Rating: 
Summary: The Other Side
Review: It begins as an innocent story of two young brothers, Billy Parham, 16 and Boyd Parham, 14 giving food to an Indian. Billy and Boyd live on a ranch with their parents in New Mexico and are required to help with the work there. One of Billies tasks is to trap a wolf who is attacking and killing their cattle. Billy becomes intrigued by the primitive and wild creature, who seems to intelligently elude capture. He attempts to learn about the wolf by asking an old and learned man about the ways of wolves. As Billy begins to feel a kinship with the wolf he discovers it caught in one of his traps. He realizes that he cannot kill it and impulsively sets out for the Mexican border to return the wolf to where it came from. By crossing the border, Billy adventures into an nether world. It is not simply another country, but another reality.We could easily call The Crossing a coming of age story, an adventure story, a quest or an epic poem, but it is all that and much more. As with any coming of age story, Billy Parham loss of innocence comes with a price of great consequence. Like an adventure story The Crossing is filled with action and unexpected situations. As with tales of quests as the Iliad and Gulliver's Travels we meet strange and interesting creatures along Billy's path. Like an epic poem The Crossing is filled with lyrical prose, both in Spanish and English. Cormac McCarthy is one of the great American authors of the twentieth century and he proves it in once again in the Crossing the second book of his border trilogy. His prose is beautiful to read, with dialogue devoid of quotation marks and contractions missing apostrophes. He shifts from English to Spanish can be challenging to the non-Spanish reader. His scenes rich with descriptors can be stark and ruthless. The reader should be prepared to be shocked and moved. Reading McCarthy comes with a price. After reading one of his books the reader feels changed, drained and at a loss. I, like Billy cannot retrieve my innocence. It disappeared when I went south of the border with him. As the Spanish Gypsy tells him "We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless." I cannot helped but be moved by Cormac McCarthy's work and The Crossing was perhaps the favorite, which I have read.
Rating: 
Summary: A dusty, bloody mess
Review: What a long, tiresome, hackneyed description of Mexico, complete with dusty streets, maroon sunsets, sultry and serious women, plates of burritos and beans, and bandits popping out from behind the sagebrush. On top of this belittling and stereotyped background is a character who learns nothing from experience and continues to follow a path of stupidity. McCarthy writes much of the important dialogue in Spanish and rarely 'translates' with any counterpoint English dialogue or explanations. If you don't know Spanish, be prepared for many frustrating pages, or else keep your Spanish dictionary handy. Maybe a master like Hemingway or Castañeda can pull this off in brief spurts, but McCarthy fails. I gave it two stars because it actually does have some wisdom, in the form of philosophical dialogues.
Rating:
Summary: A River of Sepia Skulls
Review: As I rumaged through the discount table at a bookstore, a hardback book with a striking cover caught my eye. It featured a sepia monochrome photograph. Two bucks. Can't make much of a mistake for two bucks. I had never heard the name Cormac McCarthy. The image, which presented a mass of animal skulls arranged as if a flowing stream, was both stark and beautiful. That likewise characterizes the words within. McCarthy's writing has power, texture, and lyricism. It is intensely masculine. Billy Parham, the main character, embarks on a personal odyssey to return a captured wolf to the distant mountains of Mexico, to an unpopulated wilderness which no longer exists. The story cascades into a visceral tale of loss and his futile struggle to reclaim a fragment of what has been taken away. This heartbreaking novel is probably the best of the Border Trilogy.
Rating:
Summary: McCarthy gets lost in his mess
Review: After All the Pretty Horses what could one expect except an oddly constructed ultimately flawed novel that seeks to further McCarthy's vision but only serves as a poor retread of Pretty Horses? The novel follows a boy named Billy Parham who after tracking and trapping a wolf decides to return her to the mountains of Mexico from which she came. The trouble with Billy is that he floats in this stark world. As he descends into the bowels of Mexico he meets experience, violence, and mysticsm but learns nothing and emerges from the other side as awkward and ignorant as he was in the beginning. It is tedious spending so much time with a character to see him brush life but come away no wiser. McCarthy's writing is noble and wonderful but what is the purpose if the characters are yellowed and brittle? There is no hero, no villian, no resolution. I suppose you could say it is the classic antinovel, but that is giving it too much credit. For me The Crossing was a terrible waste and is a classic example of art at its worst - where the ego cares more about the arrangement of words on the page than the story.
Rating: 
Summary: Blood meridian is better
Review: It's surely a good book,
but not as good and interesting
as "blood meridian"...
Rating:
Summary: One of McCarthy's best
Review: I would place this book with Blood Meridian and Suttree as one of McCarthy's best books. I liked it better than his commercial breakthrough, All the Pretty Horses, which, though written as beautifully as his other books, lacked the inspiration of McCarthy's finest books.
One of the aspects I found most moving was that Billy's seemingly casual, willful decision to return the wolf to it's home in the Mexican mountains leads indirectly to the death of his entire family and his own life as a rootless wanderer.
One of the dangers inherent in McCarthy's style is pretentiousness, both in the language and in the sometimes heavy handed symbolism of some of the encounters. I think he avoids that danger because I am swept away by the beauty of his language, but I can see how someone else who is not as swept away as I am might feel that way. Like poetry you either fall under its spell or you don't. I do.
Rating:
Summary: Starts off okay and then sinks
Review: This story starts off with promise, but then quickly sinks to despair and stays there. You are left with a sinking feeling of having wasted your time. If you want to get depressed turn on the news, don't bother with this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Kristen's Review of THE CROSSING
Review: Thank God there was finally a book I enjoyed. I'm not much of a reader, but after an independent reading assignment for my AP English IV class, I discovered that reading just the right book can be captivating. No, I'm not related to Billy Parham...ha ha!I really enjoyed THE CROSSING because of the many extended metaphors and imagery. I could picture everything McCarthy described. I think quotation marks would have been helpful; however, it wasn't all that important. The parts written in Spanish were done cleverly. Since I know some of the language, I could catch the jist of what they were saying. But for those who don't know it, it could have been confusing, but it left a sense of mystery to the novel. Over all, McCarthy really captured the Mexican culture of the day and his creative writing style brought it out in an intriguing way.
Rating:
Summary: Animal with a Conscience
Review: Do I mean the men, the animals or the author? All 3. The opening section of this book is so fabulous and satisfying that it is like eating dessert first. One of the finest writers ever, McCarthy's characters are often done-in, disappointed or die due to their own innate decency. While the rest of the world grinds by they tend to run on a course near it but not in it. My only question is: do all old Mexican men have nuggets of wisdom they are dying to impress upon the young?
Rating:
Summary: A miracle in prose
Review: Set in the late 30's and early 40's, the novel follows Billy Parham on several journeys back and forth from New Mexico to Old Mexico. Both Billy and the characters he encounters on his journeys suffer immense loss and hardship. It is this sense of tragic experience that lies at the heart of the novel. One of the many ideas McCarthy touches on is the meaning that experience acquires through the retelling thereof. Thus the reader himself becomes interwoven into the story's meaning. McCarthy's beautifully lyrical rendering of the landscape is stunning, while his exploration of the themes of man's relationship to self, nature, and God is timeless. The Best of the Border Trilogy.
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