Folly and Glory (Berrybender Narratives Series #4) » (Reprint)

Larry McMurtry worked as a cowhand on his father's Texas cattle ranch until he was 22, but never aspired to be a rancher. Instead, he published his first novel, Horseman, Pass By, when he was just 25. More than two dozen novels later, there's still more to McMurtry than a typical western.

"As this finale 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, English, American and Native American. Tasmin, who would once have followed her husband, Jim Snow, anywhere, is no longer even sure she likes him, or knows where to go next. Neither does anyone else - even Captain Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame, is puzzled by the great changes sweeping over the West, replacing red men and buffalo with towns and farms." "In the meantime Jim Snow, accompanied by Kit Carson, journeys to New Orleans, where he meets up with a muscular black giant named Juppy, who turns out to be one of Lord Berrybender's many illegitimate offspring, and 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 - if New Oreleans of the time can be called that - where Jim Snow has to choose between Tasmin and the great American plains, on which he has lived all this life in freedom, and where, after all her adventures, Tasmin must finally decide where her future lies.

The New York Times

Larry McMurtry's four-volume series, The Berrybender Narratives, is like a cross between John Ford and Quentin Tarantino: a genre-bending Western farce that follows the misadventures and couplings of a sprawling English family and its hangers-on as it makes its roundabout way across the West in the 1830's...While McMurtry doesn't stint on frantic action, violence or seemingly round-the-clock gropings, Folly and Glory marks a somber and satisfying end to a long, rambunctious trip.—Rodney Welch