convincing. The main characters play off of each other by displaying contrasting but admirable and heroically absolute and consistent attributes (to call Gus McCrae inarticulate suggests someone didn't read the book- he may be the most "articulate" character in modern American fiction). Gus' job is to figure everything out and do nothing. Call's job is to figure nothing out and do everything. When they are fighting Indians however there is an unworldly competence in both. A male match made in heaven (there is a little of the old testament God of retribution vs. the new testament God of forgiveness in their relationship so it seems to have literally been made in heaven) but it is one that could only succeed either there or in the pages of a novel.
There is a lot of death- some of it gratuitous, a good deal involving innocent animals and much directed at sympathetic human characters. There are echos of Cormac McCarthy in it all- contrasting the randomness of the real world with the artifical meaning that defines the existential project of humans. That also seems a little contrived (as it is in McCarthy)- appealing to the emotions while denying it by suggesting something more profound.
One of the grace notes is McMurtry's handling of the emotional differences between the sexes. He seems to have found a real truth in depicting the frustration of women with men (if I were a romantic young man in my twenties I would avoid this book for 20 years or so). What do real women want?- well after a certain age ( probably varying from 25 to 50) mostly to be left alone by foolish men. Men, more romantic, idealistic, puerile, and less pragmatic, just become too much for women to bear after awhile. They may need them in one way or another but they would prefer they didn't.
All in all Lonesome Dove adds up to a rousing story, qualified, especially for women I suspect, by the frequent deaths of major characters. You may find yourself arguing outloud with Call or McCrae or Jake- a sure sign you are hooked. The story works because it uses the mythic American west as the back drop for multiple quests and because those who populate the world enclosed by the covers are people the reader believes, or hopes, could have existed beyond those covers.

My favorite all time Book!.......2007-06-02

I recently reread "Lonesome Dove" After I finished Across the High Lonesome (which was highly recommend by Larry McMurtry, and is a very good book by the way). It was like comming back to an old friend. I read this classic of American literature 20 years ago, and I found it just as enjoyable the second time around. Gus, Woodrow, Jake, Pea eye, Lorena, are all good friends and it was great to spend sometime with them again. If you read only one western in your life it should be "Lonesome Dove."

The American classic novel.......2007-05-30

I can't believe that being a reader all my life I just now got around to reading this wonderful novel. I can only add my second to the overwhelming praise this book has received. Undoubtedly, the characters of Call and Gus are some of the most well drawn of any characters I've ever met in fiction. Written in an amazingly unpretentious style, not only are the characters exceptional, but there is plenty of food for thought about life and why we do the things we do and make the choices we make.

Many of the "serious" writers of fiction need to take a lesson from McMurtry. This proves a reader doesn't have to work hard to become greatly affected by good literature. This truly is an American classic.

Forget that it's a western, forget that its about a trail drive. It's a book about the human condition. Read it.

Review of Lonesome Dove.......2007-05-10

This is the second best book I have ever read next to "Gone with the Wind." An older guy I worked with knew I read a lot and told me this was his favorite book and recommended it to me. It sounded boring to me because I was not a fan of westerns. What could be so exciting about a cattle drive across the country? This book has lots of action, romance, suspense, sex and violence. The book has a lot of humor and it is also sad at times as well. I have to admit that I was very sad when the book ended because I wanted it to go on and on. The character development in this book is incredible. By the end of the book you have feelings for the characters. You love them, you hate them, sometimes you get mad at them. I loved the character of Gus so well that I am going to name my next dog after him. This is by far McMurtry's best book. "Streets of Laredo" is not a bad book at all but not in the league of "Lonesome Dove." There is a reason why this book won the Pulitzer Prize. It is a masterpiece and well deserving of that honor. If you are not a fan of western books like myself have no fear. You will get over that real quick and become enthralled and captivated by this book. Where else can you rent a pig?

The Wandering Hill: A Novel (Beryybender Narratives)

Average customer rating:

The Wandering Attention
The Wandering Hill
More unpleasant prairie shenanigans!
Awesome finish
Hilarious, Moving, Wonderful

The Wandering Hill: A Novel (Beryybender Narratives)
Larry McMurtry
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

By Sorrow's River: A Novel (The Berrybender Narratives)
Folly and Glory : A Novel (Mcmurtry, Larry)
Sin Killer: A Novel (Berrybender Narratives)
Boone's Lick : A Novel
Dead Man's Walk : A Novel

ASIN: 0743262700

Amazon.com

The Wandering Hill, the second volume in Larry McMurtry's The Berrybender Narratives, retains the humor of the first installment, Sin Killer, while establishing a more meditative mood. Picking up where Sin Killer left off, The Wandering Hill finds noble English family the Berrybenders waiting out the oncoming winter at a high plains trading post, delaying their hunting expedition through the frontier-era American west. Tight confines force the spirited, bickering Berrybenders to contend with one another, as well as an assortment of colorful attendants and raw trappers. Conflict has arisen between fiery and very pregnant heroine Tasmin and her stoical, evangelical mountain man husband Jim Snow, a.k.a. Sin Killer. Selfish, randy patriarch Lord Berrybender, having lost a leg, seven toes, and three fingers thus far on their journey (though not his "favorite appendage"), is slowly losing his sanity. Malicious youngest child Mary begins an odd pseudo-sexual friendship with naturalist Piet Van Wely, while "foppish" heir Bobbety's no less ambiguous relationship with priest Father Geoffrin inspires his father to accidentally stick his son in the eye with a fork. In between many such self-inflicted disasters, three children are born, fierce native tribes attack, a man is sewn into a buffalo carcass, and many lives are lost, often in the presence of a strange, mobile hill whose legendary appearance signals impending doom. McMurtry, meanwhile, continues the momentum he built with Sin Killer, offering graceful storytelling, wonderfully dimensional realism, and deadpan wit. The wintry Wandering Hill, however, diverges from Sin Killer's madcap activity to further consider the inner lives of many of its splendid characters. McMurtry will have his fans clamoring for an answer, though delighting in his wandering path toward a resolution. --Ross Doll

Book Description

In The Wandering Hill, Larry McMurtry continues the story of Tasmin Berrybender and her eccentric family in the still unexplored Wild West of the 1830s. Their journey is one of exploration, beset by difficulties, tragedies, the desertion of trusted servants, and the increasing hardships of day-to-day survival in a land where nothing can be taken for granted. By now, Tasmin is married to the elusive young mountain man Jim Snow (the "Sin Killer").

On his part, Jim is about to discover that in taking the outspoken, tough-minded, stubbornly practical young aristocratic woman into his teepee he has bitten off more than he can chew. Still, theirs is a great love affair and dominates this volume of Larry McMurtry's The Berrybender Narratives, in which Tasmin gradually takes center stage as her father loses his strength and powers of concentration, and her family goes to pieces stranded in the hostile wilderness.

