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Grim Prarie Tale Mar 24, 2002 (23 of 24 found this helpful)
This book in the Lonsesome Dove series in the first, in chronological order. Gus and Call, called 'young pups' by their elders, have joined the Texas Rangers, hoping for some adventure (and for Gus, a little brothel action and card playing). Soon after their expedition begins, they discover they are in way over their heads. The Commanches are, literally, on the warpath, and hate white people (with good reason, considering the way the white men treated them). They are also very smart, very fast, very skilled in riding and fighting, and VERY bloodthirsty. The main Chief, who even the most hardened soldiers are scared of, is Buffalo Hump, and he is introduced in an unforgettable lightning storm on the prarie, in one of the most vivid, terrifying scenes in the entire series (and if you've read the series, you know things can get VERY ugly). The men in charge of the expedition are either crazy, stupid, drunk, have a very short fuse, or all of the above. The trek starts out rather confident, looking forward to the challenges to come, but soon realize they are no match for the Indians. The Commanches set up a variety of clever, deadly, devastating traps, and soon their ranks are halved, then quartered, then...then it gets REALLY ugly.
This book was a page-turner, and had all the entertaining characters a reader comes to expect from the series. All of the books treat death as an everyday thing, but I think this is one of the most cold-blooded; do not read if you're sqeamish. There's not just one or two nasty scenes, either, they count many and come fast. This is an entertaining book, one that I couldn't put down, but not especially pleasant. A good read, don't get me wrong, but one that is emotionally gruelling.
I guess if you wanted to read the books in chronological order, this would be the one to start. I had planned to do that originally, after I read LD, but have found reading them in the order they were written is actually more satisfying; backstory is filled in, and you get a better perspective.
If you loved LD, read this and the other books in the series. If you're just starting out, read LD first; it may be the strongest, but it will give you an idea of just what a treat you're in for. No ccomplaints here-I put the bok down after reading the last page, and promptly walked right over to my new copy of Commanche Moon (I wisely bought them at the same time) and started in.
This author was born to write.
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Gus and Call without the humor Jun 6, 2000 (10 of 11 found this helpful)
Larry McMurtry's Dead Man's Walk, the original perquel to Lonesome Dove, features that book's main characters when they were just youngsters and had first joined the Texas Rangers. Like Lonesome Dove, it is a big book with a lot of characters and a lot of action, but it differs significantly in that there is very little humor and the character's stories don't mesh into any coherent plot line or ultimate resolution. It is in essence a picaresque novel that kind of wanders around - as do the characters in the story. While Call and Gus are shown to have the beginnings of the personalities that would endear them to Lonesome Dove readers, they are also shown as having little depth and no experience. They really are clueless. And pitted against the merciless indians they face it is a miracle that they survive. Of course they have to for the sake of the story but it isn't any talent or savvy on their own part that makes survival possible.
Despite its limitations, this is still a very interesting book. The action is quite satisfying even if the characters are not.
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Young Gus and Call on Western Adventure Mar 29, 2002 (8 of 9 found this helpful)
In McMurty's prequel to Lonesome Dove, we see the young Gus McCrea and Woodrow Call at the beginning of their Rangering days. It is interesting because both characters are clearly the men they will become in Lonesome Dove, yet without the assurance and confidence that carried them so easily through that book's trials. The author does a good job of portraying them as believable youths rather than as copies of their later selves in younger bodies.
This is a roaming tale. There are three trips which encompass the book. The first is a brief and futile foray against the fearsome Comanche Buffalo Hump. The second, a long and futile expedition to capture Spanish Gold in New Mexico that is thwarted by the elements and a Mexican army. The third, a march in captivity through a desolate country that will prove to be a more ruthless enemy than the Indian or the sons of the conquistadors.
I will warn the reader, the ending is a little bizarre and seems out of place with the rest of the book (and the preceding two) -- it really lost the Western feel for me.
This journey is much less purposeful and more fantastic than that portrayed in LD or Streets of Laredo. This tale feels at times a bit forced, with something exciting fitted neatly into every chapter. On the whole however, it is a good yarn that captures a flavorful frontier West before the Civil War. McMurty remains a gifted storey teller who is able to drive the reader through his pages with gifted dialogue and excellent descriptions.
