Here are 56 books that Journey of the Dead fans have personally recommended if you like
Journey of the Dead.
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My own experiences have made me a strong believer in the potential of journeys, big and small, to change our lives and the way we navigate the world. I made a journey in highly unusual circumstances, a journey that became a pilgrimage, and I think I know now that devotion is the key to transformation on the road. It may be the key to everything, in fact. That’s what I want to read about. Devotion is what every one of these books has in abundance, as well as care for the task, total honesty, and no fear of feeling.
A major part of why I read is to feel. Few books have moved me as strongly as this one. I deeply loved John Grady, and reading this book as he fought for love, his life, and the lives of his friends was a terribly painful experience.
Of course, it was worth it for the redemption, the passion and fidelity, the horses, the rivers, and the open plains. The emotions of McCarthy’s characters blaze through their sparse and natural dialogue.
When I emerged, heart wrung out and now strangely energised and peaceful, I felt differently about the world and for a while found it easier to belong to. My sense that beauty could emerge from adversity had been bolstered.
John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
The first volume in McCarthy's legendary Border Trilogy, All The Pretty Horses is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about the passing of childhood, of innocence and a vanished American…
Looking back, I was surprised at the things I'd done and the distance I'd traveled from my lower-middle-class upbringing in an industrial town. Destined for a life on the hot beds at the steel mill, I worked my way through college, found a job as a cub copywriter, learned documentary filmmaking, won an EMMY Award, moved to Hollywood, and started my 'sho biz' career.
Yes, the movie is a classic, but when I feel I could use a refresher course in how a story can be fresh and original when seen through the eyes of a child, Shaefer’s original story of honor and bravery in menacing times is first on my mind.
After the Civil War, settlers moving west often found their lives endangered by the conflicting interests of the farmers and the cattlemen. Shane is a great depiction of a dangerous but honorable man caught between such interests.
'If you read only one western in your life, this is the one' Roland Smith, author of Peak
He rode into our valley in the summer of 1889, a slim man, dressed in black. 'Call me Shane,' he said. He never told us more. There was a deadly calm in the valley that summer, a slow, climbing tension that seemed to focus on Shane.
Seen through the eyes of a young boy, Bob Starrett, SHANE is the classic story of a lone stranger. At first sight, the boy realises there is something unusual about the approaching man, but as Bob…
Because I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, my supply of heroes was liberally doled out by the 130+ Western series that dominated nighttime television in those decades. My parents allowed me one program per week. It was a Western. I was soon interested in history, to know what really did happen in the American West, and so I came to understand the great discrepancies between fact and TV. The truth, for me, is so much more interesting than the myth. As a Western historian, I've done my share of historical research, but I still gravitate toward fiction as a writer. I love the freedom to engage my characters’ thoughts and emotions.
By reading this book, people of the early 20th
century were introduced to a prototype protagonist who would be
duplicated (with variations) for generations to come. Authors who
followed this lead were Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, Jack Schaefer, Charles
Portis, Elmer Kelton, and I.
As a boy I found my heroes in the format
of the lone common man who faced up to adversities that cut against his
moral code. These protagonists played a large part in shaping my
values. Even though the characters were fictitious, the lessons were
real. The inspiration hit home.
Wister’s influence on later writers
remains intact for good reason. His work was the historical beginning of
the “Western,” which, to many folks, serves as the quintessential
American story.
Still as exciting and meaningful as when it was written in 1902, Owen Wister's epic tale of one man's journey into the untamed territory of Wyoming, where he is caught between his love for a woman and his quest for justice, has exemplified one of the most significant and enduring themes in all of American culture.
With remarkable character depth and vivid descriptive passages, The Virginian stands not only as the first great novel of American Western literature, but as a testament to the eternal struggle between good and evil in humanity and a revealing study of the forces that…
Because I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, my supply of heroes was liberally doled out by the 130+ Western series that dominated nighttime television in those decades. My parents allowed me one program per week. It was a Western. I was soon interested in history, to know what really did happen in the American West, and so I came to understand the great discrepancies between fact and TV. The truth, for me, is so much more interesting than the myth. As a Western historian, I've done my share of historical research, but I still gravitate toward fiction as a writer. I love the freedom to engage my characters’ thoughts and emotions.
When a poet picks up a pen to write a novel, the end result can be most rewarding.
