A week for Larry McMurtry and the Lonesome Dove series

Lonesome Dove
Publisher: Pocket (December 15, 1988)
ISBN: 067168390X

Streets of Laredo
Publisher: Pocket (November 1, 1995)
ISBN: 0671537466

Dead Man's Walk
Publisher: Pocket (June 1, 1996)
ISBN: 0671001167

Comanche Moon
Publisher: Pocket (June 1, 1998)
ISBN: 0671020641

(The series is presented in order of publication above. The chronological order of the narrative is: Dead Man's Walk, Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo. I am undecided as to the proper order to read them in, but more on that below.)


Larry McMurtry is a mainstay of modern American literature, author of a half-dozen classics. A number of his books have been turned into highly successful films (The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, among others), Lonesome Dove won him a Pulitzer Prize and turned into a TV miniseries starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones (winning 6 Emmys), and he himself won an Academy Award and Golden Globe Award as the co-writer of the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. I regard the four-book Lonesome Dove series as just about his best work, and include it as a series among the best novels I’ve ever read, irrespective of genre. Ignore the fact that they are historical novels set in the American West during the second half of the 19th Century as you don’t need to be a fan of Westerns to love these books (though I am a fan of Westerns, for the record).

I picked up fresh (used) copies of Lonesome Dove, as well as Comanche Moon and Streets of Laredo in my book buying binge 10 days ago and read the series in chronological order for the first time; I’d read the four novels in order of publication the first time through. It had been years since I’d read them all. I had the feeling that I was reading something fresh, but at the same time I was encountering old friends again. The series totals about 2,800 pages but I burned through them in about six days, staying up late, reading on the beach, and getting my house guest for the weekend hooked on Burnout: Revenge so I could read while he blew up cars for a few hours on Saturday afternoon in lieu of a nap. I was, in a word, happy.

I’m not going to get into the plot hardly at all. The story is important and beautifully told, but it is the characters, the setting, and the tone that make this series destined to become a classic. McMurtry follows two primary characters (Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call) and a host of secondary characters of varying importance and staying power through about 50 years of life. You’ll find love and gunfights, cowboys and Indians, heroes and villains, school marms and whores, deaths and births, humor and tears sufficient to satisfy any reader. Don’t confuse these books with your John Wayne movies, though (disclaimer: I love John Wayne movies), or with Louis L’Amour’s countless stories and novels (disclaimer: I love Louis L’Amour’s stories and novels): McMurtry has a style all his own.

In your traditional Westerns, be they books or movies, you follow the story of archetypes: white hats and black hats, spirited young ladies, evil ranchers, defenseless townspeople, all set against a stunning backdrop of Western countryside. Even the “shades of grey” examples (such as Unforgiven, The Searchers, or The Magnificent Seven né Shichinin no Samurai), still focus on the traditional ‘big picture’ elements of the traditional Western: honor, duty, love, hate, doing “what needs to be done”, and self-reliance. Clint Eastwood strives against a failing body and declining skills, but he faces a prototypical foe with the help of the doomed comrade and goofy youngster. John Wayne goes out to rescue his niece under the cloud of his blatant racism against Indians and the complex issues involved, but the story elements are fairly standard for a John Ford masterpiece. The Magnificent Seven defend a small town from evil banditos and go from fighting for money to fighting for a cause, men with checkered backgrounds getting a final chance to balance the books, but it’s still a bunch of cowboys fighting Mexican bandits and winning the girl in the end. I want to reiterate that I love that genre, and think that “traditional” Westerns are a valuable source of ideas and entertainment. The contrast with them, though, it what makes the Lonesome Dove series so stunning.

In one of the few commonalities with the rest of the genre, McMurtry describes the Great Plains and Texas with passion and accuracy, giving you broad sweeping horizons and the smallest details in turn. He respects the land and loves the land, but makes sure to show that it can be ugly as well as beautiful, deadly as well as fertile. A good Western includes the West as a primary character, and these books are good Westerns.

The unique part of the Lonesome Dove series is the descriptions and characters. Rarely is one moved by any of the “big picture” ideals above, and rarely does McMurtry touch on them specifically. Characters spend more time talking about the behavior and personality of pigs, for example, than they do discussing honor and duty. Honor is not really an issue, and duty is either taken for granted or shirked, depending on the character and situation. McMurtry takes us inside the heads of countless individuals, giving each a distinct flavor and thought process. It’s this that makes the series so good, and the books superior by far to a screen interpretation. You learn so much about the folks in the story: mostly uneducated, some Indians, some Mexican, some white. There are rich and poor, bold and meek (and most trend closer to meek), young and old, and each one’s thoughts and actions are a result of their situation and background. The conflicts between individuals and groups are so obvious and even predictable in a tragic way once McMurtry lets you inside their minds for a few minutes. I wish I could better describe how unique the experience is, but you’ll just have to see for yourself.

