Product Description

As this final volume of The Berrybender Narratives opens, Tasmin and her family are under irksome, though comfortable, arrest in Mexican Santa Fe. Her father, the eccentric Lord Berrybender, is planning to head for Texas with his whole family and his retainers. Tasmin, who would once have followed her husband, Jim Snow, anywhere, is no longer even sure she likes him, or knows where to go to next.

In the meantime, Jim Snow, accompanied by Kit Carson, journeys to New Orleans, where he meets up with a muscular black giant named Juppy in whose company they make their way back to Santa Fe. But even they are unable to prevent the Mexicans from carrying the Berrybender family on a long and terrible journey across the desert to Vera Cruz.

Starving, dying of thirst, and in constant, bloody battle with slavers pursuing them, the Berrybenders finally make their way to civilization, where Jim Snow has to choose between Tasmin and the great American plains, on which he has lived all his life in freedom, and where, after all her adventures, Tasmin must finally decide where her future lies.

With a cast of characters that includes almost every major real-life figure of the West, Folly and Glory is a novel that represents the culmination of a great and unique four-volume saga of the early days of the West; it is one of Larry McMurtry's finest achievements.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61118 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This is the fourth and final volume in McMurtry's Berrybender Narratives (following By Sorrow's River), a frontier epic of lusty and bloody proportions, in which, fortunately, nearly everyone is killed off. Lord Berrybender, an arrogant and lecherous Englishman and his whining brood of daughters, their brats and servants have been arrested by Mexican authorities and are under house arrest in Santa Fe in the mid-1830s. Tensions between Mexicans and Americans run high as the dispute over Texas drifts toward war. When the Berrybender party is expelled from Santa Fe, the group is forced to march across the desert to Vera Cruz, escorted by inept Mexican soldiers. The grueling journey is filled with hardship and death as thirst, cholera and hostile Indians whittle the group by half. Meanwhile, Jim Snow, aka the Sin Killer, a famous mountain man, plans to rescue his white wife, Tasmin Berrybender, and her family somewhere along the desert route. Once the rescue is complete and the surviving Berrybenders are safely in Texas, Jim goes after the gang of slavers who murdered his son and his Indian wife (mountain men seem to have a lot of wives). Here McMurtry really shows why Jim is called the Sin Killer and why white men and Indians fear the mountain man who shrieks "the Word" and shows no mercy when he is riled up. Of the four books in the series, this is the bloodiest and most brutal, with rapes, torture, mutilation and death heaped upon the characters until grief and despair nearly consume them. Add the disaster at the Alamo and a passel of colorful Texas heroes to the enduring figures of mountain men Kit Carson and Tom Fitzpatrick, and this grisly frontier soap opera concludes with a bang.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Take them for what they are, critics say of Folly and Glory and the rest of the Berrybender Narratives, and you might enjoy it. Judge it against Lonesome Dove, and you will inevitably be disappointed. Criticisms of the book include its meandering and thin plot, stereotypical characters, and indiscriminate violence. Still, critics agree that this volume is much better than the previous three, particularly with the matured character of Tasmin. It at least offers a sense of closure and a meditation on the nature of the American frontier. Beware: most reviewers agreed that if you read Folly and Glory separately from the rest of the series, you won’t fully understand the plot. It might be all or nothing of the Berrybender lot!

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
This is the fourth and concluding volume of the Berrybender Narratives, McMurtry's saga of the four-year odyssey of the Berrybender family as they traverse the various river valleys of the American West in the 1830s. Once again, the heart of the story is the evolving relationship between Tasmin Berrybender and her enigmatic, primitive husband, Jim Snow. Both have changed. Tasmin has learned to cope with the physical demands of a nomadic life and the emotional demands and trauma of motherhood and death. Jim, still capable of savage violence, seems more tender and vulnerable here. As they and their familiar entourage journey eastward from Santa Fe, they encounter various historical personages, including William Clark, Charles Bent, and Davy Crockett. They also endure searing landscapes, cholera, and the constant threat of horrific brutality at the hands of Apaches, Kiowas, Commanches, and slave traders. As always, McMurtry is a gifted storyteller who seamlessly melds multiple plotlines, paints vivid images, and creates memorable literary characters. The ending, while leaving plenty of loose ends, seems satisfying and appropriate. This is a worthy close to an outstanding quartet that has shown McMurtry at his best. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

This may well be the best of The Berrybender Narratives
It's so nice to see some high-profile Western projects popping up. The first was SIN KILLER, which marked the beginning of Larry McMurtry's four volumes of The Berrybender Narratives. The second was the announced republishing of the works of Louis L'Amour, commencing with a number of short story collections and continuing with the recent publication of a new edition of the immortal HONDO. And the third is the television series "Deadwood," which, in spite of its occasionally gratuitous use of crude, earthy language, may well be the best-written show currently on television. Things now come full circle with the publication of FOLLY AND GLORY, the fourth and final (at least for now) volume of The Berrybender Narratives. It is a pleasure to find that it sustains, and even surpasses, the energy of its predecessors.