Here the protagonist is a Ute rodeo star who has lost his way in a world to which he does not truly belong. As the underdog (an Indian in a white world), he seeks his personal redemption by finding the strengths that were long ago buried in his own psyche.
This story of one man’s salvation stays with the reader for a lifetime.
A young Native American raised in the forest is suddenly thrust into the modern world, in this novel by the author of The Dog Who Came to Stay. Thomas Black Bull’s parents forsook the life of a modern reservation and took to ancient paths in the woods, teaching their young son the stories and customs of his ancestors. But Tom’s life changes forever when he loses his father in a tragic accident and his mother dies shortly afterward. When Tom is discovered alone in the forest with only a bear cub as a companion, life becomes difficult. Soon, well-meaning teachers…
Because I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, my supply of heroes was liberally doled out by the 130+ Western series that dominated nighttime televisions. My parents allowed me one program per week. It was a Western. I was soon interested in history, to know what really happened in the American West, and so I came to understand the great discrepancies between fact and TV. The truth, for me, is much more interesting than the myth. But that truth carries some heavy weight, which informs us of our national foibles, crimes, and embarrassments. As a Western historian, I've done my share of historical research, but I still gravitate toward historical fiction as a writer.
Most people with even a casual familiarity with Billy the Kid know at least three things about the young outlaw:
1) Billy was captured and found guilty of murder.
2) Before he could be hanged, he affected a spectacular escape.
3) He was hunted down and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett. Because of the high drama of that last point (a shooting in a dark room at midnight near the bedroom of Billy’s paramour) and because of the machinations of the sheriff’s ghostwriter and publicist, Garrett has received all the glory for the Kid being brought to justice.
But there was another lawman who deserves just as much credit—Frank Stewart, lead detective for a Texas cattleman’s association. Stewart played an equal role in Billy’s capture, but his name was suppressed by those who did not want to divvy up fame. This new information is the subject of this book.
New, hardcover copy of the latest book on the life of Billy the Kid, concentrating on the fall and winter 1880 chase-and-capture of Billy and the boys at Stinking Spring. 424 pp., pages 8 1/2 x 11, over 120 illustrations and documents, many never before published. Much new material. Also available: SIGNED copies; and limited edition in slipcase.
After publishing five books of poems, I found myself writing a long work I had no way of classifying. It involved the extensive use of facts but was also fiction. It read in part like a novel but was also lyrical. I decided to just write it and not worry about what genre it belonged to. It became A Monster’s Notes. I suspect in our internet age, the emergence of unclassifiable work is going to become more and more common. You can already see it happening. The web isn’t divided into sections the way a bookstore is; instead, it’s more like a spider’s web—you can follow this thread or that, but somehow they’re all connected.
This short, engaging book mixes fact and fiction, prose and poetry, documents and photographs, to tell the story of Billy the Kid, from the time Pat Garrett sets out to hunt him down to his killing. At times it is beautifully hallucinatory as it gets inside Billy’s mind, showing his dreams and visions. But it is also very lucid and attentive to detail, vividly depicting how Billy is always protecting and exercising his left hand—the hand he shoots with—as well as showing Billy’s interactions with his fellow outlaws. This is Ondaatje’s earliest and most experimental novel.
Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje's visionary novel traces the legendary outlaw's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.
Because I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, my supply of heroes was liberally doled out by the 130+ Western series that dominated nighttime televisions. My parents allowed me one program per week. It was a Western. I was soon interested in history, to know what really happened in the American West, and so I came to understand the great discrepancies between fact and TV. The truth, for me, is much more interesting than the myth. But that truth carries some heavy weight, which informs us of our national foibles, crimes, and embarrassments. As a Western historian, I've done my share of historical research, but I still gravitate toward historical fiction as a writer.
Utley, a respected historian of (mostly) Indian-related research, offers the cold, hard facts of Billy’s life and remains true to objectivity, leaving the reader with the job of analyzing the right and the wrong of decisions, reactions, and events.
What tantalizes me about his book is that a researcher of such stature would choose to write about a teenaged outlaw and killer, when so many other topics of greater significance await their turn in his pen.
