Price: $24.99 - $17.96
(as of Oct 04, 2024 07:54:02 UTC – Details)
The Pulitzer Prize–winning American classic of the American West that follows two aging Texas Rangers embarking on one last adventure. An epic of the frontier, Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.
Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.
From the Publisher
Publisher : Simon & Schuster; Anniversary,Updated edition (June 15, 2010)
Language : English
Paperback : 864 pages
ISBN-10 : 1439195269
ISBN-13 : 978-1439195260
Item Weight : 1.55 pounds
Dimensions : 5.25 x 1.9 x 8 inches
5
Reviewer: Mike Powers
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Lonesome Dove: a genuine literary masterpiece.
Review: “Lonesome Dove” is Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of life in the Old West of the late nineteenth century. Itâs a tale of two aging ex-Texas Rangers who live in a small town called Lonesome Dove, located in south Texas, near the border with Mexico. Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call jointly run a hardscrabble business called the “Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium.” (Actually, it’s Call who does most of the running of the business and Gus who does most of the running of his mouth.) Despite their disparate personalities, Gus and Call have remained close friends for years.A small crew of long-time friends (also former Texas Rangers) lives and works with Call and Gus. Pea Eye Parker, Josh Deets, Dish Boggett, and young Newt Dobbs are loyal, hard-working men with simple desires. For them, life revolves around Lonesome Dove, the Dry Bean Saloon, and Lorena Wood, the town’s only “sporting woman.” It seems like these men are all destined to live, work out their lives, and then die, in the same spot…One day an old friend pays an unexpected visit to Gus and Call. After an absence of several years, Jake Spoon, a smooth-talking former Texas Ranger (and former partner of Gus and Call) arrives, bringing with him a “get-rich-quick” scheme: drive a herd of cattle north to Montana, then set up a cattle ranch there. Surprisingly, it is the stolid Woodrow Call, and not the impetuous Gus McCrae who’s all in favor of picking up stakes and setting out for Montanaâ¦â¦Meanwhile, up in Fort Smith, Arkansas, July Johnson, the townâs young sheriff, sets out for Texas in order to track down and capture Jake Spoon, fugitive from justice. Spoon, an itinerant gambler, had once passed through Fort Smith, where he had accidentally killed an innocent bystander in a gunfight. Accompanying July is his stepson, Joe. Not long after July and Joe leave, July’s wife, Elmira, also departs on a separate quest to find Dee Boot, her long, lost lover. What does July do when he learns that Elmira has disappeared? And what happens when he crosses paths with Gus and Call and Jake Spoon and the rest of the Hat Creek outfit?There are simply not enough superlatives to do complete justice to “Lonesome Dove.” Larry McMurtry – a natural storyteller if ever there is one – crams every page with beautifully descriptive passages, intensely emotional situations, and fast-paced action. His characters are wonderfully drawn… the heroes are easy to like, and the villains easy to despise. Yet, the heroes are never too heroic, and the villains, although despicable, still manage to show an occasionally faint glimmer of humanity.I was completely captivated by Larry McMurtry’s mellifluous prose, which is rich, deeply textured, and abounding with great detail. McMurtry does a nice job of keeping things realistic and believable. Never once does he allow his multi-faceted story to descend into overwrought romanticism, hyperbole, or floridity. His descriptions of people, places, and situations is so realistic, so clear and vivid that, as I read along, it seemed I could almost hear his characters’ voices and see the actions and places he describes.”Lonesome Dove” is is simply an excellent read – alternately comic and tragic; romantic and hard-boiled; poignant and violent; this novel is always fast paced, witty, and highly entertaining. In short, itâs a genuine literary masterpiece, and certainly one of the finest novels I’ve ever read. Highly recommended.