The Wandering Hill (which refers to a powerful and threatening legend in local Indian folklore) is at once literature on a grand scale and riveting entertainment by a master storyteller.

Customer Reviews:

The Wandering Attention.......2007-06-04

"The Wandering Hill" is the 30th book by Larry McMurtry that I have read. His best work was his early books through "Lonesome Dove". Since his heart attack, he seems to have lost his ability to write about "normal" people, preferring, instead, a cast of zany characters with a token normal person or two. I have not cared for this outrageous personnel and keep reading his latest books out of some sort of sense of loyalty. I was disappointed with the cast of the Berrybender's first novel, "Sin Killer", but read "The Wandering Hill" because it takes place a few miles from my home. Indeed, the visiting nobility (Berrybenders aside) are familiar names to local historians but their activities in the book don't match those of local lore.

I was getting frustrated with these crazy, obnoxious folks when it occurred to me that McMurtry is resurrecting the old Western "Dime Novel". The basic outline is there; use famous names to get the reader's attention but make up everything else. The Dime Novel idea that the more outlandish the story the better also fits right into McMurtry's style of late. What I can't figure out is whether or not Larry McMurtry is doing this on purpose (as some sort of tribute to that "genre") or has his talent evaporated to this level.

The essential problem with McMurtry, of late, is that his works lack depth. The "action" in these recent Westerns seem like what you'd get if Sergio Leone was directing the Keystone Cops. McMurtry's strength, for me, was always the relationships his characters had with one another. We were generally glad to meet up with the same characters in future novels. We start to get some of that quality of work in "The Wandering Hill" in the last 50-60 pages but it wasn't enough. Since they've left my neck of the woods, I don't care to meet up with the Berrybenders again.

The Wandering Hill.......2007-01-23

Hard to put down once you start reading. Another first class novel by Larry McMurtry - my favorite author

More unpleasant prairie shenanigans!.......2006-09-12

Larry McMurtry has written some stunning books, particularly in the western genre. This is not one of them. His unmistakeable style was present but he seems to be trying to parody himself--unsucessfully. I read the first book and didn't like it much, and only read this one in a pinch. At times the sections were boring and I ended up skimming over several pages.

For me I need to find a character to like. Since the characters in this series are mostly vain, self-satisfied and brutish it was impossible to find anyone admirable or likeable. So therefore the rather thin plot of a group of people on a hunt through the American wilderness did not engage me. A disappointment!

Awesome finish.......2006-08-24

Throughout most of this book it seemed like a four star effort, not quite up to the hilarious standard set by Sin Killer, the first in this series. The Wandering Hill is not hilarious. It's a good action story with interesting and very unusual characters.

The final chapter of the book is what earns that final fifth star. It is an awesome scene involving Pomp Charboneau, Tasmin Berrybender, and Pomp's deceased mother Sacagawea. I could see it in a movie, bringing tears to everyone's eyes, including Tasmin's.

There is a sort of humor in death. Larry McMurtry kills his characters off more than just occasionally, and those he doesn't kill he will often maim. One of the oddest scenes I've ever read involves Lord Berrybender, his son Bobbetty, and a fork in the father's hand. Poor Bobbetty really gets it in this story, harmless and silly though the teenager is. He seems like a nice enough kid to me, completely unsuited to the wild, but having lots of fun, come what may.

Tasmin is still the star of the book, as she was in Sin Killer. She's amazing.

I'm really glad I discovered this series. Sin Killer just showed up in a drawer. I don't know who bought it or how it got there. It had been sitting there for a long time, maybe years.

Hilarious, Moving, Wonderful.......2006-07-11

I had not read the first in McMurtry's Berrybender Narratives, so this book came as a complete surprise, and I have to say that it stands alone as a Western masterpiece. I don't even know where to begin to adequately describe his colorful characters, both Indian and European, and the way the tale simply bubbles along like one of the streams in the story.

In a nutshell, the book begins with a very pregnant Tasmin and her "bad boy" taciturn mountain man husband in an uneasy situation. She talks to much, he doesn't talk at all. And here he is in the middle of the very voluble Berrybenders, from the old Lord who is now missing a leg, several fingers and heaven knows what else (but thankfully not, as he says, his "favorite appendage"), to the extremely foppish and whiney Bobbety (the son), to over-the-top younger sister Mary.

And then there is Cook, who stands ready to provide double duty as midwife; and the laundress Millicent, who has caught more than Lord Berrybender's eye.

There are tragedies and the stark reality of frontier life is certainly not glossed over, but the humor and just blank good humor of the book is entertaining in the extreme. I'm looking forward to catching up with the entire series.

COMANCHE MOON: A Novel (Lonesome Dove/Larry Mcmurtry)

Average customer rating:

Good, but not as good as Lonesome Dove
4.5 stars
Part of a huge masterpiece.
An excellent book
excellent

COMANCHE MOON: A Novel (Lonesome Dove/Larry Mcmurtry)
Larry McMurtry
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside History Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Dead Man's Walk : A Novel
Streets Of Laredo : A Novel
Lonesome Dove: A Novel (Simon & Schuster Classics)
The Wandering Hill: A Novel (Beryybender Narratives)
By Sorrow's River: A Novel (The Berrybender Narratives)

ASIN: 0684807548

Amazon.com

In a book that serves as a both a sequel to Dead Man's Walk and a prequel to the beloved Lonesome Dove, McMurtry fills in the missing chapters in the Call and McCrae saga. It is a fantastic read, in many ways the best and gutsiest of the series. We join the Texas Rangers in their waning Indian-fighting years. The Comanches, after one last desperate raid led by the fearsome-but-aging Buffalo Hump, are almost defeated, though Buffalo Hump's son, Blue Duck, still terrorizes the relentless flow of settlers and lawmen. As Augustus and Woodrow follow one-eyed, tobacco-spitting Captain Inish Scull deep into a murderous madman's den in Mexico, their thoughts turn toward the end of their careers and the women they love in remarkably different ways back in Austin. What's amazing about McMurtry's West is that he sees beyond the romance. Neither his Indians, his cowboys, his gunslingers, nor his women act the way they did in either Zane Grey novels or John Wayne movies. Incredible beauty and lightning-quick violence are the bookends of his West, but it is the in-between moments of suffering and boredom where McMurtry shines. The suffering is poignant and heart-rending; the boredom tempered with doses of Augustus McCrae's sharp humor. Don't be surprised if you find yourself crying and laughing on the same page.

Book Description

Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry, a brilliant and haunting novel richly capable of standing on its own, completes the author's epic four-volume cycle of novels of the American West that began in 1985 with the Pulitzer Prize -- winning masterpiece, Lonesome Dove.

