Posted in Uncategorized on January 31, 2011|
“It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.”
– Robert B. Parker
“It’s tempting to say the Ph.D. didn’t have an effect, but it’s not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way.”
– Robert B. Parker
Posted in A Random Thought on January 30, 2011|
Earlier this week I posted the American Western Writers’ of America selection of the Best Western Novels of the 21st century. My 
goal for this year is to read all 18 of these selections. A few of them I have already read, however, I plan
to re-read those, as well as the ones I have not read. It has been my good fortune to have personally met and talked with a couple of these authors: James A. Michener, and Norman Zollinger. My expereinces with these two authors will be highlighted in a future post.
Posted in A Random Thought on January 29, 2011|
The poem, Charge of the Ligth Brigade, reveals the story of a British brigade consisting of 600 soldiers who rode on horseback into the “valley of death” for half a league (about one and a half miles). They were obeying a command to charge the enemy Russian forces that had been seizing their guns.
As the poem reveals, not a single soldier was discouraged or distressed by the command to charge forward, even though all the soldiers realized that their commander had made a terrible mistake: “Someone had blundered.” The role of the soldier is to obey and “not to make reply…not to reason why,” so they followed orders and rode into the “valley of death.”
The 600 soldiers were assaulted by the shots of shells of canons in front and on both sides of them. Still, they rode courageously forward toward their own deaths: “Into the jaws of Death / Into the mouth of hell / Rode the six hundred.”
The soldiers struck the enemy gunners with their unsheathed swords (“sabres bare”) and charged at the enemy army while the rest of the world looked on in wonder. They rode into the artillery smoke and broke through the enemy line, destroying their Cossack and Russian opponents. Then they rode back from the offensive, but they had lost many men so they were “not the six hundred” any more.
Canons behind and on both sides of the soldiers now assaulted them with shots and shells. As the brigade rode “back from the mouth of hell,” soldiers and horses collapsed; few remained to make the journey back.
The world marvelled at the courage of the soldiers; indeed, their glory is undying: the poem states these noble 600 men remain worthy of honor and tribute today.
Posted in Uncategorized on January 28, 2011|
Half a league half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred:
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns’ he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d ?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d & thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
Flash’d all their sabres bare,
Flash’d as they turn’d in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army while
All the world wonder’d:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro’ the line they broke;
Cossack & Russian
Reel’d from the sabre-stroke,
Shatter’d & sunder’d.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
While horse & hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder’d.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred
Posted in A Random Thought on January 27, 2011|
Homicide in Hardcover by Kate Carlisle centers on Brooklyn Wainwright a famed book restorer who works like a skilled surgeon. Her patients might smell like mold and have spines made of leather, but no ailing book is going to die on her watch. The same can’t be said of Abraham Karastovsky, Brooklyn’s friend and former employer.
On the eve of a celebration for his latest book restoration, Brooklyn finds her mentor lying in a pool of his own blood. With his final breath Abraham leaves Brooklyn with a cryptic message, “Remember the Devil,” and gives her a priceless—and supposedly cursed—copy of Goethe’s Faust for safe-keeping.
Brooklyn suddenly finds herself accused of murder and theft, thanks to Derek Stone, the humorless—and annoyingly attractive—British security agent who found her kneeling over the body. With the death of her friend the mystery begins. Brooklyn has to read the clues left behind by her mentor if she is going to restore justice and save her own life…which she ultimately does. This was a good read, and I am looking forward to reading the second in the series, If Books Could Kill.
Posted in Uncategorized on January 27, 2011|
“From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.’ – Groucho Marx
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” – Groucho Marx
“I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.” – Groucho Marx
Posted in Uncategorized on January 26, 2011|
I just finished reading Desperadoes an anthology of Western short stories by numerous well-known authors. The book brings together 17 Wild West stories published between 1939 and 2001. Written by such luminaries as Loren Estleman, Louis L’Amour, Ed Gorman and Bill Pronzini. I enjoyed all 17 stories, it gave me several days of good reading…and I only paid .10¢ for this great read at a local library sale!
