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Butcher’s Crossing
- Narrated by: Anthony Heald
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
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Publisher's summary
It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek ''an original relation to nature,'' drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher's Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down.
The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisiacal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher's Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.
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In 1836, when she was nine years old, Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanche Indians. This is the story of how she grew up with them, mastered their ways, married one of their leaders, and became, in every way, a Comanche woman. It is also the story of a proud and innocent people whose lives pulsed with the very heartbeat of the land. It is the story of a way of life that is gone forever.
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nice book but the narrator could be better.
- By mamaD on 07-31-10
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The Bounty Hunters
- By: Elmore Leonard
- Narrated by: Josh Clark
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The old Apache renegade Soldado Viejo is hiding out in Mexico, and the Arizona Department Adjutant has selected two men to hunt him down. One -- Dave Flynn -- knows war, the land, and the nature of his prey. The other is a kid lieutenant named Bowers. But there's a different kind of war happening in Soyopa. And if Flynn and his young associate choose the wrong allies -- and the wrong enemy -- they won't be getting out alive.
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The Bounty Hunters
- By Jean on 12-27-10
By: Elmore Leonard
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Walk on Earth a Stranger
- By: Rae Carson
- Narrated by: Erin Mallon
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Lee Westfall has a strong, loving family. She has a home she loves and a loyal steed. She has a best friend - who might want to be something more. She also has a secret.
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Better than expected
- By elenne on 10-11-15
By: Rae Carson
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The Long Valley
- By: John Steinbeck, John H. Timmerman - introduction
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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A Penguin Classic. First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for themselves in the world, these stories reflect Steinbeck’s characteristic interests: The tensions between town and country, laborers and owners, past and present.
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Generally Good Stories, Some are Great
- By Michael on 06-18-13
By: John Steinbeck, and others
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The Last Crossing
- A Novel
- By: Guy Vanderhaeghe
- Narrated by: John Henry Cox, John Keating, Colin Lane, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Abridged
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This epic tale sweeps across continents and time, hovers over a key era in American history, and deftly realizes the humanity of a whole cast of characters. Told through flashbacks and alternating points of view, The Last Crossing is about redemption, about seeking and finding, about human feelings and strengths, about personal honor, and about that moment in life when we must decide to cross over and surrender to love.
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A Very Dark Story
- By Virginia on 04-05-04
By: Guy Vanderhaeghe
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Comanche Moon
- By: Anita Mills
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Can a rough Texas Ranger overcome a woman’s hardened heart? Amanda Ross returns from her Boston finishing school to claim the Texas ranch her parents died fighting to protect. Determined to protect the sprawling ranch that has been in her family for generations, Amanda hates the Comanche people for taking away her only family. Clay McAlester may be a Texas Ranger, but he identifies most strongly with the Comanche people that raised him.
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They Don't Write them Like this Anymore...
- By D. Fields on 10-31-18
By: Anita Mills
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The Wettest County in the World, or Lawless
- A Novel Based on a True Story
- By: Matt Bondurant
- Narrated by: Erik Steele
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The Bondurant Boys were a notorious gang of roughnecks and moonshiners who ran liquor through Franklin County during Prohibition and after. The brothers played a central role in a major conspiracy trial and its violent end. In 1935, Sherwood Anderson, working on a magazine story, finds himself driving along the dusty red roads trying to find the brothers and break the silence that shrouds Franklin County.
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Just outstanding!
- By Rich on 08-18-12
By: Matt Bondurant
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The Iron Tiger
- By: Jack Higgins
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Before the sun can set on Jack Drummond’s career as a pilot in the British Navy, he must complete one final flight - a weapons drop over Tibet to aid guerilla fighters in their border dispute with the Red Chinese. But before he can complete the job, his plane and supplies are burned, stranding him in the Himalayas. Now, with his plane grounded, he must deliver a Tibetan leader’s son to safety over land. With the advancing Chinese enemy hot on his heels, Drummond’s final mission becomes a suspense-filled struggle for survival across the world’s most rugged terrain.
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absolutely fabulous
- By Tom on 06-17-21
By: Jack Higgins
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William Stoner is born at the end of the 19th century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, far different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments.
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First published in 1948, Nothing but the Night marked the auspicious beginning of John Williams' career as a novelist. In the person of Arthur Maxley, Williams investigates the terror and the waywardness of a man who has suffered an early traumatic experience. As a child, Maxley witnessed a scene of such violence and of such a nature that the evocation of Greek tragedy is inescapable. Now, years later, we move through a single significant day in the grown Arthur Maxley's life, the day when he is to meet his father, who has been absent for many years.
