Rating: 
Summary: Abbey's Second-Best Book
Review: Edward Abbey's first-best book is, of course, "Desert Solitaire," that fictionalized non-fiction work that so eloquently celebrates the pristine Southwest wilderness and mourns its destruction at the hands of industry and politics.
"The Brave Cowboy" is known to many through its filmization with Kirk Douglas. Despite the inane title, "Lonely Are the Brave," it is an excellent movie. But the book is even more excellent.
If you see this work purely as social commentary -- the individual at odds with society -- you miss the point. That aspect of the book, while it is an impassioned message from one of this country's best nature writers, is almost too obvious to deserve mention. The message, and the beautifully detailed setting of Western plains and mountains, are the background.
The foreground is a character study of Jack Burns, a man in perpetual rebellion against authority and incapable of commitment to anything outside of himself. He is generous and caring, but he allows no one to penetrate his stubborn exterior. He refuses to be vulnerable to love or to any of the normal compromises that permit even the most hardened of us individualists to survive in the real world.
He is inevitably doomed by his own intransigence, and that is what makes the story more than just "sad": it is a genuine tragedy. And like all successful tragedies, it is uplifting. The book's triumph is that, even while we know the outcome, we envy Jack Burns. This book is a youthful work. You won't find a Hemingway or a Fitzgerald in the writing style, or even a Jack London. It is a popular book, more like a best-seller than "literature." Nevertheless, the excellence of its story raises it above the main. It is simply a great, and greatly affecting, read.
Rating:
Summary: Abbey's Second-Best Book
Review: Edward Abbey's first-best book is, of course, "Desert Solitaire," that fictionalized non-fiction work that so eloquently celebrates the pristine Southwest wilderness and mourns its destruction at the hands of industry and politics.
"The Brave Cowboy" is known to many through its filmization with Kirk Douglas. Despite the inane title, "Lonely Are the Brave," it is an excellent movie. But the book is even more excellent.
If you see this work purely as social commentary -- the individual at odds with society -- you miss the point. That aspect of the book, while it is an impassioned message from one of this country's best nature writers, is almost too obvious to deserve mention. The message, and the beautifully detailed setting of Western plains and mountains, are the background.
The foreground is a character study of Jack Burns, a man in perpetual rebellion against authority and incapable of commitment to anything outside of himself. He is generous and caring, but he allows no one to penetrate his stubborn exterior. He refuses to be vulnerable to love or to any of the normal compromises that permit even the most hardened of us individualists to survive in the real world.
He is inevitably doomed by his own intransigence, and that is what makes the story more than just "sad": it is a genuine tragedy. And like all successful tragedies, it is uplifting. The book's triumph is that, even while we know the outcome, we envy Jack Burns. This book is a youthful work. You won't find a Hemingway or a Fitzgerald in the writing style, or even a Jack London. It is a popular book, more like a best-seller than "literature." Nevertheless, the excellence of its story raises it above the main. It is simply a great, and greatly affecting, read.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: After reading "The Monkey Wrench Gang" and his opus "A Fool's Progress", I was let down by this particular Abbey effort. The cliched character of Burns, the beleaguered cowboy, riding out of the purple-hazed past to rescue an old buddy from the perils of modern times, is shopworn at best. Abbey's prose, usually spectacular, just doesn't seem up to his standards here. Missing, too, were the pyrotechnic polemics that make Abbey so much fun to read. The ending was so thoroughly telegraphed, I felt slightly insulted. Avoid this book, and read "A Fool's Progress", Abbey at his finest.
Rating:
Summary: One of Abbey's best!
Review: Edward Abbey's first published novel is a modern-day western set in New Mexico. Its hero, Jack Burns, is a man unable to come to terms with an increasingly civilized west, who becomes a fugitive from the law after he attempts to help his friend break out of jail. Hunted by the authorities, he complicates his escape by refusing to leave his skittish horse behind. Despite the awful title, it is a well-written, entertaining novel that explores the tension between personal freedom and modern civilization against a backdrop of stark natural beauty. Made into an even better film under the title Lonely Are the Brave. Coincidentally, I read this book after finishing Rand Johnson's excellent new novel "Arcadia Falls", which tho set in the suburban east, is thematically very similar.
Rating:
Summary: Craft, sharp wit, keen perception, start here.
Review: For those who weren't lucky to have read Abbey chronologically, I'm afraid there are layers that you have missed. (The cowboy for instance.) All advance climbing necessary to reach comfortable rock to lean against while reading "Fool's Progress". Since "Jonathan Troy" is long out of print, fried salted mutton and beans over juniper coals at dawn is not a bad place to begin. Abbey, in this story, dives into the great and growing conflict between the wilderness and the coming of the machine, the struggle of those living between the reality and the romance. Or maybe just two realities. Abbey's comment back in the early 50"s on big brother and the BS rings true today.
Rating:
Summary: Tedious Reading
Review: I am a great fan of Abbey. But after reading several of his books, I am almost convinced that he was a far better essayist than a novelist. This book takes a laboriously long time to develop, and it isn't until the end that the reader even begins to comprehend what Abbey is getting at. (In fact, I'm not sure I get it now.) One possible explaination is that he was trying to draw a parallel between Thoreau and Emmerson. Abbey was a great admirer of Thoreau, and, I believe, took great pride in being compared to him. In this novel Bondi (Emmerson) is the high-browed educated thinker, and Burns (Thoreau) the simpler, more admirable, doer of the word. The story progressively exposes more and more of the differences between the two. But Abbey's prose is incredibly long winded, almost as if he is writing this book to show off how many literary tricks he can use, at the expense of the reader and the story. But it is not until the end of the work (almost as difficult to arrive at as the top of the mountain for Jack Burns) that the reader will feel truly ripped off and cheated. My advice is to stick to Abbey's essay collections, although I truly enjoyed "The Monkey Wrench Gang."
Rating:
Summary: One of Abbey's best!
Review: I liked Edward Abbey long before I read his work as I saw the movie adaptation of this book "Lonely Are The Brave" back in the Sixties. Abbey’s protagonist, Jack Burns, the uncompromising rebel from another America, is as free spirited as his creator. Constantly at odds with modern life, he eventally violates enough of its ways to become sought by the law. Hunted relentlessly he chooses to stay with his horse and chance his escape across rugged mountains rather than abandoning him and fleeing on foot.... Burns is not your typical cowboy hero; he is a reminder that the individual is sometimes far grander than the shackles he creates by the imposed rules of society.
Rating: 
Summary: One of Abbey's Earliest
Review: I liked Edward Abbey long before I read his work as I saw the movie adaptation of this book "Lonely Are The Brave" back in the Sixties. Abbey’s protagonist, Jack Burns, the uncompromising rebel from another America, is as free spirited as his creator. Constantly at odds with modern life, he eventally violates enough of its ways to become sought by the law. Hunted relentlessly he chooses to stay with his horse and chance his escape across rugged mountains rather than abandoning him and fleeing on foot.... Burns is not your typical cowboy hero; he is a reminder that the individual is sometimes far grander than the shackles he creates by the imposed rules of society.
Rating:
Summary: Abbey's free-spirited, fugitive, and very mythic cowboy. . .
Review: It was one of Edward Abbey's regrets that he was appreciated more for his nature writing ("Desert Solitaire") than his fiction. And it was another regret that he was mostly forgotten as the author of the story on which the movie "Lonely are the Brave" was based. However, after reading "The Brave Cowboy," I'd have to vote with those who find his nonfiction far more inspiring and satisfying. It's a novel that still rewards the reading, but almost 50 years after its publication in 1956, it seems somewhat dated, while "Desert Solitaire" remains as fresh and relevant as if it were written yesterday.
Abbey was still in his twenties when he wrote this novel, and its point of view is that of a young man full contradictory passions and attitudes. The brave cowboy of the title, a prototypical figure on horseback, is the central character in maybe half the pages of the novel. A younger college friend, imprisoned for refusing to register for the draft, is another character. The local sheriff gets a large section to himself. The novel also follows the progress of a long-haul truck driver across the country. The lives of these four characters intersect in the narrative, while each of them also represents a different perspective. And they don't all quite converge in a single point of view. But that was Abbey, an outspoken man who wasn't afraid to contradict himself.
To its credit, the novel can be read on more than one level. It uses the cowboy to represent free-spirited, libertarian ideas set in conflict with brute ignorance and repression. It decries urbanization and celebrates the limitless, stark beauty of the mountains and desert (the novel is set in northern New Mexico). It's also a prison drama, and it tells a satirical yet gripping story of heavily armed but mostly inept law officers in pursuit of a fugitive. A reader interested in a 1950s view of the West and its people in post-war transition will find much to enjoy in Abbey's youthful book about a mythic cowboy's adventure and the lives it disrupts.
As a companion volume, I'd also recommend James Galvin's "Fencing the Sky," which tells a similar story about a cowboy pursued across a Western landscape by the law.
Rating:
Summary: check out the movie too
Review: Q: What's your occupation? A: Cowhand, sheepherder; game poacher. Q: Where's your papers?...Your I.D.--draft card, social security, driver's license? A: Don't have none. Don't need none. I already know who I am. Edward Abbey is one of the patron saints of the modern Environmental movement; right up there with Rachel Carson. Desert Solitaire, his memoir of working in a National Park, is an impassioned statement of preservationist principles and his comic novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, is a virtual primer for ecoterrorism. But my personal favorite of his books is the little remembered Brave Cowboy, the basis for the excellent but equally forgotten Kirk Douglas film, Lonely Are the Brave. It belongs on the shelf with the other uniquely American paens to independence and rugged individualism: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest(read Orrin's review), Cool Hand Luke, From Here to Eternity (read Orrin's review), All the Pretty Horses (read Orrin's review), etc. Set in the mid 1950's, the novel tells the story of Jack Burns, a latter day cowboy, now reduced to working as a hand on a sheep ranch, who gets himself thrown into prison so that he can help his draft dodging friend escape. But when his buddy refuses to compromise the moral purity of his concientious objector status, Burns is forced to break out on his own, assuming that a vicious Mexican prison guard he has aggravated doesn't kill him first. In the meantime the authorities have realized that Jack too is unregistered and that while they were in college together, he helped his friend with some radical causes, however ineffectual. So when he does manage to escape, Jack ends up being treated as a dangerous fugitive, instead of as the fairly harmless eccentric that he is. Pursued by locals, feds, the military and the sadistic guard, he takes off into the desert, his only allies a high spirited horse, who's as much trouble as help, and a phlegmatic local sherriff named Morlin Johnson. In a broader sense though, what the book is really about is the clash between the values of the old West and the bureaucratic, mechanized, regimented and federalized modern West. Though it lacks the memorable set-pieces that distinguish the other books cited above and is admittedly none too subtle in portraying the menace of modern life, it succeeds nonetheless because the character of Jack Burns evokes such nostalgia in the reader and like Don Quixote, we find the mental world that he lives in more attractive than the reality that has begun to crowd in on him. I like the novel very much and especially recommend the movie. GRADE: B+
|