We join Texas Rangers August McCrae and Woodrow F. Call in their middle years, just beginning to deal with the perplexing tensions of adult life -- Gus and his great love, Clara Forsythe; Call and Maggie Tilton, the young whore who loves him -- when they enlist with a Ranger troop in pursuit of Buffalo Hump, the great Comanche war chief; Kicking Wolf, the celebrated Comanche horse thief; and a deadly Mexican bandit king with a penchant for torture. Assisting the Rangers in their wild chase is the renowned Kickapoo tracker, Famous Shoes.

Comanche Moon joins the twenty-year time line between Dead Man's Walk and Lonesome Dove, as we follow beloved heroes Gus and Call and their comrades-in-arms -- Deets, Jake Spoon, and Pea Eye Parker -- in their bitter struggle to protect an advancing Western frontier against the defiant Comanches, courageously determined to defend their territory and their way of life.

Customer Reviews:

Good, but not as good as Lonesome Dove.......2007-04-27

McMurtry caught lightning in a bottle with Lonesome Dove. No book in the series came as close. I almost wish he'd left Call and McCrae's past a mystery. Still, not a bad read in its own right.

4.5 stars.......2006-11-11

I love the way McMurtry writes! This was another brilliant story about the West.

Part of a huge masterpiece........2006-06-15

Not only a great western, but also a fantastic horror book.
When I considered some of the scenes involving the evil characters of the book I didn't know where to put it in my
book collection.

An excellent book.......2006-03-28

Commanche Moon was undoubtedly the best western book I have ever read, plus it was one of the best books I have ever read period. What I especially liked about the book was the way McMurtry characterized the Indians. He made them come alive as individuals within a specific culture and a certain historical time period. I also enjoyed the Texas Rangers, but not nearly as much as I did the Indians. It was obvious to me that McMurtry has done consideralbe research on Amerindians and he has used that research well in constructing the characters in his book. I was always excited when I started a chapter and saw it was going to be about one or more of the Indian characters. Many authors sterotype the Indians of the American West, making them too cruel or too noble, but McMurtry managed to portray them as total human beings and thereby created fascinating characters to read about. There were many other parts of the book that I enjoyed, but the author's characterization of the Amerindians was easily the best.

excellent.......2006-03-03

Really enjoying the audiotapes, taking a lot of "get out of Dodge" trips so we can continue to listen to them.

Average customer rating:

Very Disappointing
A whole new nooky at the wild west...
Mr. McMurty phoned this one in.
A great read!
dissapointing

Telegraph Days: A Novel
Larry McMurtry
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846--1890
When the Light Goes: A Novel
The Whistling Season
Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (Dave Robicheaux Mysteries)
The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America

ASIN: 0743250788

Book Description

Not since the publication of his own beloved classic Lonesome Dove has there been a novel like this one -- another big, brilliant, unputdownable saga of the West from Larry McMurtry. Telegraph Days is at once a major work of literature and a completely absorbing read, not just great fiction, but fiction on a great scale, encompassing many years, many characters, real and fictional, and the whole vast landscape of place, time, life, and heart, which has served for more than one hundred thirty years as the background for "the Western" in fiction and on the screen. Nobody writes, or has ever written, better about the West than Larry McMurtry, and nobody has caught better in words its myths, its often brutal reality, its overwhelming size, and the way it captured both the imagination and the hopes of those who settled there, only, as was so often the case, to dash those hopes.

Told in the voice of Nellie Courtright, a spunky, courageous, attractive young woman whose story this is in part, Telegraph Days is the big novel of the Western gunfighters that people have been hoping for years Larry McMurtry would write.

When Nellie and her brother Jackson are unexpectedly orphaned by their father's suicide on his new and unprosperous ranch, they make their way to the nearby town of Rita Blanca, where Jackson manages to secure a job as a sheriff's deputy, while Nellie, ever resourceful, becomes the town's telegrapher.

Together, they inadvertently put Rita Blanca on the map when young Jackson succeeds in shooting down all six of the ferocious Yazee brothers in a gunfight that brings him lifelong fame but which he can never repeat because his success came purely out of luck.

Propelled by her own energy and commonsense approach to life, Nellie meets and almost conquers the heart of Buffalo Bill, the man she will love most in her long life, and goes on to meet, and witness the exploits of, Billy the Kid, the Earp brothers, and Doc Holliday. She even gets a ringside seat at the Battle at the O.K. Corral, the most famous gunfight in Western history, and eventually lives long enough to see the West and its gunfighters turned into movies.

Full of life, love, shootings, real Western heroes and villains, Telegraph Days is Larry McMurtry at his epic best, in his most ambitious Western novel since Lonesome Dove.

Customer Reviews:

Very Disappointing.......2007-06-19

I really wanted to like this book. It sounded interesting and amusing - a Wild West romp, a revisiting of the dime novel of the late 19th century, a sort of 'Perils of Pauline' set in the wild west. It is considered one of this summer's 'hot reads'; I settled down to read it.

The book certainly starts with a bang - the narrator, Marie Antoinette (Nellie) Courtwright, reports that her father had foolishly hanged himself and the narrative goes from there, following Nellie and Jackson, her brother, as they go to the nearest small town and settle in.

I plowed my way through 70 pages (paperback edition) and had not decided whether I was enjoying it. I persevered, following the narrator and her brother as they make their way to Dodge City, where they encounter the Earp brothers. After another thirty pages I stopped reading, though I did pause to read the ending.

There is no doubt that McMurtry can write. He has a deft way with words, but it doesn't help with Telegraph Days. I was trying to put my finger on what was wrong and I concluded that it is a lot of window-dressing and not a lot of substance. It reminds me of one of those movies that is stuffed with celebrity cameo appearances, and you're too busy saying "Hey! That's Marlene Dietrich!" to notice that there is no plot.

My advice for anyone who is tempted to read Telegraph Days is to give Charles Portis' classic novel, True Grit a read (or re-read) if you want the Wild West with a wonderful narrator and a delightful, profound, quirky story.

A whole new nooky at the wild west..........2007-06-16

My grand mother and her brother were orphans
from the Oklahoma area who were sent east to St. Louis.
My grand father's family lost 4 brothers and
sisters and an uncle in Arkansas before moving to
tamer St. Louis. This story is about a southern bell
and her brother orphaned in the Cimarron
who turned writer and telegraph operator
who says she knew all them heroes ( intimately?).
Western fiction as fiction about dime novel (25 cent?)
authors.
A book bout when turning the killing of dirty mean drunks
into dollars on paper was a new business.
Not as good as Pretty Boy Floyd,
but certainly a new twist on the old west.

Mr. McMurty phoned this one in........2007-06-15

Wow. Completely disappointing. I'm amazed by the people on here who are comparing this book to Lonesome Dove. This one has none of the depth, wit, or weight of LD. Of course, it isn't attempting to be that sort of sweeping epic, but it is painfully flat, the humor(?) thuds to the ground and dies there, and the central figure was generally boring, with bouts of annoying thrown in for good measure. I've read most of McMurtry's work; I've always loved the way he could make me care about the fate of a third-string character. In Telegraph, the entire cast of characters could have died off in one massive seizure on page 110, and I wouldn't have cared in the least. (I might not even have noticed.)

