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All the Pretty Horses | 
| Author: Cormac Mccarthy
Creator: Brad Pitt
Publisher: Random House Audio
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
Buy New: $13.75
You Save: $8.20 (37%)
New (2) Used (8) from $8.00
Rating:  311 reviews
Sales Rank: 1311754
Format: Abridged, Audiobook
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Abridged
Number Of Items: 3
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 5.7 x 5 x 1
ISBN: 0375415874
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375415876
ASIN: 0375415874
Publication Date: September 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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
Three CDs, 3 hours
Read by Brad Pitt
Soon to be a major motion picture starring Matt Damon, directed by Billy Bob Thorton and produced by Mike Nichols!
A critical triumph, this is the story of John Grady Cole, who at 16 finds himself at the dying end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. To escape a society moving in all the wrong directions, Cole and two companions decide to seek their future in Mexico, a land at once beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. But what begins as an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, leads, in fact, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Within months, one of the boys is dead, and the other two aged beyond their years.
A story about childhood passing, innocence and an American age, here is a grand story and an education in responsibility, revenge, and survival. All the Pretty Horses is truly a masterpiece.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 306 more reviews...
There's just something about the way Cormac McCarthy writes words on the page. June 22, 2009
M. E. Bobola (Reston, VA USA)
Going in, I was skeptical that I would particularly like this novel and made the choice simply on my enjoyment with previous novels and the promise of the premise of The Crossing that I could read after this.
Horses and cowboy life are the kind of thing that I never knew I could enjoy, especially not in the amount that it takes to read an entire novel about. This, however, is truly a man's tale. McCarthy's striking prose mixed with his distinct style made it a joy to read, especially in the two middle sections where the action really picks up.
It does take a bit to get going, though. There was also a part in the final section where the story was a very complex description of action with little dialogue that lost me a little. On the whole, this is a great story that runs you through a wide range of emotions and manages to surprise you in that trademark McCarthy way.
Strange but Recommended May 17, 2009
Ethan Cooper (Big Apple)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Open ALL THE PRETTY HORSES to a random page and you're likely encounter a classic cowboy sensibility. This emanates from McCarthy's hero, John Grady Cole, as well as from Cole's interaction with his friend Rawlins. To simplify somewhat, McCarthy captures these characters as men, competent in their responsibilities, sound in judgment, and experienced with guns and horses. As a bonus, they have laconic cowboy-style conversations--Yep.... Nope--that are often funny and surprisingly profound. All this works... provided the reader forgets that Cole is 16 and Rawlins is 17.
Remember the movie Rio Bravo? Well, in HORSES, McCarthy has placed the sensibility of the Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) into the body of Colorado Ryan (Ricky Nelson). This makes for a slightly weird book, with its often beautiful realism shadowed by Cole's impossible maturity.
Of course, it's unfair to criticize an author for the book he didn't write. Still, I don't see why McCarthy had to make his hero and sidekick so young. McCarthy could have explored the same rich mine of themes--the search for the ideal of the American West, the power of individual integrity, the resourcefulness of certain men, the complex interfacing of cultures, and institutional violence--just as well with Cole and Rawlins, and their errant buddy Jimmy Blevins, at a credible 40. Yes, there's a young-love subplot in HORSES. But with adjustments (add a hot older woman), McCarthy could have managed this successfully. So, I wonder: Was McCarthy thinking ahead as he wrote HORSES, seeing the need to keep Cole young to write his The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, Cities of the Plain (Everyman's Library)? Or, does he just work best when a major character is a teenager or child?
This is my third Cormac McCarthy novel. IMHO, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Modern Library) is a masterpiece, with McCarthy telling the story of the Glanton Gang so that its violence has epic and profound reach. Similarly, The Road told a story of survival--maybe, after a nuclear apocalypse--in which the most basic achievements have deep reverberations. For depth in HORSES, McCarthy relies, in part, on an amazing monologue by the character Alfonsa, who tells stories of her Mexico, where unjustified and terrible violence lurks beneath a polished and civil veneer. Definitely, Alfonsa's Mexican interpretation is a valid overview of Cole's story. Even so, McCarthy finally shows Cole to be American, who decides (SPOLIER ALERT!) that the best resolution of his Mexican experience is to return to Texas with his property.
ALL THE PRETTY HORSES is definitely a worthwhile read and features plenty of McCarthy's usual elegance and eloquence. A slightly strange novel but recommended.
