Discount Shopping Online :: Books The Crossing : :

The Crossing
by: Cormac Mccarthy

List Price: $14.95

Amazon.com's Price: $10.17

You Save: $4.78 (32%)
Prices subject to change.

Used Price: $1.82
Collectible Price: $14.95
Third Party New Price: $5.00

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679760849
ISBN: 0679760849
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 432
Publication Date: March 14, 1995
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: March 14, 1995
Sales Rank: 6704
Studio: Vintage

Related Items:

Editorial Review:

Product Description:
In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy fulfills the promise of All the Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that is darker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum of a classic western and the elegaic power of a lost American myth.

In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning--a world where there is no order 'save that which death has put there.'

An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once.

Amazon.com Review:
The opening section of The Crossing, book two of the Border Trilogy, features perhaps the most perfectly realized storytelling of Cormac McCarthy's celebrated career. Like All the Pretty Horses, this volume opens with a teenager's decision to slip away from his family's ranch into Mexico. In this case, the boy is Billy Parham, and the catalyst for his trip is a wolf he and his father have trapped, but that Billy finds himself unwilling to shoot. His plan is to set the animal loose down south instead.

This is a McCarthy novel, not Old Yeller, and so Billy's trek inevitably becomes more ominous than sweet. It boasts some chilling meditations on the simple ferocity McCarthy sees as necessary for all creatures who aim to continue living. But Billy is McCarthy's most loving--and therefore damageable--character, and his story has its own haunted melancholy.

Billy eventually returns to his ranch. Then, finding himself and his world changed, he returns to Mexico with his younger brother, and the book begins meandering. Though full of hypnotically barren landscapes and McCarthy's trademark western-gothic imagery (like the soldier who sucks eyes from sockets), these latter stages become tedious at times, thanks partly to the female characters, who exist solely as ghosts to haunt the men.

But that opening is glorious, and the whole book finally transcends its shortcomings to achieve a grim and poignant grandeur. --Glen Hirshberg

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Cormac's first book attempt..
The crossing is Cormac's first book. As such, it is noteworthy for its narrative. It is a dark moody walk through a landscape of people you hope to never meet. Cormac has a style that sets him apart , as all his future novels show; notable, Blood meridian, The border trilogy and others. AS a writer of unusual people he can not be topped ! Check him out..

Rating:

- A difficult novel
You know, reading other reviews makes me realize that my problem is not a unique one; I have now read several of McCarthy's novels, and would not exactly say that I have enjoyed any of them. Yet I keep returning.

There are themes running through every one of his novels, that he returns to again and again. A young protagonist, often family-less, or about to be, wandering the desert looking for nothing in particular. McCarthy also seems to have a fascination with Mexico (or, in the case of The Road, whatever lies to the south) and of course violence. Pointless violence, meaningless violence, unresolved violence.

As others have pointed out, the first third of this novel has more of a plot than we have come to expect from McCarthy. It may comprise some of the best writing that McCarthy has done. But the middle section involving the wolf was a draining experience. I just couldn't read ... Read More

Rating:

- Highly recommend!!
This story has all the elements that draw a reader in and hold them fast: love, tragedy, revenge, hope. Try it, you'll like it!

Rating:

- Like Life, Slow and Unexpected
Volume II of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing is McCarthy's follow-up to All the Pretty Horses. The United States-Mexican border is the only recurring character from the previous volume, but the settings and themes are quite similar.

However, The Crossing is unlike its predecessor in the fact that while All the Pretty Horses followed a fairly linear story, The Crossing resembles exact life in that one never knows what the next day will bring and sometimes today's conflict has no resolution tomorrow. Nonetheless, we grow and learn from one day to the next, whether we intend to or not.

The Crossing begins with Billy Parham, a teenager, inexplicably deciding to return a captured pregnant wolf to Mexico and neglecting to inform his parents of the trip. The plight continues for such a lengthy time that I found myself wondering if the entire book would be about the return of the wolf.
... Read More

Discount Shopping Online Books and Publications

Books : The Crossing
Books and Publications Average Rating:

Search the web for info about The Crossing

Discount Shopping Online Books and Publications

Books : The CrossingBooks and Publications Average Rating:

Search the web for info about The Crossing

Books : The Crossing
Books and Publications Average Rating: