Rating: 
Summary: A Fascinating and Cleverly Written Story
Review: Nick Reding's book is one of the best books I have read in a long time. It gives the reader a well researched perspective on the power of modernization upon the isolated world of the gauchos in Chilean Patagonia. But it is more than a sociological study. It is also a very human story of a family that embodies the dissolution of a culture. This family brings both comedy and tragedy to the unraveling of this piece of history. I found myself so invested in these people by the end of the book that I didn't want it to end.
Rating:
Summary: An Honest Story
Review: Nick Reding's The Last Cowboys at the End of the World is an amazingly written portrayal of the lives of a group of individuals whose life situations are completely intangible to most of us. He makes you feel like you have met and gotten to know each and everyone one of the characters from Duck to his daughters to a night club owner in a bar at the beginning of the book. The connection he makes with the gauchos results in such an honest story that can't help but touch you again and again in every new chapter. Reading this story was a wonderful and easy way to learn about the most southern part of South America and the history of the people down there. . .
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Read
Review: Picked it up and couldn't put it down. Bravo, Mr. Nick Reding!
Rating:
Summary: Very Humurous Book
Review: The seven year old daughter of the two main characters describes a boy who's pestering her at school as relentless as a "red-dicked dog," and her 5-year-old sister says that the same boy " has the whore's tongue, " meaning he stutters because "he can't get the first word out before he's thinking of the second."
Perhaps because theirs is an oral culture, the gauchos are quite inventive when it comes to creating metaphors. They are amazing storytellers, and Reding allows the story to be told through their own words.
While this book is a compassionate account of a culture in transition, and a wonderful story, as other reviews have stated, for me it is the language and the dialogue that make The Last Cowboys memorable.
Rating:
Summary: Admiration
Review: There is a problem with the atractive notion of a Jurassic Park in the Southern Andes, where the presumably extinct gaucho is suddenly found living in numbers by an eterprising New Yorker. The problem is that it is a fanciful notion. Any modest traveler in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego has encountered exemplars of this sturdy human type, so blessed by the interest it has always awakened in writers of an urban background. And in National Geographic as well, who did a reasonably good documentary on Gauchos a few years ago. All of the Gauchos in the film were alive, I hasten to add., and are still probably there, lassoing cattle, etc. And were of different types, according to the region and the landscape. These facts are no great secret. I have briefly lived myself with a quite isolated group of Gauchos in Tierra del Fuego and find risible many of the things told by Reding. More risible even are some of the reviews that speak of unintelligible diallects, and other quasi Lombrosian aspects of the "Last Gauchos", turning these poor people into the strangest thing discoverd since the duckbill platypus. Please, some modesty in the claims. Describing gaucho life is interesting and difficult enough without dressing them up for a Hollywood production.
Rating: 
Summary: Oh dear...
Review: There is a problem with the atractive notion of a Jurassic Park in the Southern Andes, where the presumably extinct gaucho is suddenly found living in numbers by an eterprising New Yorker. The problem is that it is a fanciful notion. Any modest traveler in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego has encountered exemplars of this sturdy human type, so blessed by the interest it has always awakened in writers of an urban background. And in National Geographic as well, who did a reasonably good documentary on Gauchos a few years ago. All of the Gauchos in the film were alive, I hasten to add., and are still probably there, lassoing cattle, etc. And were of different types, according to the region and the landscape. These facts are no great secret. I have briefly lived myself with a quite isolated group of Gauchos in Tierra del Fuego and find risible many of the things told by Reding. More risible even are some of the reviews that speak of unintelligible diallects, and other quasi Lombrosian aspects of the "Last Gauchos", turning these poor people into the strangest thing discoverd since the duckbill platypus. Please, some modesty in the claims. Describing gaucho life is interesting and difficult enough without dressing them up for a Hollywood production.
Rating:
Summary: Best Book on the Gauchos of the Chilean Patagonia
Review: This book is a must read for anyone who has an interest in the Chilean Patagonia and the unique people that live there. Nick has captured exactly the feeling of the area and the people who are a fast disappearing race. I have been travelling and living in the area around Coyhaique for the last ten years. I never thought that I would read an english book about Aysen written with such emotion, insight, and love for these people who are unknown to their fellow Chileans.
Rating: 
Summary: Blue Highways meets South America. Way south.
Review: This book is an exploration/travelogue by a fishing guide-cum-author who went to Patagonia to experience the lifestyle of the "last" cowboys. While it's pretty entertaining, and written well, it just didn't hold my interest after the first hundred pages or so. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if it was shorter.
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written and an extraordinary story
Review: This is an incredible book. It is a true story based on the author's (Nick Reding) time in Chilean Padagonia, where he encounters gauchos who live a life all but extinct elsewhere (riding with herds, slaughtering sheep for sustenance, cattle rustlers, people with visions of the devil). Reding saw this was all about to change because the government built the first road into the area. So Reding set out to document, and in a real sense to preserve, the life of these gauchos. He documents the lives, stories, and customs of the gauchos in incredible detail. This is contrasted with the changes brought about by the truck traffic. While the trucks bring goods and can take the kids to school, they also signal the end of the gaucho life (how can cowboys on horses compete with trucks for speed in getting herds to market?) For the main family Reding focuses on, this leads to a very sad ending for the man (named Duck) who confronts the difficult truth about the future. This is really an exceptional book -- the story, the writing, and the lessons it teaches.
Rating:
Summary: Compelling Subject, Great Writer
Review: This is simply the best book I've read all year. It's the story of a guy who goes to Chile to work as a fishing guide and stumbles on an entire culture of people that history has overlooked--the Chilean gauchos. Most people would have thought, "Wow, that's pretty cool" and left it at that. It's a good thing for us that Nick Reding is a writer with an incredibly sharp and curious mind.Reding returns to live among the gauchos (a cattle-herding people) in remote Chile, where he is exposed to their unique language, culture, and way of life. He stays with a family of five who come to represent many of the different stresses that the modern world places on a poor, rural people--depression, alcoholism, loneliness, desire for material comfort, etc. But Reding gets underneath a lot of this stuff to reveal the spirit of these people who have lived solitary lives in harmony with the stunning landscape for hundreds of years. But don't think for a second that this is some dry sociological account. Reding is first and foremost a writer, and he focuses on the characters he meets and the many tiny plots that connect people and make up the narrative of a whole culture. He does an amazing job of drawing you in, making you care about the people in the book. He goes on harrowing cattle drives, travels to the mountain hideaways of a known criminal, and documents the way that the modern world is changing the gauchos' way of life.
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