All the Pretty Horses

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Summary: An American classic and modern western adventure for all.
Review: This modern day tale of two young men setting off by horse to Mexico explores more than the rough country and characters they encounter. It explores the depth of character of a young man who is tested by his fellow man and the elements. His nobility of spirit is depecited with passion and prose uncommon by any standard. Young readers (12 to 100) can enjoy this literary ride!

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Summary: Not my favorite
Review: Cormack McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses seemed somewhat too affected for my tastes. His hero is somewhat one-dimensional and there is a sense of a desperate search for significance within the novel - in the end most of the themes appear trite and I could not convince myself that this novel was very significant at all. McCarthy's The Crossing is a much better novel - a more finely tuned existential treatise, but still with too many stale ideas

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Summary: McCarthy reigns supreme with All the Pretty Horses.
Review: This is the absolute best novel I have ever read. McCarthy not only writes for the masculine audience (which most people think when the word "western" is said), but adds tenderness and true emotion to all of his characters as well. He displays his style when you discover that you are captivated by every page of this work. If All the Pretty Horses is not on your bookshelf by now, I'll give you about twenty seconds to go back and click that little button that says "add to shopping basket." You deserve an oppurtunity to enjoy this novel, so don't wait, because you still have volume two, The Crossing, to read after that.

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Summary: well worth the work!!
Review: ALL THE PRETTY HORSES is not an easy, lie on the beach read. like faulkner, mccarthy uses the power of language to connect to the emotion of his characters. his descriptions of the landscape are breathtaking, almost biblical, & the characters are defined through their actions & dialogue. the episodic plot is propelled by the cumulative power of all these elements, reaching a devestating finale that will leave the reader anxious to read vol. 2 of the border trilogy ('the crossing')

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Summary: Excellent book if anyone's looking for an adventure.
Review: This book was on the booklist for my English Current American Novel class. Some of the books I didn't finish, but All the Pretty Horses was one that I did. The charactors are so real and their adventure grabs it's reader as if they are actually in Mexico experiencing everything just as John Grady and his friends did. I think I appreciate the author much more when he didn't take the easy route by turning the ending into one big fantasy adventure. It's a most read

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Summary: genial!!!
Review: Si vous ne connaissez pas McCarthy, sans doute que lespremieres pages vont vous Žnerver un petit peu, mais si vous avezla patience d'aller au-dela, ce livre vous reservera des moments comme peu d'autres peuvent pretendre le faire. L'unique point noir est que cela risque de vous couter cher puisque vous voudrez lire ensuite tout McCarthy. Si, comme moi, vous recherchez un veritable morceau de vie brute a travers des pages, n'hesitez plus. A mon avis, l'auteur americain le plus important apres Thomas Wolfe.

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Summary: Encompassing book!
Review: This first novel in Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy" is not one's typical Western tale of Indians and cowboys. I originally began to read All the Pretty Horses very reluctantly for my AP English Literature class in high school. However, the plot washed away all of my qualms. The protagonist, sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole, loses his father to illness and his beloved ranch to legal pettiness. With his friend Lacey Rawlins, he travels by horseback across the Rio Grande into Mexico in search of work and adventure. While they finally find work breaking horses on a hacienda of a wealthy hacendado, Cole and Rawlins also find romance and great trouble. While the plot is exciting, the actual story is not merely centered on horses and danger. It focuses more on a boy's coming of age and how he comes to terms with the choices he has made. McCarthy's style paints a wonderful picture of hacienda life in Mexico without using florid language and makes John Grady's tale an absorbing one. I recommend this National Book Award winner to anyone.

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Summary: Stunning Novel
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. I loved the main character and, unlike some other McCarthy books, the plot is easy to follow. The rhthym of his writing is amazing and after a while you get into a steady pace when you read it. This is by far his best...

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Summary: Pretentious or Just Plain Preposterous?
Review: Written in a laughably absurd, utterly contrived style, Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses" raises a number of important questions, the first of which is: Was the publishing industry temporarily overrun by illiterates in 1992?
Let's cut to the chase. You need only struggle as far as page 5 before you recognize why you're struggling. The sixth sentence on that page has 13 "ands" in it. Yes! The word "and" appears thirteen times in that single sentence! Is this a shallow/pretentious rebellion against grammatical decency or is the author just plain inept? It's preposterous (and painfully unreadable) either way.
Just so you don't think I'm making this up, two sentences later, he drops this tortuous turd of a sentence on us: "He turned south along the old war trail and he rode out to the crest of a low rise and dismounted and dropped the reins and walked out and stood like a man come to the end of something." Does Mr. McCarthy own stock in the word "and"? Does he stand to profit from its appearance in print? And what's with the simile, "like a man come to the end of something?" How does a man come to the end of something stand? Is he sort of looking around perplexed, wondering, "Hey, where did everything go?"
My copy of this book bears a gold seal announcing that "All the Pretty Horses" won The National Book Award. Is that the Hemingway satire contest? Is Cormac McCarthy a Hemingway poseur? What's going on here?
And, so, if you're particularly fond of the word "and" and you want to spend a lot of time reading sentences and sentences and sentences that have a lot of "ands" in them and it doesn't bother you and that's your idea of enjoyable reading and you think it's fun and you want more and it doesn't make you feel like a man come to the end of something, then this is your book! The And.


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Summary: Lonely Island, one book, this is it!
Review: This one deserves an extra star. Beautiful is all I can say to this wonderful novel. This marvellous book has it all. The adventure and the tension is described in a way that makes you part of it. Cormac McCarthy's use of language is wonderful. Like a wave he sometimes describes things, a situation to the tiniest detail - but only for a few seconds. Then the wave drops down on you and he lets you roll within his and your imagination. The nature, the horses, even the romance; you're there and it won't let you go. A novel to reread again and again.