I found myself trudging through this novel out of obligation because I've enjoyed so much of his writing in the past. If you've not read his work before, don't judge him by this - he's got so much more to offer; Lonesome Dove would be an obvious starting point. If you are already a McMurty fan, skip this one and re-read something you liked.

A great read!.......2007-06-09

McMurtry is a great author. His characters really come to life. This was so enjoyable I shared it with my husband and 10 of my friends who all loved it. Try Buffalo Girls if you enjoyed this one and of course Lonesome Dove was great. His Sin Killer series was difficult at times to enjoy as there was so much tragedy but it had amazing characters. I loved all his western themed books. Didn't care for The Last Picture Show, one of his early books, but you can't please everyone all the time!

dissapointing.......2007-06-06

this earns a low mark for an author that I usually enjoy enormously. I couldn't finish this, I was bored silly by the cartoon-like Nellie Cortright

By Sorrow's River: A Novel (The Berrybender Narratives)

Average customer rating:

Not the Strongest in the Series
Addicted to an odd series
Tasmin Shows Her Berrybender Roots
Romance, Blood, and Myth
Tasmin becomes difficult

By Sorrow's River: A Novel (The Berrybender Narratives)
Larry McMurtry
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Wandering Hill: A Novel (Beryybender Narratives)
Folly and Glory : A Novel (Mcmurtry, Larry)
Sin Killer: A Novel (Berrybender Narratives)
Boone's Lick : A Novel
Streets Of Laredo : A Novel

ASIN: 0743262719

Book Description

In this tale of high-spirited and terrifying adventure, set against the background of the West that Larry McMurtry has made his own, By Sorrow's River is an epic in its own right, with an extraordinary young woman as its leading figure.

At the heart of this third volume of his Western saga remains the beautiful and determined Tasmin Berrybender, now married to the "Sin Killer" and mother to their young son, Monty. By Sorrow's River continues the Berrybender party's trail across the endless Great Plains of the West toward Santa Fe, where they intend, those who are lucky enough to survive the journey, to spend the winter. They meet up with a vast array of characters from the history of the West: Kit Carson, the famous scout; Le Partezon, the fearsome Sioux war chief; two aristocratic Frenchmen whose eccentric aim is to cross the Great Plains by hot air balloon; a party of slavers; a band of raiding Pawnee; and many other astonishing characters who prove, once again, that the rolling, grassy plains are not, in fact, nearly as empty of life as they look. Most of what is there is dangerous and hostile, even when faced with Tasmin's remarkable, frosty sangfroid. She is one of the strongest and most interesting of Larry McMurtry's women characters, and is at the center of this powerful and ambitious novel of the West.

Customer Reviews:

Not the Strongest in the Series.......2006-10-05

Although much fun to read, as were the first two books in the Berrybender Narratives, "By Sorrow's River" is the weakest link. Maybe because there is less action and more introspection, namely, willful, beautiful and impossible Tasmin Berrybender's increasinbly deep infatuation with Pomp Charbonneau, who seems indifferent to her considerable charms.

As we know from previous books, Tasmin impetuously married mountain man Jimmy Snow, "The Sin Killer," much feared by the Indians. Although he satisfies her on a very primal level and has already fathered a son by her, Jimmy is taciturn to the point of obsession, while Tasmin never shuts up. Jimmy is an unschooled frontiersman, while Tasmin is a cultured and spoiled upper-class Englishwoman. We know all this...it's old news. So why is it so annoying when she sets her sights and considerable will upon cultured and quiet Charbonneau? Maybe it's because he really doesn't want her, even up to and including her rash seduction, where she has to do just about everything herself (McMurtry is hilarious in this description, as he always is in this series). Or maybe she has become as tiresome to us as she has to most people around her.

At any rate, there are still plenty of gory deaths, outrageous selfish acts by Lord Berrybender, some unexpected weddings and couplings, and a new influx of Mexican characters who people a thriving trading post.

Still fun to read, but not the strongest in the series. Looking foward to "Folly and Glory," the next of the Narratives.

Addicted to an odd series.......2006-09-03

I was hooked on the Berrybender series because of the hysterical humor in Sin Killer, so I bought the other three books in the series. I'm reading the series as one long book, and I see no other way to read it. It is, after all, just one continuous story about the same characters on the same journey. It is as continuous as Lord of the Rings or Remembrance of Things Past, both of which were published as a series of separate books. In this regard it isn't like the Kushiel series by Jacqueline Carey, because the three books in that series can each stand alone and involve completely separate adventures, though with the same characters.

This, the third book in the four-book series, is not funny at all. Okay. I got hooked on the humor, and it's gone. But I'm still hooked on the characters, and in particular Tasmin Berrybender. Her stupid father I can do without. Her sisters play diminishing roles as the story unfolds. Her husband Jim Snow, Sin Killer, also has a diminishing role in this book. Pomp Charboneau is elevated to stardom, though he is a boring star, a man who doesn't really want to be alive, a man who will avoid Tasmin's advances almost all the time, but will submit passively to them when cornered. He's not much of a character.

One surprise star in this third book is Clam De Paty, the French journalist with the garish red pants. He has an adventure or two. Then there's a pair of lively and wealthy Mexican girls who are pretty interesting, and one is in love with young Kit Carson, one of Tasmin's conquests.

The terrifying Partezon becomes very human, and we are told what makes him tick. History proved him right. No wonder he was killing off all those white men. That was the Indians' only chance, and he was the only Indian in this book who knew it. But he peters out. So does Lord Berrybender. Sometimes McMurtry's characters just peter out.

In Lord Berrybender's case, he doesn't seem like the same man who was introduced to us in Sin Killer. I don't recognize him in this book. Perhaps "continuity of character" isn't McMurtry's strongest suit in this series. He makes things happen to his characters, and the characters don't seem to be who they started out as. I suspect it is a weakness in the writing, but nobody's perfect. This series is tremendous.

Pomp is a disturbing character. Why is he avoiding Tasmin? We kind of think it is because she's married to his buddy. But if that is the case, why is he having sex with her? I don't get Pomp. I think he's being painted as a broken man, broken by his removal to Europe after growing up in the American frontier. If that is the whole Pomp story, that he is an illustration of a man who was broken by civilization, then I think it is a poor choice on the author's part. I don't think people break like that. I don't think that they become apathetic vegetables because of that. It's a weakness of the story. Yay wilderness, boo civilization. Whatever. I don't buy it.

This author is far more cold blooded than most. He constantly kills off his main characters. It reminds me of Dungeons and Dragons, where you can be playing with a character for months, and then he's dead, and that's that. The mortality rate on this Berrybender excursion is just a little higher than the mortality rate among terminal AIDS patients too weak to stand.

