"Makoons" is the last book written, thus far, in "The Birchbark House" series. (Spoilers ahead.) It's a deceptively simple story, which you think is just about the details of ordinary life, but then you realize how many deaths have taken place in the course of the story. Nokomis. Angeline and Fishtail. Two Strike's pet lamb … Continue reading Makoons
During the first quarantine summer (2020), my family and I were binging heavily on the "Little House On the Prairie" television show and starting to read Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" novels. My wife, who read all those novels as a child, suggested we look into a series of young adult novels told from the … Continue reading The Birchbark House
Having read Laura Ingalls Wilder's “Little House” books earlier this year, and now reading “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” for the first time, it seems to me that Mark Twain produced for boys’ childhood something similar to what Wilder did for girls. Both have produced an idealized but recognizable memory of childhood in a time … Continue reading Tom Sawyer
It's a common trope in fiction: a final confrontation between the central hero of a story and its central villain. It's an important trope in Westerns, both on the page and screen -- Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" is just one famous example. And we see it in works of fiction that are too many to count: … Continue reading Hero, meet your villain; or, never mind
I almost skipped reading "Comanche Moon" because of some critical reviews – and it does have a lot of flaws, which I’ll get into. In the end I decided to read it because it brings back Famous Shoes, the Kickapoo tracker who was practically the best single thing about “Streets of Laredo.” And there is … Continue reading Comanche Moon
They say that “Streets of Laredo”, the sequel to "Lonesome Dove,: suffers from not having Gus McCrae, who didn't survive the first book. They also say that because fans wanted to see Gus again, Larry McMurtry wrote his prequels to “Lonesome Dove”, in which we get to see both Gus and Call in their youth: … Continue reading Dead Man’s Walk
I first saw the "Lonesome Dove" miniseries in 1993, about four years after it had first been shown on television. Essentially a six-hour movie, it was widely credited with resurrecting not only the TV miniseries format but also the genre of the Western, which had been thought of as dead for some years. In fact, … Continue reading Unforgiven in Lonesome Dove
Maria didn't believe in hell. If there was a hell it came to you in life."Streets of Laredo," chapter 8 “Streets of Laredo”, the sequel to "Lonesome Dove," is so filled with cruelty and death that paradoxically, it doesn’t feel ultra-realistic; it feels theological and moral – and the environment feels otherworldly. Larry McMurtry once … Continue reading Theology and morality in Laredo
About 10 years ago I saw the television adaptation of Larry McMurtry's novel, "Streets of Laredo," his sequel to "Lonesome Dove." I had recently become a father, and that may have colored my judgment a bit, but I found "Laredo" to be, among many things, most memorably a story about parenthood. Motherhood, in this case. … Continue reading Streets of Laredo
I first saw the TV miniseries adaptation of "Lonesome Dove" in the early 90s, about four years after it premiered. I didn't read the novel until this summer. The movie was and probably always will be one of my favorites, but after reading the novel I'm finding some important differences between the two, that I'd … Continue reading Lonesome Dove book vs movie
