An original, unique approach to storytelling, recounting in nonlinear, vignette fashion 100 years in the history of an isolated mountain meadow and the people who lived—or attempted to live—there over the years. The author is a poet, so his use of language is inspired and inspiring, revealing human nature and natural history with beauty and insight. I cannot tell you how many times I have read this book since its publication in 1993, but I pull it off the shelf and reread it every year or so.
In discrete disclosures joined with the intricacy of a spider's web, James Galvin depicts the hundred-year history of a meadow in the arid mountains of the Colorado/Wyoming border. Galvin describes the seasons, the weather, the wildlife, and the few people who do not possess but are themselves possessed by this terrain. In so doing he reveals an experience that is part of our heritage and mythology. For Lyle, Ray, Clara, and App, the struggle to survive on an independent family ranch is a series of blameless failures and unacclaimed successes that illuminate the Western…
Winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, McMurtry’s trail drive tale remains one of the most powerful stories about the Old West or any other time or place. Woodrow Call and Augustus McRae and their cowboy crew experience friendship, love, hardship, life, and death as they drive a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana. A book worth reading and rereading, as I have done.
Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning novel is a powerful, triumphant portrayal of the American West as it really was. From Texas to Montana, it follows cowboys on a grueling cattle drive through the wilderness.
It begins in the office of The Hat Creek Cattle Company of the Rio Grande. It ends as a journey into the heart of every adventurer who ever lived . . .
More than a love story, more than an adventure, Lonesome Dove is an epic: a monumental novel which embraces the spirit of the last defiant wilderness of America.
Another old cowboy story, a short novel published in 1926, is still in print in a 1973 edition from the University of Oklahoma Press. Rhodes, the author, was a roughhewn cowboy so his depictions and details are authentic. McEwen, star of the show, is on the run from the law and navigates the waste places of the New Mexico deserts and mountains. He is captured when he stops to lend aid to a family in need, but the story does not end in the way you might expect of a Western.
Taking his title, Paso Por Aqui, from Juan de Onate's carving in the living rock of El Morro, New Mexico, Eugene Manlove Rhodes created his own memorial to the decent people of his world who had ""passed this way"" without fanfare.
Rhodes wrote about them with wit, gusto, and tenderness, with honesty, clarity, and a sureness of interpretation as yet unequaled. He captured for all time the free, lonely, self-reliant, skilled, eternally optimistic essence of his West.
Rhodes himself rode a brindle steer, fleeing from an irate sheriff, as his story hero McEwen does, and Rhodes made seven miles on…
Justice Payne built a town on an island in a river. He owns all the land and buildings, as well as many of the businesses that occupy the buildings, and collects rent and taxes from the others. As a self-appointed judge, mayor, tax assessor, and holder of every other office of note, Justice controls all aspects of life in his town.
Most accept the situation, if grudgingly. All that is, except for Mercy O’Malley, owner and madam of a profitable brothel on the island. Justice and Mercy are often at odds. He suspects her of short-changing him financially, and she resents his autocratic, highhanded manner. Mercy foments a strike and a revolt, demanding elections and representative government.
Will Justice prevail? Will Mercy?
Joining the fray is a cast of characters that includes a tough but diminutive barroom bouncer of the fairer sex, a dimwitted but well-meaning marshal, a riverboat gambler, an itinerant phrenologist, a medicine show, and a three-legged dog.
Follow the rollicking conflict through the pages of Justice and Mercy.