The mortality rate forces this to be a comedy, because nobody in his right mind would continue this journey, as Berrybender does, for sport, after all of this tragedy. This has to be a comedy because one of Berrybender's children disappeared, died, and was never remarked again, like the child was nothing. That happened in an earlier book. Remember, he had brought two of his "numbered" children with him, one was found as a silent stowaway, and the other was never heard from again. This has to be a comedy, no? Why else would nobody in the family give a damn that baby sibling is missing, abandoned, and dead?

This series walks a very queer line between comedy and adventure. But when a series has me, it has me.

Tasmin Shows Her Berrybender Roots.......2006-07-04

If you haven't read either The Sin Killer or The Wandering Hill, I suggest you read at least The Sin Killer to get a sense of the characters before reading this book. Otherwise, this will probably seem like a dull two star book.

By Sorrow's River is a reference to the way that Pomp Charbonneau was described by his mother, Sacagawea - the famous guide for Lewis and Clark, when he was born. In this series, Pomp serves to make the point that Larry McMurtry centers this series on: The Old World is done and you'd better adapt to the new. Pomp, although an American who is half Native American, was raised in Europe and can appreciate both cultures. Pomp clearly favors the Wilderness of the West.

At the end of The Wandering Hill, Pomp was seriously wounded in an attack. Only careful surgery and insistent nursing kept him alive to reach this story. Tasmin had been falling in love with Pomp in The Wandering Hill, but now she determines to have her way with Pomp whether or not her husband, Jim Snow (the Sin Killer), is around. Tasmin's pursuit of Pomp is the main story line for By Sorrow's River.

Monty, Tasmin's and Jim's son, and the other two boys continue to grow nicely. Little Onion, Jim's remaining Native American wife, continues to serve as unpaid nanny while Tasmin nurses her hungry son.

Overall, the women show that they are the stronger sex and gain a stronger hand in their battles of the sexes with the men.

The comic relief in this story is the arrival of two journalists who bring a hot air balloon with them. On the sinister side, the Partezon is once again involved in the story in a threatening way while the travelers learn about the Ear Taker the hard way. The balance of power among the whites and the Native Americans shift was a smallpox epidemic devastates some of the tribes.

The travelers leave the relative security and comfort of the trading post near the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers to travel toward Santa Fe across parched lands to face new dangers.

The book ends on a tragic note as fate seems to once again take a hand on determining who will live and who will die on the frontier.

I enjoyed this book more than The Wandering Hill, but I would have liked the story if it had less of Tasmin's obsession with controlling men.

Romance, Blood, and Myth.......2005-11-23

By Sorrow's River is the third of four novels in a series detailing the adventures of the rich, aristocratic, and eccentric Berrybender family--terribly out of place in the raw American West--traveling up the Missouri River and then across the endless Great Plains toward Santa Fe. The time is the early 1830s, and the rugged frontier they have come to see is in turn magnificent and brutally hostile. The naive English troup encounters numerous memorable characters, such as the trappers Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpatrick, and Kit Carson, the painter George Catlin, a fearsome Sioux war chief named Partezon, and an assortment of other quirky adventurers. The story is part unromanticized view of old West and part satire of the English class system, with the pompous Lord Berrybender dragging his family and retainers through one dangerous situation after another while doggedly seeking out more game to hunt and kill. At once epic, comic, and tragic, the Berrybender narrative represents a pivotal decade in which the West was both won and lost and when random violence and natural disasters awaited all those who insisted on pushing west of the Missouri River.

At the core of the novels is the love triangle between beautiful, blunt, brash Tasmin Berrybender, her husband the ferocious frontiersman, Jim Snow, and the fur trapper Pomp Charbonneau. Tasmin is one of McMurtry's most memorable female characters, and her stormy relationship with her wandering husband is part bittersweet romance, part soap opera. I saw some similarities with the love triangle in Gone With the Wind: Tasmin is reminiscent of the feisty Scarlet O'Hara, Jim Snow shares Rhett Butler's sexual appeal and hint of danger, and Pomp-like the cerebral Ashley Wilkes-is a man of cool temperament that our heroine has difficulty rousing to passion.

McMurtry knows how to spin a great yarn, although I felt the characters in this series were more shalowly drawn than in some of his other novels. Nevertheless, I couldn't stop reading because I wanted to know what became of them. (And in typical McMurtry style, many of their fates are bizarre.) Many secondary characters are recognizable historical figures, but it's sometimes frustrating to not know where fact leaves off and fiction begins. I'm not sure why McMurtry didn't simply create some fictional names, rather than have real-world people meet historically inaccurate fates. For example, it's interesting to note that the real Scotsman, William Drummond Stewart, actually returned home (with a small herd of buffalo) in the late 1830s to be laird of his manor. He died in 1871, leaving the family estates to an illegitimate son whose mother was a Dallas saloon keeper. As for Pomp Charbonneau, who for a time is the focus of Tasmin's determined love, in real life he ended his days searching for gold in California, dying at age 61 en route to Montana.

Tasmin becomes difficult.......2005-07-11

In 1832, Lord Albany Berrybender chartered a steamboat to take him up the Missouri River on a hunting expedition. Albany is one of the richest aristocrats in England, and also a dissolute, selfish, old fool. Along for the ride are his wife Constance, six of their fourteen spoiled children, fifteen of nineteen servants, including a cellist and a botanist, an aging parrot named Prince Talleyrand, the staghound Tintamarre, and a gaggle of American talent hired to ease their way, including Toussaint Charbonneau, the guide for the Lewis and Clark Expedition many years previous.

In BY SORROW'S RIVER, a year and two books later, Lord Berrybender has since lost a leg; his wife, two children, assorted servants, Prince Talleyrand, and Tintamarre are dead. Berrybender's eldest daughter, Tasmin has borne a child to her mountain man husband, Jim "Sin Killer" Snow, and is now pregnant with a second. Another daughter, Bess, takes up with a Ute brave, High Shoulders, and a third daughter, Mary, loses her virginity to the botanist, Piet Van Wely. Berrybender himself marries the cellist, Vicky Kennet, and gets her with child. And finally, after much aimless wandering in the second book of the series, THE WANDERING HILL, the fecund group is off to Santa Fe accompanied by a ragtag group of mountain men and hangers-on.

It's only in this book that the series really takes off for me, mostly due to the fact that its chief protagonist, Tasmin, is becoming engagingly difficult. Increasingly disenchanted with her husband, Tasmin casts lustful looks at Jean Baptiste "Pomp" Charbonneau, the son of Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacagawea born on Lewis and Clark's epic trek to the Pacific. Moreover, Tasmin has a soft spot in her heart for the young Kit Carson. Trouble is, Pomp has barely a prurient thought in his head, and Kit is too busy becoming a famous scout.

