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Lonesome Dove: A Novel Kindle Edition
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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateMay 24, 2010
- File size2998 KB
- He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.Highlighted by 1,711 Kindle readers
- “Don’t be trying to give back pain for pain,” he said. “You can’t get even measures in business like this.Highlighted by 1,329 Kindle readers
- “It’s a fine world, though rich in hardships at times,” Augustus said.Highlighted by 1,020 Kindle readers
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Review
“Everything about Lonesome Dove feels true . . . These are real people, and they are still larger than life.”—Nicholas Lemann, The New York Times Book Review
“Lonesome Dove is Larry McMurtry’s loftiest novel."—Los Angeles Times
"A marvelous novel . . . moves with joyous energy . . . amply imagined and crisply, lovingly written. I haven't enjoyed a book more this year . . . a joyous epic."--Newsweek
"The finest novel that McMurtry has yet accomplished . . . Lonesome Dove has all the action anyone could possibly imagine . . . [and] both in general and in details, the authority of exact authenticity . . . superb."--Chicago Tribune
"The finest novel that McMurtry has yet accomplished . . . Lonesome Dove has all the action anyone could possibly imagine . . . [and] both in general and in details, the authority of exact authenticity . . . superb."--Chicago Tribune
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1.
WHENAUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rat-tlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over. The sow had it by the neck, and the shoat had the tail.
“You pigs git,” Augustus said, kicking the shoat. “Head on down to the creek if you want to eat that snake.” It was the porch he begrudged them, not the snake. Pigs on the porch just made things hotter, and things were already hot enough. He stepped down into the dusty yard and walked around to the springhouse to get his jug. The sun was still high, sulled in the sky like a mule, but Augustus had a keen eye for sun, and to his eye the long light from the west had taken on an encouraging slant.
Evening took a long time getting to Lonesome Dove, but when it came it was a comfort. For most of the hours of the day—and most of the months of the year—the sun had the town trapped deep in dust, far out in the chaparral flats, a heaven for snakes and horned toads, roadrunners and stinging lizards, but a hell for pigs and Tennesseans. There was not even a respectable shade tree within twenty or thirty miles; in fact, the actual location of the nearest decent shade was a matter of vigorous debate in the offices—if you wanted to call a roofless barn and a couple of patched-up corrals offices—of the Hat Creek Cattle Company, half of which Augustus owned.
His stubborn partner, Captain W. F. Call, maintained that there was excellent shade as close as Pickles Gap, only twelve miles away, but Augustus wouldn’t allow it. Pickles Gap was if anything a more worthless community than Lonesome Dove. It had only sprung up because a fool from north Georgia named Wesley Pickles had gotten himself and his family lost in the mesquites for about ten days. When he finally found a clearing, he wouldn’t leave it, and Pickles Gap came into being, mainly attracting travelers like its founder, which is to say people too weak-willed to be able to negotiate a few hundred miles of mesquite thicket without losing their nerve.
The springhouse was a little lumpy adobe building, so cool on the inside that Augustus would have been tempted to live in it had it not been for its popularity with black widows, yellow jackets and centipedes. When he opened the door he didn’t immediately see any centipedes but he did immediately hear the nervous buzz of a rattlesnake that was evidently smarter than the one the pigs were eating. Augustus could just make out the snake, coiled in a corner, but decided not to shoot it; on a quiet spring evening in Lonesome Dove, a shot could cause complications. Everybody in town would hear it and conclude either that the Comanches were down from the plains or the Mexicans up from the river. If any of the customers of the Dry Bean, the town’s one saloon, happened to be drunk or unhappy—which was very likely—they would probably run out into the street and shoot a Mexican or two, just to be on the safe side.
At the very least, Call would come stomping up from the lots, only to be annoyed to discover it had just been a snake. Call had no respect whatsoever for snakes, or for anyone who stood aside for snakes. He treated rattlers like gnats, disposing of them with one stroke of whatever tool he had in hand. “A man that slows down for snakes might as well walk,” he often said, a statement that made about as much sense to an educated man as most of the things Call said.