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John Williams is a certified wizard
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Journey down main street in the old west.
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The son of Caesar calls to you.
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Sono gli anni Settanta dell'Ottocento. Will Andrews, dopo tre anni a Harvard, lascia il Massachusetts e, pieno di vaghi sogni e aspirazioni emersoniane verso la Natura Selvaggia, va all'Ovest. Si trova così a Butcher's Crossing, poco più che un rozzo accampamento ai margini del nulla abitato da uomini duri, sempre in cerca di un modo per fare soldi, o per scialacquarli. È proprio uno di questi individui che racconta all'ex studente di una meravigliosa valle nascosta tra le Rocky Mountains, popolata di immense mandrie di bisonti che non hanno mai conosciuto l'odore, o il fucile, dell'uomo.
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William Stoner is born at the end of the 19th century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, far different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments.
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Kansas, 1870: Der Student Will Andrews kehrt Harvard den Rücken, um im Wilden Westen sein Glück zu finden. Er landet in Butcher's Crossing, einem Ort mitten im Nirgendwo. Dort wimmelt es von rastlosen Männern, Huren und zwielichtigen Gestalten. Auf der Suche nach Geld und Abenteuern schließt sich Andrews einer Gruppe von Büffeljägern an. Nach einer strapaziösen Reise gelangen sie ans Ziel und geraten, besessen vom Töten der Büffel, in einen Blutrausch.
By: John Williams
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First published in 1948, Nothing but the Night marked the auspicious beginning of John Williams' career as a novelist. In the person of Arthur Maxley, Williams investigates the terror and the waywardness of a man who has suffered an early traumatic experience. As a child, Maxley witnessed a scene of such violence and of such a nature that the evocation of Greek tragedy is inescapable. Now, years later, we move through a single significant day in the grown Arthur Maxley's life, the day when he is to meet his father, who has been absent for many years.
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The Brave Cowboy is a classic of modern Western literature. It follows Jack Burns, a loner at odds with modern civilization. He rides a feisty chestnut mare across the New West—a once beautiful land now smothered beneath airstrips and superhighways. An "anarchist cowboy," he lives by a personal code of ethics that sets him on a collision course with the keepers of law and order. After a prison breakout plan goes awry, he finds himself and his horse, Whisky, pursued across the desert towards the mountains that lead to Mexico, and to freedom.
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obvious influence on "first blood".
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By: Edward Abbey
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Monte Walsh
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A classic about the American West and the life and times of one tough cowboy, Monte Walsh. Partial to pretty women, gambling, and practical jokes, Monte doesn't have to look far to find trouble. Luckily for him, Monte's best friend, Chet, is always there to post bail or quickly get Monte out of town. As Monte grows older, though, and the West inevitably changes, he resists changing with it, and shows his dedication and loyalty to the cowboy way of life.
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I love this story
- By Jason on 06-08-19
By: Jack Schaefer
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The Revenant
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The year is 1823, and the trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Hugh Glass is among the company's finest men, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker. But when a scouting mission puts him face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive. Two company men are dispatched to stay behind and tend to Glass before he dies. When the men abandon him instead, Glass is driven to survive by one desire: revenge.
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It Was A Good Death...almost
- By Mel on 01-09-15
By: Michael Punke
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Hard Rain Falling
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The novel follows the adventures of Jack Levitt, an orphaned teenager living off his wits in the fleabag hotels and seedy pool halls of Portland, Oregon. Jack befriends Billy Lancing, a young black runaway and pool hustler extraordinaire. A heist gone wrong gets Jack sent to reform school, from which he emerges embittered by abuse and solitary connement. In the meantime Billy has joined the middle class - married, fathered a son, acquired a business and a mistress. But they will meet again....
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A Well Read, American Noir Novel from The 1960s
- By Frank Donnelly on 01-19-20
By: Don Carpenter
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The Waterworks
- A Novel
- By: E. L. Doctorow
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
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- Unabridged
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One rainy morning in 1871 in lower Manhattan, Martin Pemberton, a freelance writer sees in a passing stagecoach several elderly men, one of whom he recognizes as his supposedly dead and buried father. While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins.