What makes BY SORROW'S RIVER particularly interesting are the historical characters that sprinkle the narrative: Carson, the elder and younger Charbonneaus, mountain men Jim Bridger, Hugh Glass, and Tom Fitzpatrick, and traders William and Charles Bent, who established Bent's Fort in present-day Colorado. Having said that, it's because author Larry McMurtry occasionally plays fast and loose with the historical record that I found this fictional narrative unreasonably irritating at times. When reading this book, keep in mind that Carson didn't marry (his third wife) Josefina Jaramillo until 1843, and Pomp Charbonneau died in 1866 at Innskip Station, OR. Does Larry's version represent careless research, or just unconscionable literary license?

With this third book in the series, the Berrybender saga is finally attaining some of those qualities of excellence that characterized, McMurtry's classic, LONESOME DOVE. Despite my reservations regarding the glaring historical inaccuracies, I just may immediately begin the fourth and final installment, FOLLY AND GLORY, without stopping to vary my reading fare. For the moment, I'm hooked.

Ceremony: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Average customer rating:

One of the greatest American novels
Indian Death
Challenging but worth it
Silko no Match for Erdrich
Good book, but takes too long to read

Ceremony: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Leslie Marmon Silko
Manufacturer: Penguin Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

War | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Tracks
Love Medicine : A Novel (Perennial Classics)
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
House Made of Dawn
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

ASIN: 0143104918

Book Description

Thirty years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people. Only by immersing himself in the Indian past can he begin to regain the peace that was taken from him. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power.

Customer Reviews:

One of the greatest American novels.......2007-05-09

I teach this novel every semester at a university. I have taught it in courses on American Indian literature and in courses on American novels (no ethnic categories). It can stand up against any American novel you can name, in terms of its emotional impact, its artistic achievement, its prose style, its narrative structure -- anything. I admit it is a challenging novel, but it is well worth the work. It is best if you can read it with others, or in the context of a class or online study guide. Some reviewers here are high school students who read it for class, and I admit that may be asking a lot of high school student to dig into the novel as much as it needs/deserves. But that can be done, especially with the right kind of guidance. However, it is hard for me to imagine teaching a university-level course on American Indian literature without teaching Ceremony.

Indian Death.......2007-05-04

3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
It's about death., October 19, 2003
Reviewer: Charity Kendall (Fenton, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews

The point of the book is that an individual Indian sees himself not as individual like the people in white society but as a member of a people. The main character could not define himself as psychologically distinct from his culture. He was sad because of what he saw in war but he could only define this sadness in terms of how Indians saw the death of humanity. The only thing that brought the main character out of his shell shocked vomiting state of mind was a story about how it was the Indian culture itself that set the evil destroying white culture against it through witchcraft. The story came from a medicine man and it empowered the Indian. Either way everything around the Indian spelled disaster because destroying white society had defeated the Indians. His life was empty and the world is doomed. This is not romantic or uplifting, only sad.

Challenging but worth it.......2007-04-03

This book is absolutely beautiful. I will warn you now, however, that it is not an easy read. It is complex and multifaceted, which makes it too complicated to be a fluff book even though it is fairly short. Reading it takes some serious thought.

The plot of Ceremony is that of a half Native American man who comes back from World War II and has difficulties dealing with the world he returns to. At first he turns to alcohol but he is slowly drawn to healing not only himself but the world around him with the revised rituals of the Laguna people.

The book is incredible for the issues it covers and on the way it discusses them. The questions of belonging, of being an outcast, of the mixing of cultures and of one's role in a greater society are just some of the topics that get discussed in the story. But they are not put easily on the surface for any person to pick up on. To understand at least some of what the book is really about one must get through the layers and really read between the lines. This is a good thing. It adds to the depth of the book and makes it much more potent.

It does, however, make the book much harder to read. Not only are the main themes hidden within the main plot but the way the book jumps back and forth between present and past, events and memory, can be very confusing unless one keeps careful track of what is going on. But all this means for the intelligent reader is that she or he must pay careful attention when reading, which is a good idea anyway since the book is filled with connections and underlying themes.

Silko no Match for Erdrich.......2007-03-23

I have just finished reading Leslie Silko's novel Ceremony. Now, dont get me wrong. Mrs. Silko is an excellent authoress and a credit to her genre. However, Ceremony isn't my favorite book by a longshot. Set in the Laguna Reservation in the late forties, Ceremony is a story about a young Laguna man of mixed heritage who comes back from World War Two with shell shock. He spends some time in a veteran's hispital only to be sent home far from being cured (if one can ever really be cured from shell shock). While he is at home, his condition continues to get worse until he meets an old medicine man named Betonie. The old man tells him what he's really fighting and experiencing is the evil that the ancient witches realesed onto humanity. The largest curse that they sent being the white man. Tayo (the young veteran) has lost a cousin and an uncle: one in the war, the other at home. His heartsickness could only be cured with a healthy ceremony. One, Betonie tells him, that must blend the old ways of fighting the evil with the new. Eventually, Tayo is able to overcome his sickness and live a fairly normal life in the knowledge that there is evil out there. but there is goodness, too. Silko draws heavily on racism and inequality as heavy themes in her novel.\
In fact, this is one of the points that she critizes Louise Erdrich on. Silko claims that Erdrich painted a picture of Native AMerican life that was never real, that Erdrich is naive. It isn't hard to see a possible political agenda seeping through nearly every page of Silko's work, something conspicously absent in erdrich's work. What exactly is wrong with literature for literature's sake. Must everything have a moral and be filled with allegory?

Good book, but takes too long to read.......2006-02-25

I read this book for a class, so I had to read it. It was okay. I think the book was good, but it just took me too long to get through. It was interesting, but not a book I would read on my own. It wasn't hard to get through either, it just seemed a little overdone, until I finally got to understand the book and meanings in it.

Average customer rating:

a new mcmurtry fan
Good story, great dry humor, wonderful narration on the CDs
On the Western trails
Larry McMurtry & Will Patton - Best Duo In The West!
Light entertainment from a master.

Boone's Lick : A Novel
Larry McMurtry
Manufacturer: Pocket
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

All 4-for-3 Deals | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Folly and Glory : A Novel (Mcmurtry, Larry)
By Sorrow's River: A Novel (The Berrybender Narratives)
The Wandering Hill: A Novel (Beryybender Narratives)
Dead Man's Walk : A Novel
Sin Killer: A Novel (Berrybender Narratives)

ASIN: 0671040588

Amazon.com

Master storyteller Larry McMurtry unfurls a short, bright banner of a book following the fortunes of the Cecil family as they travel from Boone's Lick, Missouri, to the Western frontier. Though the story is narrated by her oldest son, 15-year-old Shay, the real hero of the book is Mary Margaret, the mother. Her husband, Dick, has left her and their four children in Boone's Lick while he seeks his fortunes in the West. Mary Margaret lives contentedly with the children and Dick's brother, Seth, until one day she decides she's had enough of playing the estranged wife and packs up the entire household. And so the Cecil family leaves their little town (where Wild Bill Hickok makes a cameo appearance) and travels by wagon to Wyoming, accompanied along the way by a fat Québecois priest and a Shoshone. They do find Dick, and they also arrive in Wyoming just in time for the 1866 Fetterman Massacre.

