Rating: 
Summary: Comanche Moon by Catherine Anderson
Review: Comanche Moon, was the first book I started reading, and because of this book, this woman, I am now an avid reader of historical romances. Catherine didn't have a problem making the scenes and creators as true to life as possible. You are made to feel like you are right there as the events are unfolding. I now want to read all of her books, and have gone on to read other historical romance authors' work. Thank you Mrs. Anderson.
Rating: 
Summary: Gruesome. Falls between two better works.
Review: Comanche Moon has all the expectations of Jurassic Park III -- after the first creative burst, it's a tough act to follow; by the third part of the trilogy (second in the chronology of the protagonists), the author has set a definitive tone and built an adoring audience. "Moon" carries on in the "Lonesome Dove" tradition, but with some apparent errors in chronology, excessive torture details, and little of the humor of the original.The color of Texas is there. The struggle to live. The demise of the Indian culture and population. Honor, venegance and tradition. The details of the dreary topography. The eccentricities that must have accompanied many of those who tested this rugged life. There's a vivid portrait of a morbid time of war, Indian raids, and rapes. Having immensely enjoyed the original "Dove" book and miniseries and having a less glowing memory of the follw up, picking"Moon" up at the public library, I was expecting a long, rich read. McMurtry kept me engaged through the 700+ pages. But I finished with a deep sense of disappointment. For the same reason I've stopped reading the repetitive themes of Tom Clancy and John Grisham, I doubt I'll try McMurtry again.
Rating: 
Summary: A prequel to be read after the sequel...
Review: The events from the past that are referenced in Lonesome Dove are brought to life beautifully in this prequel, which was, of course, written afterward. Gus McCrae, in my opinion, is one of the 20th century fiction's most humorous, memorable and well-developed characters - and Comanche Moon keeps him out front. He also exposes the more of the makings of Capt. Call just as his crust begins to harden. One of the most outstanding and entertaining characters here is Famous Shoes, the Indian tracker who was introduced in Streets of Laredo. Overall, I found Comanche Moon to be compelling and authentic. It follows closest to the feel and sentiment of Lonesome Dove. My only disappointment was that McMurtry changed the story up some toward the end of the book, creating some inconsistencies where Lonesome Dove picks up. I'm glad I read the latter first.
Rating:
Summary: Comanche Moon
Review: This book was an exellent western novel , where every chapter somethings happening. Some of the things that I liked about it were that it started out really good.And when the Civil War broke out none of them joined.It was really good that Blue Duck got kicked out of his fathers camp.Incredibly captain Inish Scull survived all of the tortures.Another good thing was that Newt got to stay with the rangers. Five things that I didn't like about the book were when Long Bill Coleman hung himself.And the comnanches had a great raid that led all the way to the ocean and killed everything in his path.It was also sad when Clara didn't get to marry Gus.Blue Duck kills Buffalo Hump and doesn't aloow him a peaceful death.The book was just a little to long.Someone who would enjoy this book was someone who enjoys a good western novel.
Rating:
Summary: The Last of its Line, Long and Far
Review: I think of all the books in the series about Gus and Woodrow, Comanche Moon is the closest in tone and feel to Lonesome Dove. There are fewer annoying inconsistencies than there are in the other prequels and sequels. McMurtry might have been making a special effort to wrap the series up neatly. The plot ambles along like a lost mule looking for water and there are occasional episodes of sickening violence and torture, but on the whole, one is just grateful for the chance to spend another seven or eight hundred pages with McCrae and Call.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining tale of the Old West
Review: Comanche Moon is a prequel to Lonesome Dove, and the sequel to Dead Man's Walk. Strong characters populate this sprawling tale of the Texas Rangers and the violence of the times. An enjoyable read from a talented storyteller. Not being completely consistent with the series and a few loose ends kept McMurtry from getting my "5th Star."
Rating:
Summary: McMurtry spins an Entertaining Tale
Review: "Commanche Moon" is a prequel to "Lonesome Dove," and the sequel to "Dead Man's Walk." Strong characters populate this sprawling tale of the Texas Rangers and the violence of the Old West. Not completely consistent with the series and a few loose ends kept McMurtry from getting my "5th Star."
