Review by Booklist Review
In a career that spans four decades and includes more than 20 books and a Pulitzer Prize, McMurtry has earned a place as one of our most gifted storytellers. Of course, the personal musings and recollections of great novelists are not necessarily interesting: in fact, they can sometimes prove as frightfully boring as watching a neighbor's home movies. Thankfully, McMurtry has a lot on his mind, and in this delightful and rambling but never boring "essay," he eloquently shares his musings. McMurtry describes his early life on the plains of west Texas, for his grandparents were true pioneers who arrived on land where the Commanches and Kiowas had reigned supreme just a few decades earlier. He recounts with passion and remarkable insight the struggles of his parents to keep their ranch afloat; his own decision to break with that life seems both sad and inevitable. In his ruminations on the craft of writing, McMurtry bemoans the decline of storytelling in our everyday lives and provides stimulating and provocative analyses on writers from Cervantes to Sontag. Although the subject matter is wide ranging, this brilliant memoir has two dominant themes: McMurtry's love for the printed word and his love (perhaps in spite of himself) for the West that nurtured and inspired him. --Jay Freeman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
After reading an essay by Walter Benjamin in a Dairy Queen during his hometown's centennial celebration, McMurtry set out to ponder how Benjamin's conclusions about the death of the oral tradition apply to his own desolate patch of Texas cattle country. That essay, "The Storyteller," is the touchstone McMurtry returns to throughout this digressive, erudite and frequently glum assessment of his career and the importance of storytelling. "Real curiosity," he writes, "now gets little chance to developÄit's smothered with information before it can draw a natural breath." Taking a break from writing fiction to think "about place, about my life, about literature and my relation to it," the bestselling author (Comanche Moon, etc.) and purveyor of antiquarian books offers prickly appraisals of great writers. A devotee of European literature, McMurtry considers Virginia Woolf's diaries and Proust's 12-volume opus the White Nile and Blue Nile of language. As for critics, he spurns theorists for those he considers great readers (Susan Sontag, Edmund Wilson and V.S. Pritchett, among others). Surveying his own two dozen books, he feels much like his cattle ranching father at the end of his life, contemplating his "too meager acres" and concluding he could have done more. At the same time, McMurtry claims he has exhausted the themes that interest him and hints that he may be done with fiction for good. The most infectious element in this book-length essay is McMurtry's passion for reading, which was rooted in boyhood and blossomed into a lifelong quest to understand the European culture that spawned his own pioneer familyÄa quest that brings him full circle back to Benjamin. It all adds up to a thoughtful, elegant retrospective on Texas, his work and the meaning of reading by an author who has the range to write with intelligence about both Proust and the bathos of a Holiday Inn marquee. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
When McMurtry (of Lonesome Dove fame) was coming up in Archer County, TX, books other than the Bible were as scarce as company. In this roundabout and finely written memoir, McMurtry approaches the topic of storytelling (using German literary critic Benjamin as a springboard) by telling his own. (LJ 10/1/99) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An elegiac essay on memory and the power of storytelling by a master of the art. Well-known as a Pulitzer-winning novelist (Duane's Depressed, 1998, etc.), McMurtry turns less often to nonfiction. It's usually a delight when he does. In this book-length meditation on the past'his own, that of his ancestors, and that of the corner of west Texas whence they hail'McMurtry works from an unlikely conceit: rereading the work of the German-Jewish literary journalist Walter Benjamin over a lime Dr. Pepper (for which he gives the recipe) at a drive-through diner out on the dry plains of Archer City, the town McMurtry made famous in The Last Picture Show and other novels. Benjamin never saw a prickly pear in his life, but he had much to say about personal history and storytelling in an age that isn't much interested in either. So, too, does McMurtry, who touches on issues of his craft (he writes that one of his purposes as a novelist has been to people the empty frontier in which he grew up), the pleasures of reading and collecting books, the lost art of conversation over supper, the aftereffects of heart attacks and urban renewal, and the tricky business of memory. (In west Texas, he observes, 'Sudden death, particularly death on the highway'as much a part of that culture as football'lodged in people's memories, whereas about almost everything else they were vague'). It's philosophy, literary criticism, and memoir all rolled up into one neat package, and McMurtry's constant readers will find much pleasure in these pages.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