Augustus held to a more leisurely philosophy. He believed in giving creatures a little time to think, so he stood in the sun a few minutes until the rattler calmed down and crawled out a hole. Then he reached in and lifted his jug out of the mud. It had been a dry year, even by the standards of Lonesome Dove, and the spring was just springing enough to make a nice mud puddle. The pigs spent half their time rooting around the springhouse, hoping to get into the mud, but so far none of the holes in the adobe was big enough to admit a pig.
The damp burlap the jug was wrapped in naturally appealed to the centipedes, so Augustus made sure none had sneaked under the wrapping before he uncorked the jug and took a modest swig. The one white barber in Lonesome Dove, a fellow Tennessean named Dillard Brawley, had to do his barbering on one leg because he had not been cautious enough about centipedes. Two of the vicious red-legged variety had crawled into his pants one night and Dillard had got up in a hurry and had neglected to shake out the pants. The leg hadn’t totally rotted off, but it had rotted sufficiently that the family got nervous about blood poisoning and persuaded he and Call to saw it off.
For a year or two Lonesome Dove had had a real doctor, but the young man had lacked good sense. A vaquero with a loose manner that everybody was getting ready to hang at the first excuse anyway passed out from drink one night and let a blister bug crawl in his ear. The bug couldn’t find its way out, but it could move around enough to upset the vaquero, who persuaded the young doctor to try and flush it. The young man was doing his best with some warm salt water, but the vaquero lost his temper and shot him. It was a fatal mistake on the vaquero’s part: someone blasted his horse out from under him as he was racing away, and the incensed citizenry, most of whom were nearby at the Dry Bean, passing the time, hung him immediately.
Unfortunately no medical man had taken an interest in the town since, and Augustus and Call, both of whom had coped with their share of wounds, got called on to do such surgery as was deemed essential. Dillard Brawley’s leg had presented no problem, except that Dillard screeched so loudly that he injured his vocal cords. He got around good on one leg, but the vocal cords had never fully recovered, which ultimately hurt his business. Dillard had always talked too much, but after the trouble with the centipedes, what he did was whisper too much. Customers couldn’t relax under their hot towels for trying to make out Dillard’s whispers. He hadn’t really been worth listening to, even when he had two legs, and in time many of his customers drifted off to the Mexican barber. Call even used the Mexican, and Call didn’t trust Mexicans or barbers.
Augustus took the jug back to the porch and placed his rope-bottomed chair so as to utilize the smidgin of shade he had to work with. As the sun sank, the shade would gradually extend itself across the porch, the wagon yard, Hat Creek, Lonesome Dove and, eventually, the Rio Grande. By the time the shade had reached the river, Augustus would have mellowed with the evening and be ready for some intelligent conversation, which usually involved talking to himself. Call would work until slap dark if he could find anything to do, and if he couldn’t find anything he would make up something—and Pea Eye was too much of a corporal to quit before the Captain quit, even if Call would have let him.
The two pigs had quietly disregarded Augustus’s orders to go to the creek, and were under one of the wagons, eating the snake. That made good sense, for the creek was just as dry as the wagon yard, and farther off. Fifty weeks out of the year Hat Creek was nothing but a sandy ditch, and the fact that the two pigs didn’t regard it as a fit wallow was a credit to their intelligence. Augustus often praised the pigs’ intelligence in a running argument he had been having with Call for the last few years. Augustus maintained that pigs were smarter than all horses and most people, a claim that galled Call severely.
“No slop-eating pig is as smart as a horse,” Call said, before going on to say worse things.
As was his custom, Augustus drank a fair amount of whiskey as he sat and watched the sun ease out of the day. If he wasn’t tilting the rope-bottomed chair, he was tilting the jug. The days in Lonesome Dove were a blur of heat and as dry as chalk, but mash whiskey took some of the dry away and made Augustus feel nicely misty inside—foggy and cool as a morning in the Tennessee hills. He seldom got downright drunk, but he did enjoy feeling misty along about sundown, keeping his mood good with tasteful swigs as the sky to the west began to color up. The whiskey didn’t damage his intellectual powers any, but it did make him more tolerant of the raw sorts he had to live with: Call and Pea Eye and Deets, young Newt, and old Bolivar, the cook.
