An entertaining oater that’s also a subtle study in understated manliness.
Horse racing is a nail-biting proposition—especially in the bandit-infested Old California of this tense Western.
Fed up with training other people’s horses in Kentucky, Cole Copeland has taken to the local California racing circuit with his trusty steed. It’s a sport of artfully manipulated appearances as well as hurtling horseflesh; often posing as an Arkansas rube, Cole pits his well-trained equine ringer against the actual rubes’ favorite nags in informal races and cleans up on the resulting bets. He makes a living, garnering bags full of gold coins that, in the 1870s, attract plenty of desperadoes whom he fends off with his trusty Winchester and two pistols, one for show and another hidden to shoot. A mysterious man named Sandy, who may or may not be a bandit chieftain—but so might anyone—steers him towards the big race-match gathering at Tehachapi that draws the best horses and the richest swells in the California racing scene and where an unknown quantity like Cole might clean up. With his excitable 14-year-old groom Jeremy, Cole plunges into the byzantine swirl of Tehachapi and takes readers along into this arcane and fascinating world. The race itself is almost secondary to the negotiations leading up to it, in which Cole craftily susses out the competition and maneuvers them into the perfect race, with high stakes and a field so good that the oddsmakers don’t realize he can win. Writing with a clipped, precise prose, professional horse-trainer Porter fits plenty of suspenseful showdowns and hair-raising gunfights into this galloping yarn, but balances it with absorbing lore on his craft. Protagonist Cole makes an appealing man in the saddle—he’s cool, wary, always at work on a back-up plan to his back-up plan and a hard-nosed businessman who sees a horse as a moneymaking investment—but he’s also sublimely attuned to the equine soul.
An entertaining oater that’s also a subtle study in understated manliness.Pub Date: April 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-1453705933
Page Count: 236
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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