Reviewer: Nick Wisseman (author)
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Easy to Read, Impossible to Forget
Review: Larry McMurtryâs Lonesome Dove starts with pigs and ends with sorrow. In between lies one of the best books Iâve ever read.The novel is set in the American West after the Civil War. The protagonists, Woodrow Call and Augustus âGusâ McCrae, are former Texas Rangers who retired a decade ago and spent the intervening years in the little Texas town of Lonesome Dove. Nominally, they run the Hat Creek Cattle Company with a few of their old comrades (and two blue pigs, who kick off the book by eating a snake). But mostly theyâre just whiling away the hours.This part of the story is easy, pleasurable reading. McMurtry writes in third-person omniscient, meandering from one character to the next and bringing them to life quickly and completely. Call is a workaholic prone to brooding. (âGive Call a grievance,â we hear early on, âhowever silly, and he would save it like money.â) Gus is voluble and lazy. Pea Eye is simple but solid. Deets is as reliable as he is quirky (he makes his pants out of quilts). Newt is young and desperate to please.Even minor characters get distinctive traits. Lippy âwas so named because his lower lip was about the size of the flap on a saddlebag. He could tuck enough snuff under it to last a normal person at least a month; in general the lip lived a life of its own, there toward the bottom of his face. Even when he was just sitting quietly, studying his cards, the lip waved and wiggled as if it had a breeze blowing across it.â And Joe âhad a habit of staring straight ahead. Though Call assumed he had a neck joint like other men, he had never seen him use it.âFor a while, it seems like the Hat Creek crew might putter around Lonesome Dove forever. Then Jake, another ex-rangerâon the run from the law, as it happensârides into town and mentions that heâs been to Montana and seen vast tracts of good, unsettled land there. This lights a fire under Call. He spurs the boys into motion, leading them on cattle raids across the Mexican border and hiring extra hands to help drive the animals north. So begins a great, three-thousand-mile trek from some of the lowest latitudes of the country to the highest.Things get hairy almost immediately. Death comes fast on the drive, and the dangers are too varied to guard against: snake-plagued river crossings, lightning storms on the open plains, searing droughts, and worse. Likable characters are abused and killed. Some of your favorites wonât make it. Prepare to be heartbroken.Yet thereâs no grand goal here. Call and Gus arenât trying to open up the American Westâthey already served their time protecting settlers along the shifting frontier. Montana is a vague destination, not a mission; Call essentially leaves Lonesome Dove on a whim. Gus goes along for lack of anything better to do, but not eagerly. âHere youâve brought these cattle all this way,â he complains to his partner around the halfway mark, âwith all this inconvenience to me and everybody else, and you donât have no reason in this world to be doing it.âMcMurtry has plenty of reasons for the drive, though. In his preface to the 25th-anniversary edition of Lonesome Dove, he argues that âthe central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity,â namely Newtâs. His mother is long dead, and his father might be one of the Rangers.But that wasnât the thread that stood out most to me. The book is filled with restless souls regretting all sorts of errors. Gus wishes heâd married his sweetheart when he had the chance. âI expect it was the major mistake of my life, letting her slip by,â he tells Call. For his part, the quieter man laments getting involved with women at all. Jake canât believe heâs committed hanging crimes. July Johnson, the Kansas sheriff pursuing Jake, hates himself for leaving three of his charges to face a murderer. And so on.Aging is the through-line hereâaging and change. Gus and Call are past their primes. They were legendary Rangers once, but now theyâre fading into irrelevancy. The younger generation doesnât hold them in the same esteem. âI guess they forgot us, like they forgot the Alamo,â August observes after the owner of a bar tries to kick him out for demanding respectful treatment. âWhy wouldnât they?â Call answers. âWe ainât been around.âThe West is moving on too. The buffalo are nearly done, pushed to the brink of extinction by wasteful hunting. Gus rides past several slaughter sites where it looks like âa whole herd had been wiped out, for a road of bones stretched far across the plain.â The Native Americans arenât in much better shapeâdespite their fearsome reputation, their numbers have dwindled in tandem with the buffalosâ. âWith those millions of animals gone,â Gus reflects, âand the Indians mostly gone in their wake, the great plains were truly empty, unpeopled and ungrazed. Soon the whites would come, of course, but what he was seeing was a moment between, not the plains as they had been, or as they would be, but a moment of true emptiness, with thousands of miles of grass resting unused, occupied only by remnantsâof the buffalo, the Indians, the hunters.âThis is all tragic, but itâs beautifully done.A couple things bothered me, however. That 25th-anniversary preface contains what feel like major spoilers. They arenât, but Iâd still skip this section until youâre done with the story proper. (Unless you want to start the book as grumpy as I did.)More significantly, while Deets shines as the only African American in the Hat Creek outfit (âHeâs the best man we got,â Call says late in the drive; âBest man weâve ever had,â Augustus agrees), the one Native American that gets extended time on the page is a vicious monster. We meet some friendlier indigenous people in passing, but I kept waiting for a real counterweight: a kind Comanche, or a decent Sioux. It never happens. (To be fair, McMurtry does have Gus take a few stabs at articulating why the Native Americans arenât always hospitable. âWe won more than our share with the natives,â he remarks near the end of the novel. They didnât invite us here, you know. We got no call to be vengeful.â And earlier, he puzzles Call by saying, âI think we spent our best years fighting on the wrong side.â I donât think this is enough, but itâs something.)Other than that ⦠itâs hard to complain. Lonesome Dove doesnât close with a climactic shootout like you might find in other westerns. But it doesnât need to. The journeyâGus and Callâs last shot at big, unnecessary adventureâis the point.And itâs a masterpiece.
Reviewer: Joanne F
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Brilliant book by an accomplished author. Never expected a Western to have such depth of story. Definitely recommended!
Reviewer: Pietro
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Um livro inesquecÃvel. Como toda obra de ficção nota 10, é sobre personagens realistas, cheios de falhas, muitas vezes contraditórios, com conflitos mais internos do que externos. Um livro pé-no-chão que mostra um Velho Oeste mais realista e pacato, sem o constante bangue-bangue, porém ainda com momentos de tensão crÃveis e marcantes. Recomendado para todos que gostam de arcos de personagem profundos.
Reviewer: Dr. Big Bear
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: The wild west, the fierce west; the disturbing west, the unsettling west; the inspiring west, the touching west. This is surely one of the best fictional works I have read in the past 15 years.
Reviewer: arpit singh
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: An awesome classic western, which doesnt glorify old times, life was hard for men women. We follow call and gus and their adventures in tragic journey. Beautiful writing by Larry.
Reviewer: Kindle Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Muy descriptivo en el ambiente de época, de paisajes y personajes. Una bonita hustoria