Posted in Uncategorized on January 26, 2011|
“A wise man fights to win, but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat.”
– Louis L’Amour
“To disbelieve is easy; to scoff is simple; to have faith is harder.”
– Louis L’Amour
Posted in Uncategorized on January 25, 2011|
The Western Writers of America (WWA) had issued the lists of the Best Westerns twice before; in 1985 and again in 1995, both times with similar results in several areas. However, around the year 2000 the WWA felt it was time to reprise the Best Western Survey. They brought together a panel of fifty-five individuals from twenty-two states and one Canadian province provided them with their votes for the best work and authors of the 20th century. On the lists were 83 authors, 112 novels, 122 nonfiction books, 86 films, 64 short stories, 41 television series, and 22 television mini-series. All of the lists can be viewed at: www.westernwriters.org/best_westerns.htm. Listed below are 18 of the Best Western Novels… not in any order of distinction:
John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick–a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins–encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal hacienda where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance.
Kidnapped form his safe California home. Thrown into a life-and-death struggle on the frozen Artic wilderness. Half St. Bernard, half shepard, Buck learns many hard lessons as a sled dog: the lesson of the leash, of the cold, of near-starvation and cruelty. And the greatest lesson he learns from his last owner, John Thornton: the power of love and loyalty.Yet always, even at the side of the human he loves, Buck feels the pull in his bones, an urge to answer his wolf ancestors as they howl to him.
A stunning panorama of the West, CENTENNIAL is an enthralling celebration of our country, brimming with the glory and the greatness of the American past that only bestselling author James Michener could bring to stunning life. From the Native Americans, the migrating white men and women, the cowboys, and the foreigners, it is a story of trappers, traders, homesteaders, gold seekers, ranchers, and hunters–all caught up in the dramatic events and violent conflicts that shaped the destiny of our legendary West.
Death Comes for the Archbishop traces the friendship and adventures of Bishop Jean Latour and vicar Father Joseph Vaillant as they organize the new Roman Catholic diocese of New Mexico. Latour is patrician, intellectual, introverted; Vaillant, practical, outgoing, sanguine. Friends since their childhood in France, the clerics triumph over corrupt Spanish priests, natural adversity, and the indifference of the Hopi and Navajo to establish their church and build a cathedral in the wilderness. The novel, essentially a study of character, explores Latour’s inner conflicts and his relationship with the land, which through the author’s powerful description becomes an imposing character in its own right.
He was a man etched by the desert’s howling winds, a big, broad-shouldered man who knew the ways of the Apache and ways of staying alive. She was a woman raising a young son on her own on a remote Arizona ranch. And between Hondo Lane and Angie Lowe was the warrior Vittoro, whose people were preparing to rise against the white men. Now the pioneer woman, the gunman, and the Apache warrior are caught in a drama of love, war, and honor.
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.
With humor and pathos author Schaefer chronicles the passing of the Old West. In loosely connected episodes he vividly portrays the life and times of working cowboy Walsh, side-kick Chet Rollins, and other memorable characters of the Slash Y. Here are shootings, cattle drives, winter storms, and spring floods; cattle rustling, romancin’ and horse breaking. Man and beast, pushed to the limits of their endurance, survive or perish.
In the remote border country of South Utah, a man is about to be whipped by the Mormons in order to pressure Jane Withersteen into marrying against her will. The punishment is halted by the arrival of the hero, Lassiter, a gunman in black leather, who routs the persecutors and then gradually recounts his own history of an endless search for a woman abducted long ago by the Mormons. Secrecy, seduction, captivity, and escape: out of these elements Zane Grey built his acclaimed story of the American West.
In this saga beginning in the days of Pancho Villa, Ignacio Ortiz, an orphan and a runaway searching for his past, lives through eras of intense change, including two world wars and the beginning of the modern West. As these turbulent events serve as backdrop to his life, Ignacio’s loyalties will be tested by the passions of his tempestuous employers–the MacAndrews clan.