Whatever his name or alias at the moment-Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, Kid Antrim, Billy Bonney-people always called him the Kid. Not until his final month did anyone call him Billy the Kid. Newspapers pictured him as a king of outlaws; and his highly publicized capture, trial, escape, and end fixed his image in the public mind for all time. He was only twenty-one years old when a bullet from Sheriff Pat Garett's six-shooter killed him on July 14, 1881. Within a year Billy the Kid became the subject of five dime-novel "biographies" as well as Garett's ghost-written account, and that…
Because I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, my supply of heroes was liberally doled out by the 130+ Western series that dominated nighttime televisions. My parents allowed me one program per week. It was a Western. I was soon interested in history, to know what really happened in the American West, and so I came to understand the great discrepancies between fact and TV. The truth, for me, is much more interesting than the myth. But that truth carries some heavy weight, which informs us of our national foibles, crimes, and embarrassments. As a Western historian, I've done my share of historical research, but I still gravitate toward historical fiction as a writer.
As it is often said, “history is written by the winners.”
The Hispanic population had very little voice in the outcome of the Lincoln County War, but it is they who had the deepest insight into who Billy was, for they were his friends and he their champion. Mills has mined that forgotten voice to publish a more thorough understanding of who the Kid was.
The result is a greater appreciation for Billy as a human being. This is a long overdue perspective that better defines Billy Bonney’s admirable traits.
In the annals of American western history, few people have left behind such lasting and far-reaching fame as Billy the Kid. Some have suggested that his legend began with his death at the end of Pat Garrett's revolver on the night of July 14, 1881, in Fort Sumner. Others believe that the legend began with his unforgettable jailbreak in Lincoln, New Mexico, several months prior on April 28, 1881. Others still insist his legend began with the publication in 1926 of Walter Noble Burns's book, The Saga of Billy the Kid.
Because I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, my supply of heroes was liberally doled out by the 130+ Western series that dominated nighttime televisions. My parents allowed me one program per week. It was a Western. I was soon interested in history, to know what really happened in the American West, and so I came to understand the great discrepancies between fact and TV. The truth, for me, is much more interesting than the myth. But that truth carries some heavy weight, which informs us of our national foibles, crimes, and embarrassments. As a Western historian, I've done my share of historical research, but I still gravitate toward historical fiction as a writer.
Nolan, an Englishman who researched from his home country, has long been considered the world authority on Billy the Kid.
It can still be said that all research on Billy begins with Nolan, who died in 2022. His book undertakes the massive quest to explain the Lincoln County War in detail and to reveal the endless cast of characters interwoven throughout the struggle.
Nolan’s supple mind has delivered unto us provocative motives for Billy’s actions and thereby expanded our understanding of the Kid’s mind. Without Nolan, historians would be left with mere nuggets of information and not necessarily hold the larger story in perspective.
In The West of Billy the Kid, renowned authority Frederick Nolan has assembled a comprehensive photo gallery of the life and times of Billy the Kid. In text and in more than 250 images-many of them published here for the first time-Nolan recreates the life Billy lived and the places and people he knew. This unique assemblage is complemented by maps and a full biography that incorporates Nolan's original research, adding fresh depth and detail to the Kid's story and to the lives and backgrounds of those who witnessed the events of his life and death.Here are the faces of…
Because I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, my supply of heroes was liberally doled out by the 130+ Western series that dominated nighttime televisions. My parents allowed me one program per week. It was a Western. I was soon interested in history, to know what really happened in the American West, and so I came to understand the great discrepancies between fact and TV. The truth, for me, is much more interesting than the myth. But that truth carries some heavy weight, which informs us of our national foibles, crimes, and embarrassments. As a Western historian, I've done my share of historical research, but I still gravitate toward historical fiction as a writer.
This book does a fine job of laying out the complex plots and cross-plots of a most complicated New Mexico Territory of the 1870s.
The full spectrum of politics, murders, and factions can be overwhelming to a first-time student. There are clearly too many players in the story for a reader to grasp the overarching drama. Mr. Wallis found a way to guide the reader across this challenging terrain without shortcuts.
Award-winning historian Michael Wallis has spent several years re-creating the rich, anecdotal saga of Billy the Kid (1859-1881), a deeply mythologized young man who became a legend in his own time and yet remains an enigma to this day. With the Gilded Age in full swing and the Industrial Revolution reshaping the American landscape, "the Kid," who was gunned down by Sheriff Pat Garrett in the New Mexico Territory at the age of twenty-one, became a new breed of celebrity outlaw. He arose amid the mystery and myth of the swiftly vanishing frontier and, sensationalized beyond recognition by the tabloids…