The Berrybender Narratives are not something you can jump into. While McMurtry is incapable of writing badly, this series is best read from the beginning, as it is most definitely a sequential narrative. FOLLY AND GLORY begins with the Berrybenders under a forced yet luxurious house arrest in Santa Fe, Mexico. The mood of the party, particularly Tasmin Berrybender's, is somewhat subdued due to the murder of Pomp Charbonneau at the hands of a deranged Mexican Army captain. The party as a whole, however, passes the time in relative comfort. Their somewhat idyllic incarceration is abruptly ended, though, when it is learned that the Mexican authorities plan to arrest them --- for real this time --- and, in all probability, execute the entire party. Lord Berrybender plans to proceed to Texas, and the party effects a hurried exit out of the compound. Danger and death await at every turn, not only from pestilence but also from a party of slavers.

Meanwhile, Jim Snow has as his wont been absent more than present, guiding a wagon train and procuring a weapons shipment for the always overbearing and self-centered Lord Berrybender. When an attack by the slavers results in the death of two members of the party, Jim Snow becomes The Sin Killer once again, exacting a dark and terrible but fitting vengeance upon the slavers. Snow's action also indirectly results in a complication that will affect his wife Tasmin and the rest of the company, forcing Tasmin to make a decision regarding her future and that of her offspring.

FOLLY AND GLORY may well be the best of The Berrybender Narratives. McMurtry is perfect here, capturing the feeling of danger and casual brutality that was part of the everyday existence of the frontiersmen in the mid-19th century. FOLLY AND GLORY also neatly weaves its way through one of the major historical events of the period, while a number of real-life figures make brief but important cameo appearances. FOLLY AND GLORY is, ultimately, the capstone of what may well be McMurtry's penultimate work in a career that has been marked by creative summits.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

THE CULMINATION OF A VERY WILD RIDE
FOLLY AND GLORY by Larry McMurtry is a fitting benediction to McMurtry's Berrybender tetralogy. Despite reviews that paint this book as being about as violent as anything that McMurtry has written, I determined to complete the tale of a family of dysfunctional British gentry who come to America in the early Nineteenth Century to "see the sights" as it were.

What I discovered was yet another fine work by McMurtry that was a joy to read. Regarding McMurtry's treatment of violence, I suspect his statement to the modern reader is that violence in the past was as everyday as eating, sleeping or breathing. To our mollycoddled world, where tragedy manifests itself most acutely in the outcome of the latest reality TV program or contest, McMurtry's nonchalant depictions of frontier violence may seem insensitive. But in a world where one could be moving along the trail swimmingly one minute and gasping for life the next with an Apache arrow in his [...] it was likely very common to develop a rather McMurtryan viewpoint of life, of death and of the violence inherent to both.

As with the other three volumes of this series, FOLLY AND GLORY delivers a very engrossing tale with the usual cameo appearances of some of the geographical area's and period's most notable figures. From Old Santa Fe to the Alamo, FOLLY AND GLORY is another McMurtry triumph.

THE HORSEMAN

Spectacular!
When I began the Berrybender Narratives, I was expecting a happy, humorous lark though the American West of the 1830's. And, throughout Sin Killer, that is exactly what I got. However, as the series progressed, each book became a little darker, a little more serious, until finally, I read Folly and Glory, put it down, and realized that somewhere along the line this series became a true Larry McMurtry depresser. Not that it's a bad thing! Any McMurtry fan knows that there is going to be at least SOME death and violence in the novels. But wow! Was I depressed after I finished Folly and Glory! But, strangely, I was depressed in a good way, because I truly cared about these characters and their fates. Larry McMurtry has this great talent in which he can just write one paragraph, or one page, and in this paragraph or page, everything is pulled together so well that I end up reading it again and again. (See Captain Clark's reaction to Pomp's death--or even Ben Sippy's reaction to the aftermath of the battle of Skunkwater Flats in Anything for Billy, if you want to know what I mean.)
This book is a wonderful ending to a wonderful series. I am only sad that I cannot find out what happens in the rest of Tasmin's life, or Jim's, for that matter, even though I didn't like him much in this book.
This series was amazing! Read it!