Rating: 
Summary: The second half flops!
Review: The first half of the book is the story of returning the wolf to Mexico, and it is fabulous. Had the book ended with this story, I would say this is one of the best books I have ever read. What Cormac McCarthy does next in the second half is bizzare - he writes page after page of boring drivel. It is like a football team playing in the superbowl, ahead 45-0, and then ending up losing it.Toward the end, I did not want to finish reading this book, but I had to just to see if there was some point for this Jekyll & Hyde performance. I found none. It is almost as if two different people authored this book. Very bizzare. On the strength of the first half of this book I give it 2 stars.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: The first half of this book, with the wolf, I rank among the very best, perhaps THE best, most breathtaking prose I have ever read. Vivid. Funny. Heartbreaking. People, characters and detail of place fully rendered with enviable sparse writing. What amazing images and feelings. The power and brilliance of the first section however, he is, for me, unable to sustain when he leaves the wolf. Still, were ten stars available in the Amazon ranking, I would give this book 10 based on the extraordinary first section.
Rating:
Summary: A teachingly awesome experience.
Review: Cormac teaches you how to read him then he sweeps you through a metaphysical journey with his language and vision alone. A human drama progresses in there and the words as they are put together are the effective agents rather than the philosophy expounded. This code-like speak carries a rather simple experience of returning a wolf to its home into a monumental encounter with evil, care and obcession with the spiritual. Inventive ability puts McCarthy at the head of a class that includes even Faulkner. While there, you recognize he has done his research and he is painting a mostly tragic scene for man, nothing new but, the power overwhelms. The real writing stuff is here, you can't put the man down. You have to read this book if you intend to write anything that is powerful. Singularly addictive, this writing. Read all his books, this one is his best.
Rating:
Summary: Tales within the book are independently important
Review: This book contains what may be construed to be McCarthy's views of the aesthetics of fiction, including notably the crucial role of the narrator. The story contains a number of tales told to the searching main character. One of these, which I call "The Tale of the Man in the Church," discusses the old American theme of the interdependence of events, and is itself a towering document of American literature.
Rating: 
Summary: Cross off the philosopy Cormac and stick to the ambience
Review: I didn't enjoy this book as much as I'd expected. McCarthy certainly has a superb way with dialogue and he effectively creates the ambience I associate in my mind with the border milieu in which the story is set. I also found the way the story developed held my interest. But I find his descriptive passages (and there's plenty of them) can be portentous and pretentious. Also, his philosophising is a bit undergraduate and hardly insightful.
Rating:
Summary: A great contemporary western
Review:
The Crossing is a powerfully-written story of the borderlands--New Mexico, Texas, and the Republic of Mexico. McCarthy is one of the only writers I know of who can write what amounts to a sentimental chivalric romance in a way that combines myth, stream-of-consciousness, and even a bit of postmodernism. When I say this is a sentimental novel, I mean it: three or four scenes will drive readers to tears, especially the final scene, where the protagonist, Billy Parnham, finds the end of the road in an abandoned gas station in Las Cruces, New Mexico, with the backdrop of the Organ Mountains glowing in the sunset. This novel combines the romance of youth found in All the Pretty Horses with the mythic high seriousness of Blood Meridian, both of which are also highly recommended reading for those who like Western American Literature.
The plot of The Crossing is driven by a picaresque series of episodes where Billy looks for a lost wolf, then his brother, but there seems to be something far more significant that he seeks and cannot find. His predicament is accepting the fate of simply being a wanderer, not really having a place in any of the locales he visits. Most of the relationships he establishes end either in death or violence. Even the U.S. Army won't take him. The physical descriptions, as well as Billy's individual passion are so powerfully developed that the reader will not want to put this book down.
The major flaw with this novel is McCarthy's obvious debt to William Faulkner. The first third of the novel is essentially a remake of Faulkner's The Bear, placed in the bootheal of New Mexico, complete with the mythic Last Wild Beast and the mixedblood medicine man. Readers might also find McCarthy's use of Spanish in much of the dialogue to be excessive.