McMurtry writes with an ease that younger writers would do well to emulate. Here Seth fights off an ambush of white trash dastards: <blockquote> Uncle Seth fired again and a third horse went down--though just saying it went down would be to put it too mildly. The third horse turned a complete somersault. Its rider flew off about thirty feet, after which he didn't move. </blockquote> "'It's rare to see a horse turn a flip like that,' Uncle Seth observed." That cool "observed" gives an idea of the book's wry, pervasive humor. But there's more here than shooting and quipping: McMurtry's wagon full of frustrated Missourians makes a fine narrative vehicle: we get a first-hand account of the Native American wars; we get the perspective of the women left behind in the opening of the West; we get a wagon's-eye view of the hard journey of the settlers; and, ultimately, we get an insightful family romance. All that, and scalpings too. --Claire Dederer

Book Description

Boone's Lick is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry's return to the kind of story that made him famous -- an enthralling tale of the nineteenth-century west. Like his bestsellers Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo, Comanche Moon, and Dead Man's Walk, Boone's Lick transports the reader to the era about which McMurtry writes better and more shrewdly than anyone else.

Told with McMurtry's unique blend of historical fact and sheer storytelling genius, the novel follows the Cecil family's arduous journey by riverboat and wagon from Boone's Lick, Missouri, to Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming. Fifteen-year-old Shay narrates, describing the journey that begins when his Ma, Mary Margaret, decides to hunt down her elusive husband, Dick, to tell him she's leaving him. Without knowing precisely where he is, they set out across the plains in search of him, encountering grizzly bears, stormy weather, and hostile Indians as they go. With them are Shay's siblings, G.T., Neva, and baby Marcy; Shay's uncle, Seth; his Granpa Crackenthorpe; and Mary Margaret's beautiful half-sister, Rose. During their journey they pick up a barefooted priest named Father Villy, and a Snake Indian named Charlie Seven Days, and persuade them to join in their travels.

At the heart of the novel, and the adventure, is Mary Margaret, whom we first meet shooting a sheriff's horse out from underneath him in order to feed her family. Forceful, interesting, and determined, she is written with McMurtry's trademark deftness and sympathy for women, and is in every way a match for the worst the west can muster.

Boone's Lick abounds with the incidents, the excitements, and the dangers of life on the plains. Its huge cast of characters includes such historical figures as Wild Bill Hickok and the unfortunate Colonel Fetterman (whose arrogance and ineptitude led to one of the U.S. Army's worst and bloodiest defeats at the hands of the Cheyenne and Sioux) as well as the Cecil family (itself based on a real family of nineteenth-century traders and haulers).

The story of their trek in pursuit of Dick, and the discovery of his second and third families, is told with brilliance, humor, and overwhelming joie de vivre in a novel that is at once high adventure, a perfect western tale, and a moving love story -- it is, in short, vintage McMurtry, combining his brilliant character portraits, his unerring sense of the west, and his unrivaled eye for the telling detail.

Boone's Lick is one of McMurtry's richest works of fiction to date.

Customer Reviews:

a new mcmurtry fan.......2007-05-12

This is the first western I've ever read. I chose a short book because I wasn't sure I could make it all the way through Lonesome Dove, but now I can't wait to read that too. Halfway through I was already sad that the book was going to end so soon. It's a very simple story, written in an unassuming style, but the characters are so real and endearing that you can't help but love them. It was also refreshing to see a Western with a female heroine, and an amazing one at that.

Good story, great dry humor, wonderful narration on the CDs.......2006-07-23

The characters and their dry humor are better than the story, which is pretty good. The narrator Will Patton really makes the characters come to life. Historical details are nicely woven into the story. If you buy the book and miss the narration on the CDs, you will miss a lot. I gave it 5 stars because when I listened in the car I always wanted to keep listening after I arrived at my destination. And I want to find more books on CDs by this author and narrator. I even liked the incidental guitar pieces at the end of each CD. In fact, I listened to it two times, back to back.

Reviewers, please consider that people who have not yet read the book might read your review, so please save them a surprise or two.

On the Western trails.......2005-09-20

Another version of LONESOME DOVE, though not a sequel and not nearly as good. A family, led by the formidable Mary Margaret (McMurtry loves very strong female characters), takes off one day from Boone's Lick, MO, in search of Mary's husband, Dick. They travel across the Oregon Trail to Ft. Laramie, and then to Ft. Phil Kearney on the Bozeman Trail in Wyoming (arriving just in time for the Fetterman massacre). When Mary finds her husband she sees he has a number of Indian wives, so she "quits" him.

All the McMurtry touches are here - the humorous, understated dialogue; the accidents (Mary's father dies right at the beginning of the journey); the finger of fate everywhere; the appearance of some famous historical people. But the book feels tired and rushed. He writes as if he were trapped in the Western setting created by his great successes of the past and can't get out. A disappointing work.

Larry McMurtry & Will Patton - Best Duo In The West!.......2005-09-05

The story is quite good but, now and again, seems to get into a different mode. I mean one minute he seems to be talking to us of events yesterday or last week, then the next as if it was years ago.

The reader, though, is the perfect compliment to the ideas conveyed by the author. It was easy for me to imagine the subjects face simply by hearing the narrator's voice speaking the writer's words. I was able to easily imagine an old shipmate (M. Hill of Missouri) telling some of us his life story.

Had the last chapter been omitted I would have given this five stars. Even so, I and all my friends at westwardho.us would have been proud to have written a book only half so well as Larry wrote this'n - Bill Anderson.

Light entertainment from a master........2005-04-02

There is no question this is a slight novel. With McMurtry's western novels, we usually get epic sweep, grand accomplishments, tragedy, massacre's, etc. etc. They are usually fabulously entertaining books, with the LONESOME DOVE saga and the BERRYBENDER CHRONICLES being the best examples. But they are not easy reads. They pull at the heart, make us grimace with pain, etc.

BOONE'S LICK is like an antedote for these books. Many of its themes are similar...the men who are ignorant of "civilized life," the elderly Native Americans who assist the whites, the end of the buffalo, the hardships and bad-luck of traveling across the west, etc. But there is a lightness of tone (and far less tragedy) then McMurtry's other books. It is not a towering achievement, by any stretch, but I found it to be fun, fast reading and still enlightening.