When the sky had pinked up nicely over the western flats, Augustus went around to the back of the house and kicked the kitchen door a time or two. “Better warm up the sowbelly and mash a few beans,” he said. Old Bolivar didn’t answer, so Augustus kicked the door once or twice more, to emphasize his point, and went back to the porch. The blue shoat was waiting for him at the corner of the house, quiet as a cat. It was probably hoping he would drop something—a belt or a pocketknife or a hat—so he could eat it.
“Git from here, shoat,” Augustus said. “If you’re that hungry go hunt up another snake.” It occurred to him that a leather belt couldn’t be much tougher or less palatable than the fried goat Bolivar served up three or four times a week. The old man had been a competent Mexican bandit before he ran out of steam and crossed the river. Since then he had led a quiet life, but it was a fact that goat kept turning up on the table. The Hat Creek Cattle Company didn’t trade in them, and it was unlikely that Bolivar was buying them out of his own pocket—stealing goats was probably his way of keeping up his old skills. His old skills did not include cooking. The goat meat tasted like it had been fried in tar, but Augustus was the only member of the establishment sensitive enough to raise a complaint. “Bol, where’d you get the tar you fried t...
Product details
- ASIN : B003NE6HD4
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster; 25th Anniversary ed. edition (May 24, 2010)
- Publication date : May 24, 2010
- Language : English
- File size : 2998 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 964 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #6,945 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the coauthorship of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Academy Award. His most recent novel, When the Light Goes, is available from Simon & Schuster. He lived in Archer City, Texas.
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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 Montana…
…Meanwhile, up in Fort Smith, Arkansas, July Johnson, the town’s 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, it’s a genuine literary masterpiece, and certainly one of the finest novels I've ever read. Highly recommended.
This epic novel is sprawling, contains a large cast of characters (in every sense of the word) and tells a story that combines the strongest elements of love that we can understand, those of a physical and intellectual nature.
This novel begins on the Rio Grande in Lonesome Dove, Texas, makes a long journey to practically Canada by way of Montana, and ends back in Lonesome Dove. The main drivers of the story are former Texas Rangers, and business partners Augustus McCrae and Captain W.F. Call. I cared deeply about these two men. And Gus McCrae has to be one of the most quotable characters I have come across in all of literature. Honestly, “Lonesome Dove” is their story. It is a story of love and friendship. It does not sentimentalize either emotion, which makes it even more palpable, and true.
Larry McMurtry does a stellar job of deftly interweaving three or four plot lines into a story that eventually converges. The writing is beautiful and concise (a rare combination) and McMurtry does not belabor points. And in an 858 page novel that is a mean feat!
As for the characters, I can say I am a bit in love. No spoilers here, but McMurtry depicts the brutality of frontier life with a savageness that is realistic, quick, sudden, and then moved past. The reader will be jarred from time to time. McMurtry also helps create voice and point of view in this third person novel with subtle stylistic changes in the text as the omniscient narrator jumps from one character’s head to another. Just the manner in which the text was written (depending on the POV) would let you know what character’s head we were in. As a feat of writing McMurtry succeeds brilliantly in this book.
As a feat of storytelling, “Lonesome Dove” is more than brilliant. Not one time when I picked up this text did I want to set it down because I was tired of reading it, or because the story dragged. Rather it was because life got in the way. Work, family, chores, etc.
This text is funny (hysterically so at times) heartbreaking, exciting, hold your breath tense…I could go on and on. I won’t. It took me forty years to read “Lonesome Dove”. Do not make that mistake.
I will revisit this text again, because I love some of these characters, and I miss them.
I can’t wait to meet up with them again.
Top reviews from other countries
On a (presque) hâte de prendre les transports en commun pour poursuivre la lecture.
Les personnages, les dialogues l'intrigue, les descriptions géographiques : tout est génial!
Un chef-d'œuvre tout simplement.
j'ai déjà commandé la suite.
It is as if this happened to you in real life.