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History, mystery, and Drama
- By D. Witscher on 12-23-15
By: E. L. Doctorow
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Stoner
- By: John Williams
- Narrated by: Jesper Bøllehuus
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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William Stoner bliver i slutningen af det 19. århundrede født ind i en fattig bondefamilie i Missouri, USA. Som ung går han på landbrugsskole, men drages af litteraturens verden. Han vender aldrig hjem til forældrenes gård og vælger i stedet det akademiske liv, hvor bøgerne og litteraturen forbliver hans faste holdepunkt - også når konflikter og skuffelser truer med at ødelægge hans tilværelse. Bogen blev første gang udgivet i 1965, siden genudgivet i 2006 i USA, hvorefter mange forlag verden over fik øjnene op for romanen. Den er nu en international bestseller. "Stoner" er et fascinerende, velskrevet og rørende portræt af en helt almindelig mand, hvis liv man ikke kan undgå at blive berørt af. Det er en roman om identitet, om livet, om de valg, vi træffer.
By: John Williams
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Whiskey When We're Dry
- By: John Larison
- Narrated by: Sophie Amoss
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- Unabridged
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In the spring of 1885, 17-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family's homestead. Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbors, she cuts off her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her outlaw brother Noah and bring him home. A talented sharpshooter herself, Jess' quest lands her in the employ of the territory's violent, capricious governor, whose militia is also hunting Noah - dead or alive.
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Surprisingly fantastic
- By stuartjash on 08-14-19
By: John Larison
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Journey to the End of the Night
- By: Louis-Ferdinand Celine
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 19 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every minute of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty, and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the public in Europe, and later in America.
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Miserable Ride with Cynic Supreme
- By W Perry Hall on 03-15-17
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Mason & Dixon
- By: Thomas Pynchon
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 33 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic.
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What the hell just happened?
- By Kid A on 12-23-19
By: Thomas Pynchon
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The Crying of Lot 49
- By: Thomas Pynchon
- Narrated by: George Wilson
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Quite unexpectedly, Mrs. Oedipa Maas finds herself the executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a man she used to know in a more-or-less intimate fashion. When Oedipa heads off to Southern California to sort through Pierce's affairs, she becomes ensnared in a hilarious and puzzling worldwide conspiracy.
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Good book, Average recording
- By James on 08-12-07
By: Thomas Pynchon
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Blood Meridian
- Or the Evening Redness in the West
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Author of the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier.
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A beautiful nightmare
- By Ryan on 07-11-11
By: Cormac McCarthy
What listeners say about Butcher’s Crossing
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 11-13-15
A Holocaust of Hides
"He could hardly recall, now, the passion that had drawn him to this room and this flesh, as if by a subtle magnetism; nor could he recall the force of that other passion which had impelled him halfway across a continent into a wilderness where he had dreamed he could find, as in a vision, his unalterable self. Almost without regret, he could admit now the vanity from which those passions had sprung."
- John Williams, Butcher's Crossing
Stop what you are doing. Nursing a baby? Put it down. Dousing out a wildfire? Walk away. Those things can wait. This book is here. You need to listen to it NOW. Serious. Focus. Life is short and dreams die. You need to freaking prioritize and this should be at the top of your list.
This book might have just pushed right into my top ten books of all time. I'm not sure what book got pushed out, but perhaps the Old Testament just had to go. Seriously, this book is that good. Well, perhaps, not Old Testament good, but there were times when reading this I felt GOD's finger might have just been scratch this prose on a rock or bleached bone in a mountain somewhere.
”You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies at school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you’re the only one that knows the secret; only then it’s too late. You’re old.”
It reminded me a bit of Cormac McCarthy that your mom can even read, or think of Moby-Dick, but instead of a white whale, Andrews, Miller, Schneider, and Charley Hoge are seeking an enormous herd of buffalo hidden in valley in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It is a story of death, obsession, nature, destruction, dreams, and the myth of the American West and the Wilderness Myth.
At times 'Butcher's Crossing' also reminded me of the beautiful, dreamy, obsessiveness of Werner Herzog's movies. Nature, in the end, doesn't whimper when you die. Nature often doesn't whimper when it dies. Hell, now I really want Herzog to make this book into a film.
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36 people found this helpful
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- Ron
- 02-12-17
Another prose painting by a master.
Williams is the true underappreciated American author in my opinion. His works stand as portraits of men and women whose still waters run endlessly deep. His work Stoner was a masterful character piece. A wordsmithed painting about the world of academia and affluent duty, stuck and dusty as it could be, yet in the almost daily silence, a complex man struggled ... Here, in Butchers Crossing, we read of a young stagnant protagonist Hell-bent on finding himself, someone, something, anything; set against a tumultuous and changing landscape. In such an immense and powerful way, that land, the ever-changing world of men, is the protagonist. It is the land whose literal waters run deep, whose challenges of time and quiet force bend its will upon the human mind.