Characters come and go, in part because McMurtry shows no hesitation in killing them off (regardles of whether they are large or small), but you get to know them all as much as they deserve. The bitter, difficult life on the frontier gets driven home time after time with hard-fought victories that don’t matter much at all in the grand scheme of things, people who die due to the smallest of mistakes, or just bad luck. Animals are treated harshly (he documents the retreat and disappearance of the buffalo through the novels, so gently you hardly notice), as they were out there. The Indians are portrayed as noble savages or as barbarians at the gate: they are treated as individuals, just like all the other characters. Their struggle for primacy and then just survival isn’t offered as a parable, or as a lesson, it just happens and you feel badly about it for a time. Don’t expect climactic battles and a stirring climax to the books, that’s not how they work or how life works. There are lots of battles and lots of climaxes, but in the end life goes on. The bad fades just like the good, sometimes tomorrow comes to you, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s always there for someone else.

The nearest equivalent series I’ve seen is probably the John Sandford Lucas Davenport series of detective novels. Both authors conjure up the gritty feel, the attention to detail, the day-to-day life emphasis, and the scorn for big picture ideals discussed above. McMurtry, though, is writing for a different audience and for a different reason, and far surpasses Sandford’s books in terms of objective quality. (Disclaimer: I love the Sandford Prey series and read them constantly)

In the end, I can’t recommend these novels highly enough. They rank alongside the works of Guy Gavriel Kay, Pat Conroy, and Robert Heinlein as the most complete, entertaining, thought- and emotion-provoking books I’ve had the pleasure to read. If you only read five novels a year, make these four of them.

As a final note, remember that the published order of books is different from the chronology of the series (see top). No matter what order you read in, you’ll find disconnects. I believe that Lonesome Dove (1st published, 3rd chronologically) was originally intended to stand alone, or just with Comanche Moon (2nd published, 4th and last chronologically). It is the source of most of the inconsistencies you’ll find (and there are a fair number, none major, most having to do with timing of events, but some that will irritate you for a bit as you go). At this point I’d say do it in chronological order, but bear in mind that the first that way, Dead Man’s Walk, is my least favorite of the bunch. I like it, but it doesn’t resonate with me as much as the others for some reason. The series is much like a wave: the shallower rise leading the way with Dead Man’s Walk, the building wall of energy and motion in Comanche Moon, the frothing, crashing and peaking of Lonesome Dove, and the surge and ebb of Streets of Laredo. No matter what order you read in, just read them and enjoy them. Authors like McMurtry are all too rare, and books like these are rarer still.

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Dying to Understand

Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
Robert A. Pape
Published by Random House, 2005
ISBN 1400063175 Hardcover
ISBN 0812973380 Paperback


This is another book that’s only been out a year or so, though the author did publish a monologue on the subject in 2003 in the American Political Science Review. Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago (Go Maroons!), has put together one of the most comprehensive studies of the causes of suicide terrorism. If you’ve ever uttered the phrase "They hate us for our freedoms!", "Islamofascists!" or anything along the lines of "They blow themselves up because they have nothing to live for!" then this book might do your slogan-embracing little mind some good. Here are a few of the teasers from the dust jacket, just to get you warmed up:

"FACT: Suicide terrorism is not primarily a product of Islamic fundamentalism.
FACT: The world’s leading practitioners of suicide terrorism as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka – a secular, Marxist-Leninist group drawn from Hindu families.
FACT: Every suicide terrorist campaign has had a clear goal that is secular and political: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.
FACT: Al-Qaeda fits the above pattern.
FACT: Despite their rhetoric, democracies – including the United States – have routinely made concessions to suicide terrorists. Suicide terrorism is on the rise because terrorists have learned that it’s effective."

I was skeptical going in, but Prof. Pape makes a convincing case. He has had Chicago grad students combing reports the world over and compiling as much information about each and every suicide terrorist as is possible. Nowhere else have I seen a discussion of this topic backed by such comprehensive data. Even the respected experts on today’s terrorists such as Steve Sloan, Bruce Hoffman and Rohan Gunaratna, have not tackled the question of why suicide terrorism persists with such vigor and such resources. Prof. Sloan has spoken at length over the years about his desire for a comprehensive database of terrorism, and uses the question of how to design one as a standard puzzle for his classes. A terrorism database is far larger than a suicide terrorism database, but Prof. Pape and the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism have achieved at least a small part of Prof. Sloan's dream.