 A Slow Read With Little Momentum May 15, 2009
B. Brody (Fairbanks, Alaska)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book was chosen by my reading group. I found the book a slow read with
little momentum. Though poetic, I did not feel vested in the outcomes or the
characters. I am at a loss to decipher why so many people I respect think so
highly of this book. I just did not get it.
 Don't Miss This One... April 29, 2009
Big D (Auburn, AL. USA)
A fine Western,very fine...An adventure story and a love story, a man's love story told from his perspective about a forbidden love (aren't they the mosst daring kind?) Told against the backdrop of a young man seeking hope and a new life, clashes of Mexican and American culture and tradition, Old World/New World values and experiences, Youthful hope and optimism against middle and old age maturity and, perhaps, conventional wisdom. Throughout there is a yearning for a successful resolution, but you will have to read the book to know its ending. It's hard to read about a man aching as much for his love as John Grady Cole aches for his lady.
One of the most touching passages is on page 284 of the paperback edition: "He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the (wedding) activities in the square and he said it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all..."
Lots of macho stuff, too. riding, roping, fighting, even a little dancing...lots of male bonding and friendship of the highest level and degree.
If you like Westerns, don't miss this; if you like adventure stories, don't miss this; if you don't mind a good love story told from the man's perspective, don't miss this. Starts off slow, but stay with it--it will blow you away.
The hero John Grady Cole gives us all hope...and, as with Mary and Joseph, it is hard to realize that young people, seemingly so very young, could endure so much and accomplish so much. It's about youth, their toughness, their durability, their dependablity and, ultimately, their hope.
(No sacrilege meant with the comparison of John Grady Cole and Mary and Joseph--just meant to show that young people, 14-15-16 can and do accomplish great and admirable things while enduring seemingly unbearable hardships.)
A young man draws upon the man inside to survive April 19, 2009
C. B Collins Jr. (Atlanta, GA United States)
Once again Cormac McCarthy demonstrates that he is one of the finest novelists in the English language, a master of description. His use of the language is poetic, descriptive, and unique. I found myself continually amazed at the metaphors and descriptions that McCarthy uses, built into sentences that flow and sway with the tides of the narrative, evoking long hidden insights about the human condition which centers of the human tragedy of existence. His work resonates with that of Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway. Like Melville in Moby Dick, he experiences the tragedy of humanity, evolved beyond the other animals cognitively just enough to realize we are not God. Like Faulkner's bleak view of the defeated Southern USA, he invents and resurrects language, twists language and words, and makes juxtapositions that astound. Like Hemingway, he has an economy of description, giving just enough, making each paragraph a sprint to the finish line. I read at least 24 books a year and McCarthy has become my favorite living author. In this book, All the Pretty Horses, his considerable talents carry us on a terrifying journey of painful experiences and continual resurrection of the will to move forward.
The journey, the trip, the odyssey, the quest is a very common armature in the novel form. It is expected that those on the journey will change in some manner. It is expected that they will meet a broad range of characters and experience a vast number of adventures, all of which shape and mold the characters and entertain the reader. In this regard, All the Pretty Horses is exactly on the money. It delivers. It is a bit more sophisticated than the typical coming of age story, even though the story is primarily about a young 16 year old man. To me it seemed that the story was more about how terrible challenges pull out the man in the boy rather than creates a man out of a boy, or at least this was my impression of All the Pretty Horses.
There are passages of the book that are extremely beautiful, especially the description of Cole and Rawlins taming wild horses, one after another, all day long and into the evening, just to show they can accomplish this feat.
McCarthy also demonstrates a post-modern influence in that he allows an elderly Mexican aristocratic woman to offer a long and complex narrative into the very center of the novel, shifting from the bleak, truncated narratives of the teenage boys to the philosophical and sophisticated narrative of this elderly women, still engaged in power and influence.
Like many novels by McCarthy, we meet a character that seems like something out of mythology, and in the character of Jimmy Blevins, the 14 year old sharp shooting, horse stealing runaway trouble magnet, we are given a dose of this character that brings tragedy down upon all the other characters. Blevins, afraid of Jupiter's lightening, seems to evoke trouble everywhere he goes, with the effect that he seems like a curse upon his fellow man.
McCarthy is a pleasure to read, his poetic dark music cuts deep, assuring us that it really is bad out there and survival is not a joke. But both physical and emotional and spiritual survival are all impacted in the worlds created by McCarthy and the one thing we can be assured of in his universe is that we will get bruised. In fact, we will be lucky if it is just bruises.
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