Written by Mac Sandlin <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.\u201d\u00a0 That isn\u2019t the best quote from Larry McMurtry\u2019s 1986 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, \u201cLonesome Dove,\u201d but it\u2019s close. The best quote is probably \u201cLife is San Francisco is still just life,\u201d or maybe \u201cThe hardest thing in life is choosin\u2019 what matters.\u201d But there are a dozen others that one could argue for just as well. The book, and the miniseries based on it (starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall) is worth checking out just for the quotes. I was reminded of that this week because I\u2019d recommended the book to Dana Steil, and he commented on how many great lines there were in it. I am also reminded of it most every week because Kraig Martin peppers so much of his conversations with quotes from it.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I grew up with \u201cLonesome Dove.\u201d Momma and Daddy and my cousins all loved it, so I watched it in junior high, but I didn\u2019t read the book until college. I can remember sitting in my class on Acts sophomore year and reading with the book in my lap while my professor, who deserved more respect and attention than I was giving at the time, lectured about Paul. At a particularly heart-wrenching scene in the book, I felt my eyes fill with tears and I had the very awkward experience of pretending to be so moved by the professor\u2019s comments on the third missionary journey that I began to cry. I remember wondering if he bought it and whether it was a hellable offense to attempt to deceive a decent and godly a man as Owen Olbricht. I regret not paying attention in class, but I\u2019ll never regret reading that book. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cLonesome Dove\u201d is almost certainly the greatest western ever written. It has all the elements of that most American of American genres, but it challenges the standard tropes of the West at every stage of the story. McMurtry wanted to write a western novel that didn\u2019t romanticize the West, but the trouble was that McMurtry was a Texan and an honest writer. It turns out the West is romantic and nobody who tells the truth about it can avoid that fact. McMurty seemed sort of bitter about that and couldn\u2019t ever bring himself to admit it even though the popularity of his story proved it to be so. The cowboy is <\/em>the great American mythic figure, and so \u201cLonesome Dove\u201d ends up performing the epic grandeur and poetry of a cattle drive despite its author\u2019s best efforts to avoid it. The almost, but not quite, cynical worldview of the book serves only to make its deeply admirable characters all the more appealing because of their rough exterior and unacknowledged scars. Besides being deep and wise, and extraordinarily well written, \u201cLonesome Dove\u201d <\/em>is also a thrilling adventure story and hilariously funny, that oh so rare of stories that manages to make us laugh, cry, think and grow. So find some time this semester to read the book. Take a weekend and binge the miniseries. And don\u2019t let the fact that it\u2019s from the \u201880s slow you down any. Like Gus would say, \u201cThe older the violin, the sweeter the music.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Written by Mac Sandlin \u201cThe earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.\u201d\u00a0 That isn\u2019t the best quote from Larry McMurtry\u2019s 1986 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, \u201cLonesome…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15068,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinions"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15068"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}