I love this reversal of rolls between the two books! I saw myself in Stoner and also in young Will Anderson, of Butchers Crossing. What is so special, is the two characters couldn't be more opposite! One was a wellspring of feeling, bottled so tightly, that he nearly cracked and exploded on his world. The other, had to be cracked by the world; only then, could magnificent, if ever so small insights, seep in.
So it is with the genius of John Williams! The insightful life lessons that I know Williams is pouring profoundly out of himself at the end of the story are greatly worth the read!
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16 people found this helpful
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- DrK
- 08-29-14
The incomparable John Williams goes west
Three such different books -- Augustus, Stoner, and Butcher's Crossing -- all memorable. This one takes the tired western genre and kicks it back up to literary masterpiece, a coming of age tale told with cinematic sweep and exquisite writing. Some sections were so thrilling that I listened 2X. I mean twice, not doublespeed!
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11 people found this helpful
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- Kathleen
- 01-07-16
Perfect.
Perfect writing. Perfect narration. Devastatingly perfect story. There may be no better American west novel.
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8 people found this helpful
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Loved it
I read this after reading "Stoner," expecting there was no way this one could be any good. As well-written as this is, you'd consider that it was probably written after Stoner although it was actually written 5 years prior. I am a fan of writers like Hemingway and Steinbeck, and I rank Williams up there with them. Nothing is said but what needs to be said. There's no pussyfooting around with the style. The pacing was perfect on this book. Exactly when I felt things needed to hurry up, they'd leap forward a matter of weeks or months in the storyline. This is a book I will read again at some point in the future.
The narration of this is perfect.
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8 people found this helpful
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- David
- 07-20-16
Grim but compelling.
The narration is fine. I listened to this as an admirer of Stoner. This novel is not as good as Stoner, but I appreciated its nihilism.
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- Ian C Robertson
- 02-22-16
A Tiring Listen
I say this was a tiring read (not a tiresome one) for the sheer scale of the endeavour that the little group of four huntsmen endure. There is great thirst, distance, freezing snows, exhausting work in deplorable conditions to be read. It made me tired listening and at times I felt myself involuntarily dozing off from exhaustion, felt vicariously for these pioneers. I guess that endeavour is what built the countries that we now enjoy and there is some reason to take pride in it. There is also reason to reflect upon the waste (all those buffalo slaughtered) and the misfortune that courted every step. Williams captures all of that and, for that reason alone, his account is a worthy read. I can't say that I enjoyed the listen, but that was no fault of the writing, the reading or the underlying importance of the pioneer spirit. Heald captures the latter well, for example. For me, it was too real (if that is possible) and I am tiring just thing about it.
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- John
- 02-24-15
Terrific book
This is a great novel, beautifully written and the plot picks up and gets quite suspenseful. Highly recommended.
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- Unknown
- 05-28-21
The Horror
Excellent novel. Extremely well read.
It and Stoner are an immense monument to futility and nothingness, finely written.
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- Rick
- 10-17-18
Western with an Edge
When John Williams was writing “Butcher’s Crossing” around 1960, he said that “the subject of the West has undergone a process of mindless stereotyping.” This novel was his response.
The story has a simple framework, really: a callow young man entranced by Emersonian philosophy leaves Boston and Harvard to seek adventure in the West. In the minuscule settlement of Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas, he finds someone to take him on a buffalo hunt, and a four-man ensemble sets out for a secret valley in the Rocky Mountains where one of the last great herds of buffalo still roams.
The party comprises the young man, Will Andrews; Miller, a veteran buffalo hunter; Charley Hoge, a Bible-toting alcoholic (who for some reason, or no reason, is always referred to by his full name); and Fred Schneider, who can skin a fallen buffalo every five minutes.
The animals are there, all right, and in a few frenzied weeks the hunters kill them all, stacking the hides and leaving the carcasses to rot in the sun. They estimate they have some 4500 hides. Then a bitter mountain blizzard traps them so suddenly that they barely have time to fashion a cramped shelter (of buffalo hides) to survive the long and brutal winter.
Triumph eventually turns to tragedy, and the survivors return to Butcher’s Crossing to find that in their winter absence, the world has changed dramatically.
It’s an excellent, rugged, realistic story with an unexpected ending. The characters are hard-edged realists and not particularly heroic. Anthony Heald’s superb narration is lively as always.
There are times when it seems like the Western, and not just this one, could be defined as “A form of literature distinguished by the use of the term “spat”—the past tense of spit—every couple of minutes.” Nonetheless, this trailblazing novel led the way for others that eschewed movie-star glamor in favor of a more realistic portrayal of what the 1870s frontier must have been like.
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