| All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, Book 1) |  | Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Seller: Yankee_Clipper_Books_
Rating:  333 reviews
Sales Rank: 1,153
Media: Paperback
Edition: Trade Paperback Edition
Pages: 301
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 0679744398
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679744399
ASIN: 0679744398
Publication Date: June 29, 1993
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| • | ISBN13: 9780679744399 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Part bildungsroman, part horse opera, part meditation on courage and loyalty, this beautifully crafted novel won the National Book Award in 1992. The plot is simple enough. John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick--a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins--encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal hacienda where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance. Readers familiar with McCarthy's Faulknerian prose will find the writing more restrained than in Suttree and Blood Meridian. Newcomers will be mesmerized by the tragic tale of John Grady Cole's coming of age.
Product Description
The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Cormac McCarthy Reads Like Poetry July 28, 2010
D. Scott (Athens, GA USA)
I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road first, and loved it so much that I picked up All the Pretty Horses soon thereafter. McCarthy's flat, distinctive prose reads like poetry, and several passages were so breathlessly beautiful that I went back to read them again and again.
All the Pretty Horses exists at a crossroads, both old west and new, as Cole and Rawlins leave their small town in Texas in 1949 to cross into Mexico at ages 16 and 17 looking for adventure. Along the way they meet up with Blevins, an even younger runaway who tries to recover his horse after losing it in a lightning storm. They end up being chased by the Mexican authorities, working on a ranch, breaking horses, falling in love, getting thrown in prison, and learning about the good, the bad, the old, and the new of life along the way.
Truly this is a book to savor, and at the end I wished that it would go on. I am now looking forward to reading the rest of the Border Trilogy. Cormac McCarthy's writing is a national treasure, and will live on forever in all those who read it. Highly recommended.
He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret May 27, 2010
Aidan (USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a fantastic story - powerful, amusing, and moving. McCarthy has such a great way of engaging the reader by alternating between being economical with his prose during one moment, and gushing the next. This novel contains narrative so powerful and beautiful that I could scarcely believe they were hidden within a western novel.
 MUCHO--MUCHO----SPANISH May 24, 2010
LENNY (CONNECTICUT)
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
THAT TITLE GIVES AWAY THIS REVIEW---WAY--WAY--TOO MUCH SPANISH---
WITH LITTLE OR NO ENGLISH TRANSLATION. I TRIED TO TAKE THE TIME
TO CROSS-TO ENGLISH SOME OF IT---BUT---WAY TOO MUCH. ON TOP OF THAT--
I THOUGHT THE STORY WAS PRETTY GOOD---BUT---IT GOT MESSED UP WHEN THE
AUTHOR STARTED PUTING IT INTO WORDS. RUN-ON AFTER RUN-ON AFTER RUN-ON,
AND, THERE WERE PARTS OF THE BOOK THAT---?? WHY IS THIS IN HERE ??
Just don't bother-- May 16, 2010
E. Willingham (Heart of Texas, the USA,)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The abridgment makes the most sense in this book of the trilogy, but this is not a work to abridge. Literary fiction should never be abridged.
Brad Pitt's reading is better for this book than for the others also. (Pitt does not even bother to approximate Spanish phonology and seems bored by the task of reading.)
Still a pitiful enough effort that you should seek an unabridged version read by someone else.
Some reviews on this page either do not refer to the audio version or do not refer to this audio version. Caveat emptor.
Violent, wry, beautifully wrought May 16, 2010
Ty B. Powers (Nashville, TN)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Toward the end of "All the Pretty Horses," the main character John Grady Cole shoots a deer. When he reaches the doe, he kneels beside her to usher her tenderly to her death. His mind is filled with thoughts of the tumultuous journey that has brought him to this point:
"...he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."
Later, John watches a funeral from a distance: "...for a moment he held out his hands...as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead."
Rife with these types of profound observations, this wry, beautifully wrought, sometimes comic novel is compelling, exultant, and heartbreaking.
Clearly, "All the Pretty Horses" is a multifaceted love story. First, it reveals the affection between John, a miraculously gifted horse whisperer, and his subjects: "What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise." Second, there's the more traditional, yet troubled love between the impecunious John and Alejandra, his wealthy boss's refined and beautiful daughter. And finally, there's the love expressed between John and his best friend Lacey Rawlins. In fact, this fraternal relationship may be the novel's most fleshed-out. McCarthy rarely expresses this love through dialogue, yet reveals it clearly and deeply: "They rode out on the prairie and sat on the ground and let the animals drift with the reins down and he told Rawlins all that had happened. They sat very quietly. The dead moon hung in the west and the long flat shapes of the nightclouds passed before it like a phantom fleet."
In a much broader sense, this novel illuminates a writer's unbridled love for his setting. McCarthy's broad affectionate descriptions of the Texan and Mexican landscapes are uncommonly detailed and full of integrity. In this, my third McCarthy novel, I'm finally beginning to get a real sense of his unparalleled use of setting as a character unto itself. That's a rare quality, even in the most accomplished writer.
"All the Pretty Horses" explores the perpetually inventive ways humans simultaneously revel in life, drinking in every vivid particle, while inexplicably separating themselves from it through fear, cruelty, and indifference. Perhaps this inherent compartmentalization explains how people can inflict evil on others and still sleep at night and also how victims somehow manage to extract tiny shreds of forgiveness from a soul otherwise decimated by their victimizers. Sometimes that perpetrator is life itself.
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