Call, if you want better food you have to start by shooting Bolivar,” Augustus said, reminded of his own grievance against the cook. The Gay Science by Nietzsche. I suppose it was my mind that was changed but it felt as if it was the world that changed. This is one of my favoritest books ever. In fact, put a gun to my head and tell me chose just one, and it’d be better than even money that Lonesome Dove would be what I’d name.

Gus and Woodrow are two very different sides to the same coin. It is never quite clear why they became friends (and it’s something that McMurtry has attempted, with limited success, to explain in the prequels). Nevertheless, they have real affection for each other, even though, as Clara notes, they might have been better off missing each other completely. Call soon has started hiring men and stealing Mexican cattle for the drive. Gus says that Call is going to get them all killed just to have another adventure in a wild frontier, but he goes along to see his old sweetheart Clara who is living in Nebraska. Jake has taken up with Lorena and decides to travel along with the herd, much to Gus’s amusement and Call’s aggravation. The large cast of characters carry their hopes, fears and limitations with them out onto the vast plains of the American Midwest, and the drive turns out to be dangerous in ways they couldn’t even imagine.

He didn’t believe anything of the kind—he just liked to stimulate the boy once in a while, and Pea too, though Pea was an exceptionally hard man to stimulate, being insensitive to most fears. Pea had just sense enough to fear Comanches—that didn’t require an abundance of sense. Mexican bandits did not impress him. She might have died anyplace,’ Call said. ‘I’ll die someplace, and so will you – it might not be no better place than Lonesome Dove.’ Call and Gus have since set up the Hat Creek Cattle Company. Their job is to secure cattle and horses for determined clients, an objective they accomplish by sneaking into Mexico in the middle of the night and stealing all the cattle and horses they might need to satiate the needs of their clients.

It sneaks up on you, but before you know it, you suffer when they suffer, your heart soars when they succeed, you understand and forgive when they fail. And you wish you had about an ounce of their grit - because these men and women are all tougher in their sleep than I could ever be on my toughest day. Whether this response is justified by the grandeur of their mission to tame the frontier, or conditioned by popular culture, it is there and cannot be denied. I grew up in a herding tradition and that's determined everything I've done. I was never good at herding cattle, but writing is a way of herding words and rare books a way of herding books, and I suspect by my constant driving aroundIn Wyoming, several horses are stolen by half-starved Indians. Call, Gus, and Deets chase after them, and Deets is killed in the ensuing confrontation by the group's only remaining brave. Shortly afterward, Gus informs Newt that Call is his father, something Newt has always dreamed of, but he is too upset by Deets' death to give it much thought. Toward the end, through a complicated series of plot twists, Mr. McMurtry tries to show how pathetically inadequate the frontier ethos is when confronted with any facet of life but the frontier; but by that time the reader's emotional I was so engrossed in this book that I had no problem regularly making a fool of myself in public places - on the subway, in coffee shops - gasping, weeping, and shouting "Nuh-uh!" You know what they say about characters larger than life? This is one of them. And, for me, it was enough to compensate for the book's flaws. I don't know if McMurtry was aware that one can't kill the goose of the golden eggs and expect to write a tetralogy that'd be just as good as the first book, but I, for one, am not going to continue with the other books. If the soul is gone, the void that remains is felt deeply.

I said we oughta get married,” Louisa said loudly. “What I like about you is you're quiet. Jim talked every second that he didn’t have a whisky bottle on his mouth. I got tired of listening. Also, you’re skinny. If you don’t last, you’ll be easy to bury. I’ve buried enough husbands to take such things into account. What do you say?” with only a dead horse for shelter, it is unforgettable. S UCH moments give ''Lonesome Dove'' its power. They demonstrate what underlies all the banter, and they transform Call and McCrae from burnt-out cases into - Newt looked at Bolivar, sitting over by the stove in his dirty serape. Bolivar’s hair looked like it had had a can of secondhand lard poured over it. Once every few months Bol would change clothes and go visit his wife, but his efforts at improving his appearance never went much higher than his mustache, which he occasionally tried to wax with grease of some kind. I struggled with the slow beginning, and was a little bit underwhelmed by the plain prose, until in section 3, when I came to a belated realisation of what I was actually reading: a STORY. I know this sounds really stupid, like duh, what did I think I was reading? I guess the Pulitzer label and the 5-star constellations that abound for this book had me expecting something different. But what this is, ladies and gents, is a high calibre, old-fashioned STORY. No fancy writing, but an epic, all-American adventure, filled with characters who get under your skin in the most insidious manner. The pair decides to follow through with this plan after some thought, bringing a number of curious characters along with them. None of them know just how drastically their lives will change along the way.Augustus walked down and met the men at the wagons. “It’s a little early for you two to be quittin’, ain’t it, girls?” he said. “Or is this Christmas or what?” sustained passages intended to be beautiful or fervent. He always has time for another funny minor character to pirouette on stage, or for McCrae to produce a new bon mot. And he leisurely pursues familiar themes - two friends in love