It basically tells the story of one woman's trip across dangerous country to confront her frequently absent, no-good husband. In tow she brings her two teenage sons, a teenage daughter, a baby, her husband's brother (who has always loved her), her sister and her elderly father...along with a bunch of mules. They pick up some other companions along the way too.

The first half of the book mostly establishes the characters and their amusing relationships in the town of Boone's Lick, Missouri. (A younger Wild Bill Hickock is an important character in this part of the book). When they suddenly hit the road (all but the mother VERY reluctantly), we follow them more or less across the Oregon Trail. Although some misfortune befalls them, the body count is low for McMurtry. There are amusing misunderstandings, befuddlements, and such, but little to be sad about.

I'm perplexed by the reviewers here who say the book is boring. It's very fast paced...just not very deep. But it paints an authentic feeling, and has some characters that, while they won't stay with you forever like Gus and Call from LONESOME DOVE, are certainly worth getting to know. I recommend the book for fans of McMurtry's style, but who don't want to plunge into a full-blown epic. It's also a book that I think younger readers might enjoy...very little of the usual sex and extremely graphic violence.

Average customer rating:

Worthy Prequel to Lonesome Dove
The weakest book in the series.
Dead Man's Walk - a review
Schlock of the Highest Order
4.5

Dead Man's Walk : A Novel
Larry McMurtry
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Comanche Moon : A Novel
Streets Of Laredo : A Novel
Lonesome Dove: A Novel (Simon & Schuster Classics)
Boone's Lick : A Novel
The Wandering Hill: A Novel (Beryybender Narratives)

ASIN: 0684857545

Amazon.com

In this prequel to McMurtry's 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove, Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call are invincible young bucks, Texas Rangers, full of youthful energy and, quite frankly, full of themselves. That is until they're utterly consumed by the vicious battlefield of the early-19th-century Wild West. Their journey takes them across barren deserts and raging rivers and through steep and snowy mountains, often on foot and with barely enough provisions and clothing to keep them from certain death. The constant threat of attack by Comanches keeps them awake nights, fearing for their lives--and for good reason. "Buffalo Hump reached down and grabbed the terrified boy by his long black hair. He yanked his horse to a stop, lifted Zeke Moody off his feet, and slashed at his head with a knife, just above the boy's ears. Then he whirled and raced across the front of the huddled Rangers, dragging Zeke by the hair. As the horse increased its speed, the scalp tore loose and Zeke fell free. Buffalo Hump had whirled again, and held aloft the bloody scalp."

This bedraggled group of adventurers--on their foolhardy expedition to seize Santa Fe from the Mexicans (who also prove to be formidable enemies)--includes a salty assortment of cowboys, scouts, fortune seekers, and a fat and sassy whore nicknamed "The Great Western." McMurtry's adept storytelling paints a portrait of the Wild West that at times is palpable. One can almost smell the campfires, the body odors, and the long-awaited piece of meat after weeks without a proper meal. Dead Man's Walk will satisfy your craving for adventure, without having to put your life on the line.

Book Description

Dead Man's Walk is the first, extraordinary book in the epic Lonesome Dove tetralogy, in which Larry McMurtry breathed new life into the vanished American West and created two of the most memorable heroes in contemporary fiction: Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call.

As young Texas Rangers, Gus and Call have much to learn about survival in a land fraught with perils: not only the blazing heat and raging tornadoes, roiling rivers and merciless Indians but also the deadly whims of soldiers. On their first expeditions--led by incompetent officers and accompanied by the robust, dauntless whore known as the Great Western--they will face death at the hands of the cunning Comanche war chief Buffalo Hump and the silent Apache Gomez. They will be astonished by the Mexican army. And Gus will meet the love of his life.

Customer Reviews:

Worthy Prequel to Lonesome Dove .......2007-06-08

Larry McMurtry's DEAD MAN'S WALK is a worthy prequel to Lonesome Dove (the Pulitizer Prize winning masterpiece). However, it lacks the originality of Lonesome Dove. The characters are very real and McMurtry writes in a convincing and readable manner.

The book is excellent until page 459 which is the introduction of Lady Carey and her entourage. The next twenty nine pages are worthless. They add little to the story and worst of all they made the novel unconvincing. The troop saunters through the llano like a circus: there is a black lady with warrior nature, a leper woman who is a contrived Godavia, and a young boy who is undimensional.

The beginning story was a tale of gruelling hardship to survive. It is high quality writing combined with a page turning story. But McMurtry fails the reader with his hideous conclusion. The ending seemed more circus fantasy than gritty western.

Despite the poor conclusion Dead Man's Walk is worth the read. The tale of Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call is as good as Lonesome Dove. It is delightful to read of their trials and coming into manhood. The descriptions of the landscapes are stunning. Also, the villian, Buffalo Hump, is a force throughout the novel and a halmark of this book.

Overall ****/***** for a good tale but poor ending; and well concieved characters.

Recomendations:
Deadwood - The Complete First Season
Deadwood - The Complete Second Season
Deadwood - The Complete Third Season
The Searchers (Two-Disc Anniversary Edition)
Seraphim Falls

The weakest book in the series........2007-04-27

I found much of this book to be contrived and forced. Its more of a formula book than the others. The characters didn't ring true with what they became.

Dead Man's Walk - a review.......2007-02-08

Woodrow Call and Agustus McCrae are very young men, just embarking on their adventures as Texas Rangers when this book takes place. I have to admit it was rather a disappointment. "Lonesome Dove" is a masterpiece and, in a way, I think McMurty should have left it at that. He uses the central characters from "Lonesome Dove" in "Dead Man's Walk", and, especially in regard to Woodrow Call, it just doen't ring true. I just can't see Captain Call of LD as the same Woodrow Call in DMW, particularly when it comes to his relationship with Maggie. Captain Call was a solitary individual,emotionally remote. I don't see this struggle in DMW, or any reason for him to turn inward later in life and to deny his son. The ending of the book seems rather abrubt and far-fetched. If you can separate the idea that these are the same characters from LD, you may enjoy the book on that level. As westerns go, it is an okay read.

Schlock of the Highest Order.......2006-11-16

"Dead Man's Walk" was my introduction to Pulitzer-Prize winning hack, Larry McMurtry's fiction. A book written in the "what happens next" style of schlocky fiction, much like the Hardy Boys series, like the latter, it is nonetheless hard to put down. Taken for what it's worth, it's a real page-turner that reads easily, makes little, if any, demands on the reader, and provides the same kind of cheap thrills as a Grade B horror movie, or a well-put-together haunted house in an amusement park. There is much more substantial western fiction out there, written by writers with a surer hand, but this book packs its considerable weight in cheap thrills, and offers, as is often said about other western hacks, Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, a ripping good (if often lamely predictable) yarn.

4.5.......2006-11-11

McMurtry's books should be on your list of "Western books to read". This one is no different.

Authors:

Authors

Authors