Started off really well but ran out of gas (and even editing?) before the end of the story. But it occurs to me that could well have been intentional. This is the last (I assume) in the Thalia series (Last Picture Show, Texasville and Duane's Depressed, unless I've missed some, which would be my ...
A glorious literary career has come to this. Though it isn't a comeback as Larry has never stopped writing, Sugar Ray Leonard had more late career success. Somewhere around Dwayne's Depressed or the last of the BerryBender Chronicles, McMurtry ceased to be the writer he once was. There are som...
Let me start by saying that Larry McMurtry could rewrite the phone book and I would probably read it. He is one of my favorite authors. I love his books, while most people are familiar with hi from "Lonesome Dove", it is his other genre of books that I love. He has such great characters, rich, ra...
Probably the weakest of the three memoirs. Part of the problem is that while it's about Hollywood, McMurtry's Hollywood is the Hollywood of script writers. He uses the same episodic style that he used in the first two books. Though, he does draws a few complete and lengthy portraits of a few e...
I unabashedly fell for the film version of this book, winner of the Best Picture Oscar in 1983, a beautifully acted character-driven comedy drama about the lives and complicated relationships of a mother and daughter, in Houston and the Midwest, respectively, with a final 15 minutes that reduce m...
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful: SO MANY MEN, SO LITTLE TIME, September 1, 2008 By Bookworm (St. George Utah) - See all my reviewsLarry McMurtrys Telegraph Days give us a glimpse of the old west from a woman's perspective. The woman in question is a 22 year old Virginia native,...
In my review of Lonesome Dove, the masterpiece of this saga, I recommended that the reader read Lonesome Dove first as a stand alone novel and then go back and read the others. Here, my recommendation is entirely different. Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon are, in my opinion, companion novels....
Jordan BlalockMinniearEnglish 910/11/10Boone’s Lick Boone’s Lick is a story that takes place during the Wild West era in a town called Boone’s Lick near the Missouri River. The story is told in first person by a young boy named Shay. The main characters are Shay, G.T., Grandpa Crac...
Larry McMurtry grew up among ranchers and cowboys, and his familiarity with this rural world makes his early novels set in and around Thalia, Texas, genuinely alive with rich detail and believable characters. He knows this world as it's seen and understood by the people who live there, both young...
Is there a term for a boring omniscient narrator who doesn't commit to any judgment and hardly knows anything except who did what and when? This is almost pure slow action and I found it mostly uninteresting. Maybe I'm spoiled, or maybe this is dated. It was published in '66, but takes place, ...
Treasure of the Rubbermaids 16: YUUUP!The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time une...
I've have decided to read the entire Lonesome Dove saga in chronological order which means I kick off with Dead Man's Walk which was actually the third book published following Lonesome Dove (chronologically the third book) and Streets of Laredo (a direct sequel to Lonesome Dove and chronological...
All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and w...
When Belgian novelist Georges Simenon (1903-1989) neared his 70th birthday, he unplugged his typewriter and abruptly stopped writing. But one thing is certain: nobody could ever accuse Simenon of being a slacker, for after all, he authored over 200 novels under his own name (including dozens of ...
I feel like I need to read McMurtry's other works before I can properly review this since it seems to be reflecting and commenting on some of his well-traveled themes, so this will be somewhat of a cursory analysis. Half way through the book, I started to feel like I was just in the backseat of M...
Pulitzer Prize-winner Larry McMurtry writes novels set in the American heartland, but his real territory is the heart itself. His gift for writing about women -- their love for reckless, hopeless men; their ability to see the good in losers; and their peculiar combination of emotional strength an...
In Oh What a Slaughter, Larry McMurtry has written a unique, brilliant, and searing history of the bloody massacres that marked -- and marred -- the settling of the American West in the nineteenth century, and which still provoke immense controversy today.Here are the true stories of the West's m...
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 "Th...
I just finished Texasville this week and have mixed feelings about it. This is Larry McMurtry's sequel to The Last Picture Show, and it takes place in the oil-glut 80s, with many of the characters from the 1950s story. Duane has become an oil millionaire but is going bankrupt, his wife Karla is a...
This is book three in Larry McMurtry's "Last Picture Show" or "Duane Moore" series (whichever is more correct) and continues the saga of Duane Moore, who we met as an high school senior in "The Last Picture Show" (one of my very favorite books and movies) who is now 62 years old and with a still ...
The given adjective used to describe the 1960s is “tumultuous;” but what was it like for ordinary people unsuspecting that they were the actors on a shifting cultural stage? Larry McMurtry illuminates this in “Moving On.” The book doesn’t have much of a story arc—it’s solely focused on the relati...
Thoughtful and brief biography of Crazy Horse, the legendary Sioux warrior who has become a contemporary icon of resistance. McMurtry is a careful, fair-minded guide into a somewhat murky history: primary sources are rare, contradictory, and unreliable, and some earlier historians apparently s...
If Larry McMurtry symbolically declared the death of the Old West with "All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers," he at least demonstrates that you can tell any tale as a Western with its sequel, "Some Can Whistle."Danny Deck, the drifter protagonist from "All My Friends..." is back - aging and ...
KIRKUS REVIEWPulitzer Prize winner McMurtry (Dead Man's Walk, 1995, etc.) and his collaborator on Pretty Boy Floyd (1994) attempt to bestow mythic stature on a maverick American Indian in this for-want-of-a-nail yarn set in 1870s Oklahoma. A half-breed member of the Cherokee Nation, Zeke Proctor ...
I like to think about this: while 2nd generation Puget Sound pioneers were felling the old growth Doug firs from which my house is built, and Irish immigrant carpenters were nailing together my roof beams, Calamity Jane was still alive and kicking around Deadwood. It's true that the American wild...
About halfway through The Late Child, there's a paragraph summarizing everything that's happened up to that point: "Harmony thought how strange life was. Her son, who was only five, had just talked to the President and now was talking to the First Lady. Her sister Neddie had just refused to eat a...
When the men left, Maria cried until she was empty. For days, she would fill up with tears, and then cry until she was empty. Whether Joey lived or not, Maria knew she had lost her son--the good son she had until Juan Castro sold him. That son was gone, farther away even than Crow Town. He was on...
He insisted that his cowhands keep their horses on a short rope at such times, as a precaution against stampedes. It was the right thing to do, but not all cowboys were wise enough to do it, some were unable to sleep with a horse practically right over them. Goodnight was renowned in Texas for hi...
Early June of that year may have been a last moment of confidence for the Plains Indians: they were many, they had meat, and they were in their place: let the soldiers come.This buildup of confidence was capped by what was probably the best-reported dream vision in native American history—namely,...
Teddy said, wondering if the old Cadillac was going to get so hot it boiled over.“Perhaps you should be, though,” Aurora said, polishing her rings. When in doubt, she polished her rings—lately they had been treated to a lot of polishing.The two of them were stuck in traffic on I-45, the freeway t...
Even the scout and Indian fighter Kit Carson, who had a strong stomach when it came to killing Indians, may have turned a little, conscience-wise, after taking part in the “perfect butchery” at the Sacramento River in 1846. This turning, if it occurred, didn’t prevent him from effecting the dread...
I went through three years of college and no changes of significance occurred at all. I read books and wrote my novel and got drunk frequently. That was about all that happened. Existence really held no wild surprises—or wild surmises, either. Sally was my first wild surmise. I woke up on Godwin’...