Product Description

IN THE LITERARY TRADITION OF CORMAC MCCARTHY'S AND LARRY MCMURTRY'S HISTORICAL WESTERNS, SHAVETAIL TRACES THE BRUTAL COMING-OF-AGE OF A BOY SOLDIER STATIONED AT A REMOTE U.S. ARMY OUTPOST AND A YOUNG WOMAN'S TERRIFYING PASSAGE ACROSS THE AMERICAN FRONTIER.

Set in 1871 in the unforgiving wasteland of the Arizona Territory, Shavetail is the story of Private Ned Thorne, a seventeen-year-old boy from Connecticut who has lied about his age to join the Army. On the run from a shameful past, Ned is desperate to prove his worth -- to his superiors, to his family, and most of all, to himself. Young and troubled, Ned is as green and stubborn as a "shavetail," the soldiers' term for a dangerous, untrained mule.

To endure in this world, Ned must not only follow the orders of the camp's captain, Robert Franklin,but also submit to the cruel manipulations of Obediah Brickner, the camp's mule driver. Both Franklin and Brickner have been damaged by their long military service, both consider themselves able to survive the dangers of the desert -- floods, scorpions, snakes, and Indians -- and both imperil Ned.

Yet there are other characters, all richly drawn, who also confront Ned: half-wit soldiers, embattled Indians hidden in cliffs, a devious and philosophical peddler, and the fleshy whores who materialize in the desert as soon as the paymaster has left camp and dance with drunken soldiers around a fire late into the night.

After a band of Apaches attack a nearby ranch, killing two men and kidnapping a young woman, Ned's lieutenant -- a man seeking atonement for his own mistakes -- leads Ned and the rest of his patrol on a near-suicidal mission through rugged mountains and into Mexico in hopes of saving the woman's life. It is unlikely any can survive this folly, and those who do will be changed forever.

Meticulously researched and vividly told, Shavetail renders a time when the United States was still an expanding empire, its western edge bloody with the deaths of soldiers, settlers, and Indians. In language both spare and brilliant, Cobb brings readers this lost American landscape, untouched by highways or electricity and without the comforts of civilization.

Shavetail also marks the return of a great American literary voice. Cobb's first and only other novel, Crazy Heart, was published in 1987 to great acclaim and was edited by the legendary editor Ted Solotaroff. Cobb is also a former student of Donald Barthelme, who described Crazy Heart as "a bitter, witty psychological profile of genius."

Brutal and deft, laced with both violence and desire, Shavetail plunges into the deepest human urges even as it marks the ground where men either survive or perish.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #667008 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781416561194
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Set in 1871 Arizona, the second novel from Cobb (Crazy Heart) is a thoughtful western that is more character-driven adventure tale than plot-driven novel. Connecticut runaway Ned Thorne, 17, joins the cavalry and lands at Camp Grant, a nascent outpost along the edge of Arizona's Chiricahua mountains. Capt. Robert Franklin thinks his command of Camp Grant punitive duty for an earlier disastrous campaign; the discovery of a pillaged farmhouse and the kidnapping of a woman by renegade Apaches provide an opportunity for Franklin to redeem his honor. Using the actual Camp Grant massacre as a frame for the story, Cobb produces some marvelous, richly described scenes, and he does a fair job with period detail (though punctilious western fans will find some anachronisms). Setting and plot, however, are of secondary importance to the deeper developing revelations of the three main characters—the third being Lt. Anthony Austin, who leads a harrowing chase through the mountains. Their introspective analyses go a long way, but there's a disjointed sense to the whole, which teeters between straight realism and Cormac McCarthy-style flights of mysticism. The real eventually wins, and the results are less than satisfying. (Feb.)
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Review
"Shavetail is the story of the futility of war and is as immediate and brutal as daily news from Iraq or Afghanistan, although the year is 1871 and the place is southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Cobb presents the landscape, the characters, and the conflict with absolute authority, producing a magnificent story in the tradition of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian."

-- Richard Shelton, author of Going Back to Bisbee

Review
"The education to which Thomas Cobb's eager young soldier is forced to submit combines such wisdom, pain, suspense, and nasty good humor that I simply couldn't read this book fast enough. Of course I didn't know what a 'shavetail' was when I began, but learning that was only part of the education I was treated to. Guilt and innocence, blood and tenderness -- I can't imagine any reader who could resist."

-- Rosellen Brown, author of Civil Wars

"Shavetail is the story of the futility of war and is as immediate and brutal as daily news from Iraq or Afghanistan, although the year is 1871 and the place is southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Cobb presents the landscape, the characters, and the conflict with absolute authority, producing a magnificent story in the tradition of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian."

-- Richard Shelton, author of Going Back to Bisbee

Customer Reviews

A convincing western
OK, first things first. Ignore the review that claims there is something mystical/Cormac McCarthy about this book. Admit it, McCarthy can be daunting and hard work to read. Think Lonesome Dove, not Blood Meridian. Cobb's characters come to life immediately. He tells their stories in alternating chapters. He also inserts the diary of another central character, a kidnapped settler, that I feared would grow cloying, but didn't. How he resolves her situation initially seemed abrupt, but the more I thought about it, I realized it was the correct resolution. Cobb obviously has done his research. The book reeks of authenticity (and reeks is the right word when you consider his descriptions of life in an Arizona Army outpost in 1871). Oh yeah, did I forget to mention, Shavetail is a lot of fun to read. This is the best Western I've read since Lonesome Dove and up there with my all-time favorite, Welcome to Hard Times. Buy it. Read it. Enjoy.

A Novel that is a keeper
Shavetail is different. It is interesting and teaches the reader but it has excellent and well-drawn characters who tell you the tale through different eyes. Having been in the Army fifty years ago as an enlisted man I recognize the characters although from a different time period.
This is not candy for the eyes but is a great and serious story. Buy it and enjoy it. Tell your friends about it.

Different
SHAVETAIL is more of a psychological western than an adventure novel. The three main characters are tortured in different respects. Ned Thorne, the shavetail, is a seventeen-year-old boy who has run away from home to join the army. He has a secret in his past that the author keeps alluding to. The letters he keeps writing to his brother Thad aren't what we think they are.

The two officers in the story, Captain Robert Franklin and Lieutenant Anthony Austin, have know each other all of their lives. Both were shamed when Franklin led his troupe into an Apache ambush due to Austin's suggestions. Bobby Franklin is more of a Colonel Custer kind of army officer, charging into battle without regard for his own safety. Austin doesn't really belong in the army. He is more interested in observing new species he finds in the Arizona territory outback. He also may be a manic-depressive. At first he's a sympathetic character, but his indecisiveness is a real detriment to the other soldiers. I was reminded of Merriweather Lewis every time Austin was on stage.

The villain of the story is the mule driver, Obediah Brickner, who steals Ned Thorne's weather instruments at the beginning of the novel. He has been busted to corporal because of the Apache ambush and is nursing a festering hatred for the two officers. Perhaps the most interesting character in the novel, is "Mary" a woman who reluctantly traveled west with her parents and fiancée from New England. One of the soldiers finds her journal after Apaches kill her husband and hired hand and kidnap her. The reader is led to believe that this will an adventure novel where the two officers and young Ned redeem themselves, but author Thomas Cobb emulates Cormac McCarthy in respects to killing off major characters and leading the reader off in unsuspected directions.

There is a scene with Anthony Austin negotiating with the leader of a troupe of Mexican irregulars that's as good as anything in Cormac McCarthy.