I'm already digging into McMurty's last book of the Lonesome Dove series, Comanche Moon.
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A Most Intriguing "Western" Dec 20, 1999 (5 of 5 found this helpful)
Shattering many of the old stereotypes recalling the "glory" of the Old West, McMurtry has actually created many new stereotypes of his own. Here, in this new tale, are the grotesques we have come to expect of him, the suddenly violent eruptions, the sense of utter despair. And yet the tale resonates, with its feeling of hopelessness, with all the aimless wandering and low-down betrayals and the angry, incomprehensible bloodiness of the Indians who understand the land better than the whites and yet are doomed to lose it to the ever swelling numbers of them as they trek west to encroach on the Indian lands. Neither side understands the other and so are brought together in nothing less than a bloody war of attrition. The harshness of the terrain in which they all travel imposes its bloody, dehumanizing regimen on these people. This tale is, finally, one of pointless wandering by men who seem to have nothing better to do. And, indeed, perhaps they haven't. Even more, it is a tale of the savage interplay between the peoples of this land as Indians brutalize whites and Texans brutalize Mexicans who, in turn, brutalize the Texans, each yielding to the baser impulses which the land elicits from them. There is not much plot here either, just the love of adventure of two young frontier boys on the way to becoming men which draws them into one foolhardy campaign after another, leading them to participate in, and witness, some of the meanest conditions living can offer, and some of the ugliest means of dying. It doesn't quite make men of them, to be sure, but it hardens them and teaches a bit about living in the harsh world in which they find themselves -- a world which, through good luck and some basically sound personal traits, they manage to survive in long enough to embrace.
I am reluctant to invoke LONESOME DOVE here, the tale which started all this but, in fact, that is the obvious reason for this book, to show us how the two old Texas Rangers, Call and MacCrae, got to be the way we found them in the latter book. And yet it all works here without reference to that first book. This one reverberates with a real feeling of life, despite its lack of any real plot and the utter sense of despair which permeates the tale. And it holds you. It's not so much that you want to know what happens (I already largely did, having seen the TV movie previously), but that you want to be there with them, to experience the world which McMurtry so brilliantly conjurs up for Call and MacCrae. Sometimes it's not a matter of trying to guess what's around the next bend only but wanting to live it. And that's what McMurtry gives us here. And that's good writing.
SWM
author of The King of Vinland's Saga
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How It Began? Oct 6, 2005 (4 of 4 found this helpful)
This is the volume in Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet (or as it really should be said, the three books he wrote to tie into Lonesome Dove) that is earliest chronologically. In this fast-moving novel, the teenaged Gus and Call meet as Rangers on a Texas frontier overrun with menacing Comanches. Texas is at the time in its last years as a nation, before its inclusion into the American union, and the stoical Scottish born Call, and Augustus, the raconteur from Tennessee, have just met one another. Although their start was slightly rocky, the two are, by the beginning of this book, strong friends. The pair survive an early encounter with Comanche, enlist on a fortune seeker's adventure to take part of Mexico for himself, and wind up making a forced march across one of the driest, hottest, most savage places in North America, the Llano Escatado. The pair survive this ordeal (not a spoiler, to be alive for Lonesome Dove thirty years in the future, it's obvious they do) and then embark on a return journey even more perilous. This book has a shocker ending that I personally found hilarious, and is certainly one I doubt anyone could see coming.
Dead Man's Walk stands on its own much better than did Comanche Moon, which is set about ten to twenty years after this volume, and is stronger in some ways than even Streets of Laredo, which wraps up the books nearly half a century after Dead Man's Walk concludes, but it is lacking through no fault of its own the familiar personalities of the Gus and Call we came to know in Lonesome Dove,. Here the two young men who will one day grow into the legendary pair, are just too raw to draw us in as completely as they do later on. There is also the matter of the author's inexplicable reworking of facts established elsewhere in the series' plot. I hate when he does that. He sacrifices continuity to push the story in the present volume along, and that's just a little weak. Dead Man's Walk is well worth reading and gives us a peek at the young Gus and Call (and a few others) that is enjoyable, but it and the other books in this quartet vary greatly in overall quality, with this being at the upper end, but nowhere nearly as good as Lonesome Dove.