Synopses & Reviews
In this brilliant saga -- the final volume of
The Berrybender Narratives and an epic in its own right -- Larry McMurtry lives up to his reputation for delivering novels with "wit, grace, and more than a hint of what might be called muscular nostalgia, fit together to create a panoramic portrait of the American West"
(The New York Times Book Review).As this finale opens, Tasmin and her family are under irksome, though comfortable, arrest in Mexican Santa Fe. Her father, the eccentric Lord Berrybender, is planning to head for Texas with his whole family and his retainers, English, American, and Native American. Tasmin, who would once have followed her husband, Jim Snow, anywhere, is no longer even sure she likes him, or knows where to go to next. Neither does anyone else -- even Captain Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame, is puzzled by the great changes sweeping over the West, replacing red men and buffalo with towns and farms.
In the meantime, Jim Snow, accompanied by Kit Carson, journeys to New Orleans, where he meets up with a muscular black giant named Juppy, who turns out to be one of Lord Berrybender's many illegitimate offspring, and in whose company they make their way back to Santa Fe. But even they are unable to prevent the Mexicans from carrying the Berrybender family on a long and terrible journey across the desert to Vera Cruz.
Starving, dying of thirst, and in constant, bloody battle with slavers pursuing them, the Berrybenders finally make their way to civilization -- if New Orleans of the time can be called that -- where Jim Snow has to choose between Tasmin and the great American plains, on which he has lived all his life in freedom, and where, after all her adventures, Tasmin must finally decide where her future lies.
With a cast of characters that includes almost every major real-life figure of the West, Folly and Glory is a novel that represents the culmination of a great and unique four-volume saga of the early days of the West; it is one of Larry McMurtry's finest achievements.
Synopsis
As the finale opens, Tasmin and her family are under irksome, though comfortable, arrest in Mexican Sante Fe. As the Berrybenders adapt to life in Sante Fe, Tasmin's husband Jim Snow, accompanied by Kit Carson, journeys to New Orleans, where he meets one of Lord Berrybender's many illegitimate children. But they are unable to prevent the Mexicans from carrying the Berrybender family on the terrible "Dead Man's Walk" across the desert to Vera Cruz. The Berrybenders finally make their way to civilization, where Jim Snow has to choose between Tasmin and the freedom of the American plains...and where Tasmin must finally decide where her future lies.
Synopsis
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author concludes his frontier epic about the Berrybenders, an English family making their way across the America in the 1830s, with this novel of triumph, tragedy, and destiny. "A worthy close to an outstanding quartet."--"Booklist."