Novel by Conrad Richter, published in 1936, presenting in epic scope the conflicts in the settling of the American Southwest. Set in New Mexico in the late 19th century, the novel concerns the often violent clashes between the pioneering ranchers, whose cattle range freely through the vast sea of grass, and the farmers, or “nesters,” who build fences and turn the sod. Against this background is set the triangle of rancher Colonel Jim Brewton, his unstable Eastern wife Lutie, and the ambitious Brice Chamberlain. Richter casts the story in Homeric terms, with the children caught up in the conflicts of their parents.
A stranger rode out of the heart of the great glowing West, into the small Wyoming valley in the summer of 1889. It was Shane, who appeared on the horizon and became a friend and guardian to the Starrett family at a time when homesteaders and cattle rangers battled for territory and survival. Jack Schaefer’s classic novel illuminates the spirit of the West through the eyes of a young boy and a hero who changes the lives of everyone around him The
A legend before he turns 20, Boone Caudill becomes a powerful White Savage, an untamed life force that only one woman, the beautiful daughter of a Blackfoot chief, would dare to love. It is this magnificent spirit that Guthrie celebrates with his vivid storytelling–the glory of the bigness, the wildness, the freedom and undying dream of the West.
Set in 1885, The Ox-Bow Incident is a searing and realistic portrait of frontier life and mob violence in the American West. First published in 1940, it focuses on the lynching of three innocent men and the tragedy that ensues when law and order are abandoned. The result is an emotionally powerful, vivid, and unforgettable re-creation of the Western novel, which Clark transmuted into a universal story about good and evil, individual and community, justice and human nature.
In The Rounders, Dusty meets a roan named Old Fooler, a horse whose hooves should be cloven, he’s so mean-spirited. When Dusty’s not trying to send Old Fooler back to the devil, he is nursing the wounds, both physical and emotional, inflicted by the evil horse. In The Great Wedding, Dusty arranges to marry off his buddy, Wrangler, to a rich woman in Santa Fe, so they can all live happily ever after. High society in the Hi Lo Country will never be the same after a brush with these two rowdy range riders. And in the final, Spur Award-winning Novella The Orange County Cowboys, modern times catch up with Wrangler and Dusty when their boss, Jim Ed Love, plans to sell his ranch, their only home, to a Japanese investor.
This is the all-time classic novel chosen by the Western Writers of America as one of the best western novels ever wrttten. It is also the inspiration for John Wayne’s last great starring role–the acclaimed 1976 film, The Shootist.
To the ranchers and farmers of 1950s Texas, man’s biggest enemy is one he can’t control. With their entire livelihood pegged on the chance of a wet year or a dry year, drought has the ability to crush their whole enterprise, to determine who stands and who falls, and to take food out of the mouths of the workers and their families. To Charlie Flagg, an honest, decent, and cantankerous rancher, the drought of the early 1950s is a foe that he must fight on his own grounds. Refusing the questionable “help” of federal aid programs, Charlie and his family struggle to make the ranch survive until the time it rains again-if it ever rains again.
In the untamed West, pioneers came to test their fortunes — and their wills. The Wyoming territory was a harsh, unforgiving land, with its own unwritten code of honor by which men lived and died. Into this rough landscape rides the Virginian, a solitary man whose unbending will is his only guide through life. The Virginian’s unwavering beliefs in right and wrong are soon tested as he tries to prove his love for a woman who cannot accept his sense of justice; at the same time, a betrayal by his most trusted friend forces him to fight against the corruption that rules the land.
Charles Portis has been acclaimed as one of America’s foremost comic writers. True Grit is his most famous novel–first published in 1968–and the basis for the movie of the same name starring John Wayne (for which he won his only Academy Award). It tells the story of Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old girl from Dardanelle, Arkansas, who sets out in the winter of eighteen seventy-something to avenge the murder of her father.
Posted in Uncategorized on January 24, 2011|
“A man’s character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation”
– Mark Twain
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