The Crossing is certainly worth reading, but it does not live up to the precedent McCarthy set in the masterful first volume of the Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses, which is perhaps the best American novel written in the last 20 years
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book by an outstanding writer.
Review: McCarthy knows his subject, and describes
things better than any writer since Hemingway.
This story of how two brothers, very different in personality, come to adulthood in Mexico in the early part of this century is great. The attempt to take a wolf, trapped in New Mexico, back into Mexico's Sierra Madre, is heart-breaking. True to life, with Mr. McCarthy's masterful use of the English Language making for a great read. You'll read it more than once
Rating:
Summary: "The most heart-wrenching book I've read this year."
Review: I started The Crossing expecting it to be similar to All The Pretty Horses--a book that could go right up on the movie screen as a Great Western, complete with the hero riding off into the sunset. What I found, instead, was a long twisting thread of a tale where every turn is a turn for the worse, where each decision, even if made for the right reasons, somehow results in loss and even more isolation for the main character, Billy. This slow-building anguish is offset by the almost Zen-like descriptions of the desert, the mountains, the dusty poor towns and people. McCormac's way of presenting dialogue--no quotation marks, and unencumbered by descriptive adverbs (she wrote thoughtfully)-- fits with the spareness of the landscape he describes so gracefully. His one joke in the book (I won't spoil it for you Texans), is told with as much forthrightness as the scene that describes how the blind man lost his eyes--one of the most horrifying things I've ever read. The final scene of the book made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
I put this book down realizing that there were layers and layers of meaning here, and that I had only absorbed one or maybe two. It's a book that I believe will only improve with rereading (and I will be rereading it, something I rarely do), and one that would provide excellent material for classroom discussion on any number of topics. It's a book that I found myself really wanting to talk with somebody about, so hey, somebody invite me to their book club and let's put this one on the list!
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece by a master writer.
Review: I eagerly read The Crossing, having thoroughly
enjoyed All the Pretty Horses (by the way, I stayed away from All the Pretty Horses for quite
some time, just because the title reminded me
of the movie Pretty Woman, and so I thought the
book would be trite - Wrong!). In The Crossing,
Mr. McCarthy truly unleashes his mastery of the
English language, writing in poem-prose throughout. The sequence of the dying wolf is
the best description of death's ultimate relation to life that I've ever read. My feeling after reading the book was that I'd just become part of the anguish that any displaced species or people feels, in this case the wolf representing Mexico's loss of 2/3 of its country to the US and Mexico representing the loss of innocence of the protagonist and thus the loss of innocence of both the US and Mexico - both guilty of the death that must follow life, yet both still neighbors, although now Mexico is much poorer and dangerous, or is it?
Rating:
Summary: Conviction and consequence with nature, man and God.
Review: McCarthy's prose is magnetic and convincing and above all reads true. The story about the she-wolf is well done and riveting, if slightly implausible, but it establishes the theme of personal conviction and courage in the midst of a world which is impersonal and often brutal. It forms the
basis for the majority of the story which follows. McCarthy is successful because he does not judge the actions in his story, he merely tells the story with prose that is never
false and often eloquent. The three narratives inside the main story about Billy establish the major theme regarding conviction and consequences. The first narrative,
about a man who became God's adversary and a priest, could well be McCarthy's own point of view, since it emphasizes the relativity of truth and the importance of the story itself. The second narrative is about a man who was
blinded in the revolution, and supports a perspective that life is to be interpreted from many different viewpoints, all of which are integral and equally valid. The third narrative is about perception and deception, and involves an airplane which has crashed in the wilderness, and what may be true and not true about recovering the airplane. These three narratives are like the legs of a 3-legged stool,
which support the wanderings of Billy in the main story with
a philosophical underpinning, a touchstone upon which to test
Billy's experiences. The action and consequences in Billy's
story are predictable but no less compelling and well told.
I find the main characters in The Crossing and All the Pretty
Horses to be indistinguishable. The prose in The Crossing
is less restrained and often more eloquent than in the All
the Pretty Horses, but it is also less focused overall.
All in all, it is refreshing to find a writer who can inexhaustibly describe the beauties and harsh trials of the world with such conviction and passion.
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