FOLLY AND GLORY by Larry McMurtry - SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOK
In this brilliant saga -- the final volume of The Berrybender Narratives
and an epic in its own right -- Larry McMurtry lives up to his
reputation for delivering novels with "wit, grace, and more than a hint
of what might be called muscular nostalgia, fit together to create a
panoramic portrait of the American West" (The New York Times Book Review).
As
this finale opens, Tasmin and her family are under irksome, though
comfortable, arrest in Mexican Santa Fe. Her father, the eccentric Lord
Berrybender, is planning to head for Texas with his whole family and
his retainers, English, American, and Native American. Tasmin, who
would once have followed her husband, Jim Snow, anywhere, is no longer
even sure she likes him, or knows where to go to next. Neither does
anyone else -- even Captain Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame, is puzzled
by the great changes sweeping over the West, replacing red men and
buffalo with towns and farms.
In the meantime, Jim Snow,
accompanied by Kit Carson, journeys to New Orleans, where he meets up
with a muscular black giant named Juppy, who turns out to be one of
Lord Berrybender's many illegitimate offspring, and in whose company
they make their way back to Santa Fe. But even they are unable to
prevent the Mexicans from carrying the Berrybender family on a long and
terrible journey across the desert to Vera Cruz.
Starving, dying
of thirst, and in constant, bloody battle with slavers pursuing them,
the Berrybenders finally make their way to civilization -- if New
Orleans of the time can be called that -- where Jim Snow has to choose
between Tasmin and the great American plains, on which he has lived all
his life in freedom, and where, afterall her adventures, Tasmin must
finally decide where her future lies.
With a cast of characters that includes almost every major real-life figure of the West, Folly and Glory
is a novel that represents the culmination of a great and unique
four-volume saga of the early days of the West; it is one of Larry
McMurtry's finest achievements.