Download Folly and Glory: Volume 4 of The Berrybender Narratives AudioBook Free
In such a brilliant saga -- the final volume of The Berrybender Narratives and an epic in its own right -- Larry McMurtry lives up to his reputation for delivering novels with "wit, grace, and greater than a hint of what might be called muscular nostalgia, fit together to create a panoramic portrait of the American West" (The New York Times Book Review).
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 likely 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 more even sure she likes him, or knows where to go to next. Neither does anyone else -- even Captain Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame, is puzzled by the fantastic changes sweeping above the West, replacing red men and buffalo with towns and farms.
For the time being, 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 an extended 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 Orleans of that time period can be called that -- where Jim Snow must select from Tasmin and the fantastic American plains, on which he has lived all his life in freedom, and where, in the end her adventures, Tasmin must finally decide where her future lies.
Which has a cast of characters that includes nearly every major real-life figure of the West, Folly and Glory is a novel that represents the culmination of any great and unique four-volume saga of the first days of the West; it is one of Larry McMurtry's finest achievements.