The book is broken down into three major parts. The first discusses the strategic logic of suicide terrorism. Here, Prof. Pape discusses the widely accepted premise that terrorism in general, and suicide terrorism specifically, are weapons used by the weak against the strong. He points out that suicide terrorism occurs in campaigns, not isolated incidents, and so the threat of continued suicide attacks is as effective a weapon as the attacks themselves. His second major point in this section, and the most relevant, is that suicide terrorism campaigns occur only against democracies, or reasonable facsimiles thereof. India, the US, Israel, modern Russia, France, terrorists have realized that autocratic states are not susceptible to the kinds of fears and pressures that democracies feel, and thus choose other methods to attack them (see the USSR in Afghanistan compared with the US/NATO in Afghanistan and democratic Russia in Chechnya). Finally, Prof. Pape offers proof that suicide terrorism pays. Those who use it tend to get what they want and, if they do not, they tend to abandon the tactic. [As a topical aside, I’m applying his thoughts to the current situation in Lebanon. Hezbollah was a regular user of suicide terrorists in the past, but have not chosen to go down that road (yet) in the current round of hostilities. Why? My take is that they are capable of damaging Israel using more conventional rockets and guerilla warfare; they feel that Israel is being led by emotion and the military, not democratic principles in this case, and they feel that Israel’s invasion of Southern Lebanon will result in Israel being perceived as the bad guy. Why spoil that through suicide terrorism?]

Moving on, Prof. Pape looks at the social logic of suicide terrorism. This section features in depth examinations of groups such as the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), the Tamil Tigers, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. Each study is meticulously researched and emphasizes not just the group dynamics, but the operational context of each group. The most important part of Section II, though, is the thorough categorization and analysis of the common and dissimilar factors surrounding each suicide terrorist campaign. Prof. Pape determines that nationalism and "national liberation" from occupation perceived or real, are the wellsprings of suicide terrorism, rather than religion. Religion plays a role, but it is secondary to the nationalist side. He also shows that up until now, terrorist campaigns are not a "spiral" of death, as commonly portrayed by frustrated foreign ministers and media experts, but logical and linear military campaigns with specific motivations and goals. A corollary argument, again well documented, is that these groups (of all creeds) do not seek world domination, no matter what the PR says: they have mostly local goals.

Finally, Prof. Pape presents his data on the individual logic of suicide terrorism. He discusses suicide as a societal phenomenon, drawing heavily on Émile Durkheim’s seminal theories on the topic. He combines the accepted theories on individual logic for suicide with the data available on who suicide terrorists were and what motivated them to choose that course of action. The results are somewhat surprising: the majority of suicide terrorists were not maladjusted, depressed, fanatical teenaged loners, but rather people with a strong connection to their society, with secular and political motivations that fall firmly in the "altruistic" category of suicides. They tend to be from the middle class, in their 20s, and well educated. Hezbollah suicide bombers during the 1982-86 campaign, for example, were Christians or Communists/Socialists (and thus prone to atheism) 92% of the time, and only 8% Islamist. He shows his demographic data, broken out admirably by group, conflict and opponent, and finishes with a detailed look at three specific cases: Mohammed Atta from the Al-Qaeda attacks on 11 September 2001, a young woman named Dhanu of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and Saeed Hotari who blew up a Tel Aviv disco in June of 2001 at the behest of Hamas.

Professor Pape, in his recommendations, accepts that the United States is involved in the Middle East and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. He advocates combating suicide terrorism in two ways. The first is military and diplomatic action against existing terrorist groups, eliminating or marginalizing as many of their members as possible. The second recommendation is to prevent a new generation of terrorists from appearing by slowly reducing our contributions to the conditions that spawn them. This means withdrawing our military from the region as much as possible, particularly the very visible elements of the armed forces. We must encourage and support local solutions to the problems and work through alliances and proxies rather than directly. The question of Israel is one for which he has no concrete solution, though US support for Israel (our proxy occupation of Jerusalem) is a prime cause for terrorism in the Eastern Mediterranean.

In the end, this book seems to prove that terrorists, specifically suicide terrorists, are both more complex and more easily understood than most people like to believe. Politicians, the media, academics and the military take comfort in describing terrorists as being completely foreign, people we don’t understand and could never understand. As in all wars, we try to de-humanize our opponents. In reality, though, the groups studied are working for goals we can all associate with: freedom from oppression, freedom from foreign rule, and national identity. It is not particularly pleasant to realize that suicide bombers are not that different from any of us, but it is a realization that we must all come to if we are to have a hope of slipping out of the crosshairs of these groups. Criminals and murderers they may be, but while we can and must condemn their means, we must also accept that we can understand their goals, and perhaps even sympathize with their plight to a certain extent.