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Title: The Brave Cowboy: An Old Tale in a New Time by Edward Abbey ISBN: 0-380-71459-0 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 April, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.08 (12 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Tedious Reading
Comment: I am a great fan of Abbey. But after reading several of his books, I am almost convinced that he was a far better essayist than a novelist. This book takes a laboriously long time to develop, and it isn't until the end that the reader even begins to comprehend what Abbey is getting at. (In fact, I'm not sure I get it now.) One possible explaination is that he was trying to draw a parallel between Thoreau and Emmerson. Abbey was a great admirer of Thoreau, and, I believe, took great pride in being compared to him. In this novel Bondi (Emmerson) is the high-browed educated thinker, and Burns (Thoreau) the simpler, more admirable, doer of the word. The story progressively exposes more and more of the differences between the two. But Abbey's prose is incredibly long winded, almost as if he is writing this book to show off how many literary tricks he can use, at the expense of the reader and the story. But it is not until the end of the work (almost as difficult to arrive at as the top of the mountain for Jack Burns) that the reader will feel truly ripped off and cheated. My advice is to stick to Abbey's essay collections, although I truly enjoyed "The Monkey Wrench Gang."
Rating: 4
Summary: check out the movie too
Comment: Q: What's your occupation? A: Cowhand, sheepherder; game poacher.
Q: Where's your papers?...Your I.D.--draft card, social security, driver's license? A: Don't have none. Don't need none. I already know who I am.
Edward Abbey is one of the patron saints of the modern Environmental movement; right up there with Rachel Carson. Desert Solitaire, his memoir of working in a National Park, is an impassioned statement of preservationist principles and his comic novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, is a virtual primer for ecoterrorism. But my personal favorite of his books is the little remembered Brave Cowboy, the basis for the excellent but equally forgotten Kirk Douglas film, Lonely Are the Brave. It belongs on the shelf with the other uniquely American paens to independence and rugged individualism: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest(read Orrin's review), Cool Hand Luke, From Here to Eternity (read Orrin's review), All the Pretty Horses (read Orrin's review), etc.
Set in the mid 1950's, the novel tells the story of Jack Burns, a latter day cowboy, now reduced to working as a hand on a sheep ranch, who gets himself thrown into prison so that he can help his draft dodging friend escape. But when his buddy refuses to compromise the moral purity of his concientious objector status, Burns is forced to break out on his own, assuming that a vicious Mexican prison guard he has aggravated doesn't kill him first. In the meantime the authorities have realized that Jack too is unregistered and that while they were in college together, he helped his friend with some radical causes, however ineffectual. So when he does manage to escape, Jack ends up being treated as a dangerous fugitive, instead of as the fairly harmless eccentric that he is. Pursued by locals, feds, the military and the sadistic guard, he takes off into the desert, his only allies a high spirited horse, who's as much trouble as help, and a phlegmatic local sherriff named Morlin Johnson.
In a broader sense though, what the book is really about is the clash between the values of the old West and the bureaucratic, mechanized, regimented and federalized modern West. Though it lacks the memorable set-pieces that distinguish the other books cited above and is admittedly none too subtle in portraying the menace of modern life, it succeeds nonetheless because the character of Jack Burns evokes such nostalgia in the reader and like Don Quixote, we find the mental world that he lives in more attractive than the reality that has begun to crowd in on him. I like the novel very much and especially recommend the movie.
GRADE: B+
Rating: 4
Summary: Born in the wrong time
Comment: When Jack Burns encounters a barbed-wire fence as he comes across the West Mesa (Albuquerque)on horseback he scans in both directions for a gate before he clips the wire to ride through. He wouldn't have cut it if it wasn't in his way, or if there'd been a gate nearby. Thus begins the book with a scene that tells much about the main character.
Burns is a man who doesn't merely cling to ideals of loyalty, privacy and individual freedom. His internal machinery accepts no alternative at any level. Jack Burns is a man who won't cut a fence unless it stands in the way of where he wants to go. He recognizes the existence of the creeping encroachments and compromises to his choices and ignores them. The modern acquiescence by the rest of society is foreign to him.
Burns descends the mesa into Albuquerque, encounters modern city life and is battered by it without 'losing' in the usual sense of the word, and leaves on the run from the legal instruments intended to keep us all on the straight and narrow. The end is inevitable.
Readers who know Albuquerque will enjoy the ride across the 'Volcans', the places in the Rio Grande Valley still recognizable despite the years since Abbey wrote the book, the harrowing climb up the Sandias pursued by the military and law enforcement community. Those who don't know Albuquerque or New Mexico will appreciate the type of individual Burns portrays: a man born too late, unable to compromise.
I haven't seen the movie mentioned by other reviewers. I also didn't see the shortcomings of the book mentioned by several. I saw only a writer who created a character much as Abbey saw himself, as many people today see themselves, and a plot that carried those traits through to the end. No one, I imagine Abbey would say, can dodge the steamroller.
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Title: Fire on the Mountain by Edward Abbey ISBN: 0380714604 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 April, 1992 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel by Edward Abbey ISBN: 0805057919 Publisher: Owl Books (NY) Pub. Date: 01 August, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Good News by Edward Abbey ISBN: 0452265657 Publisher: Plume Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: One Life at a Time, Please by Edward Abbey ISBN: 0805006036 Publisher: Owl Books (NY) Pub. Date: 01 January, 1988 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Down the River by Edward Abbey ISBN: 0452265630 Publisher: Plume Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 1991 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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