Rating:
Summary: The second-best book McMurtry ever wrote
Review: The best, of course, being the first book in this series, "Lonesome Dove". I'm not sure whether McMurtry ever intended to write more books featuring Gus McCrae & Woodrow Call, but I'm certainly glad he did. And it's only fitting, somehow, that the book that says on its cover, "the final volume of the Lonesome Dove story", be almost as good as the first. We learn about some of the things that Gus and Woodrow referred to in that first book. We learn something about why Jake is the way he is in that first book. And we also learn a lot about Newt and his future relationships with the rangers. There's a lot more, but it would take a lot more than a thousand words to mention everything. I do have some problems with this book - not with McMurtry's writing, but with the way the publisher laid it out. First of all, check out the back cover - Gus McCrae's first name is Augustus, NOT August. And check out the spelling of some of the words in the book. I didn't think McMurtry was British or Canadian; I don't remember "behavior" being spelled in the British manner in "Lonesome Dove", but here it's spelled "behaviour" consistently - and other words follow suit. The publishers better go over the next edition of this book very carefully so they can avoid these kinds of mistakes.
Rating:
Summary: Light on plot.
Review: Once again, I enjoyed the great characters of 'Lonesome Dove' but found the story scrappy, inconclusive and unsatisfying.
Rating:
Summary: A Story and Maybe Something More
Review: What makes fiction fiction? Or at least what makes it serious fiction? A recent article in the New York Times extolled the virtues of the "post-modern" literary milieu in which authors allegedly meld the visceral with the experimental in order to re-combine the purely intellectual approach of those deemed by Philip Rahv (of PARTISAN REVIEW fame) to be literary "pale-faces" with the more earthy renderings of those he called the "red-skins." Story, as such, doesn't count for much in this analysis. And yet this surely gives short shrift to that aspect of fiction, leaving the telling of stories to the lower realm of so-called commercial fiction. An error in my mind since I think that stories, modernism or post-modernism be damned, are what fiction ought to be about. But what constitutes a story? McMurtry is an author who has repeatedly demonstrated his facility for telling tales though he has not surrendered his place in serious literature for that. And yet this one, COMMANCHE MOON, is no story in the ordinary sense at all. Nor is it experimental in any post-modern sense either. And yet it succeeds because it weaves a world of events for us which give us the feeling of being there, that we have seen and felt what its characters have seen and felt once we have turned the final page. Here is a tale of men surviving in a world of unknowable and almost metaphysical violence, of men who are not heroes in any formal sense of that word, men who are often clumsy, thoughtless blunderers who "make it through" by a combination of will and luck rather than heroic achievements. The last tale in the LONESOME DOVE saga, this one may be the strangest yet as it takes the two Texas Rangers, Gus MacCrae and Woodrow Call, through their formative years and into their maturity. Theirs is an odyssey of survival as they set out on numerous expeditions which mostly end in failure or partial success, at best. Although they are apparently successful much of the time (we hear about their capturing and hanging numerous thieves and brigands) it is not their successful forays which interest McMurtry. Rather it is those events which seem to characterize for him the futility of existence itself. Gus and Call repeatedly bang their heads against the harsh west Texas ground as they go after the Commanches (who are dwindling, though ever formidable, in the face of the white onslaught) and the implacably evil Mexican bandit Ahumado (a man, if we may call him that, whom even the Commanches fear, a man who seems to have stepped out of our darkest nightmares). The heroism here is not one of gunplay or gunfighters in bloody face-offs but of survival, as men contend against an implacably unfriendly world, a world in which all are beasts in an unremitting place where only the Law of the Jungle prevails. It is Gus and Call's victory to have survived this world and to have grown competent enough to endure it and, in the end, to have outlasted it as the tides of new settlers sweep over the violent and bloody west Texas plains and wash away the old ways and peoples. There is a terrible violence here which may be McMurtry's vision of the world as it is. And the heroism is nothing less than surviving the worst nightmares men can conjure up for their fellows. Women are brutally raped and slaughtered; men fare no better. All are subject to the vilest of tortures, some literally being skinned alive -- all very distasteful in the end. And yet it's also uplifting in a strange sort of way as our heroes outlast the dark world they have somehow stumbled into. No, there is no story here in the ordinary sense for this is a book of episodic and generally incomplete missions and contests between men who in the end are barely more than beasts (either because they are predatory or because they are reduced to resisting the predations of others). And yet it is a book which absorbs us and gives the sense of being there. In that sense it is certainly a tale. And a level of fiction which I doubt the so-called post-modernists, with all their experimental pretensions, are ever likely to achieve.
|
