Customer Rating: 
Summary: superfantastic
Comment: Jail breaks, gun fights with lawmen, cooking beans in the desert -- I love it!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A Voice From The Past - Still Worth Reading
Comment: This book has been in my bookcase for sometime and I am not clear where it came from. Perhaps a Christmas present. Perhaps an impulse purchase as I enjoy this author, even though we are politically poles apart.
Regardless, I noticed it a few days ago and started reading it and was once again immersed in Edward Abbey's view of life from fifty-two years ago.
Jack Burn's and Paul Bondi are friends that go way back although they have drifted apart. Burn's rides back into the Bondi's life on the back of a fractious young horse he has named Whiskey only to find that his friend is in the County Jail awaiting transfer to a federal penitentary for failing to register for the draft.
Burns has an idea that if he can get into the jail, he can break his friend out and they can though go live in the mountains until the law gets tired of looking for them. He manages to get himself arrested and it looks as though his screwball plan may in fact work...except Bondi will have no part of it. He has two years to serve and a wife and child to return to. His days of protesting and supporting anarchy are over.
Burns and a couple of others manage the escape and part their seperate ways. It has come to the attention of the authorities that Burns, like Bondi has protested the Draft Registration Law and are interested in interrogating him. But first they have to find him.
The balance of the book is taken over with the search for Burns by the authorities which allows Abbey to trot out many of his political views in an entertaining way in the point and counterpoint action between the hunters and the hunted.
Even fifty-six years after it's original publication this is a book still worth reading notwithstanding the preface that Abbey writes:
"This is only a story. None of it really happened. How could it? How could such people be? The prisoner is probably a professor. The sheriff loses the next election. The truckdriver died of emphysema. And as for the cowboy, that character, why nobody even knows where he is anymore. Or even, to be honest, if he ever really was."
Right. Only a story. But, there are stories, and there are stories. This is one you will remember.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An Ed Abbey Classic, but it's no Moneky Wrench Gang
Comment: If you're a fan of Ed Abbey, you really ought to read this book. It's not his best work, because his views are presented with a very thin plot. The image of the cowboy riding down the freeway was lovely, however and it doesn't feel too preachy. I would recommend Monkey Wrench Gang or Desert Solitaire to anyone just breaking into Abbey's work. They're simply better peices and frankly, they appear to have been written for a more educated audience than Brave Cowboy.
Brave Cowboy is a quick, easy read that will entertain you and will help clarify Abbey's views on freedom, men and women. It's unlikely you'll agree with him, but the subtext of the book will make you think more than the plot itself.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brave Author, Great Publisher
Comment: While other reviews will give you a plot synopsis and their reaction to the book, or a comparison with the movie, "Lonely Are The Brave," I will limit my review to a few off the wall observations. First, I liked this book a lot and believe the adaptation by Dalton Trumbo to be one of the most faithful by any screenwriter. Often it is difficult not to think of the movie a book is based on while reading it (if you've seen the movie first). But Abbey is so good he made me forget I'd seen the movie and allowed me to lose myself in his words and story. So, a great book, well written, that didn't back away from some of the political hot potatoes most writers and publishers would rather avoid (draft dodging, property rights, etc.).
Few books have made me cry at the end -- usually it's when I think of the time and money wasted on them. This one left me in tears because of a profound sense of loss of another kind, the loss of men such as John W. Burns, the loss of the maverick, the loss of a true voice of the west, and the loss of a west that we will never know except through books and movies.
But one thing impressed me as much as the contents of the book -- its binding. Rarely does anyone discuss this, but I have to say that this edition is the best bound I've ever read. The spine was not stiff and the pages were very flexible allowing me to read one handed almost anywhere. If all paperbacks used this same binding, I wouldn't have to replace my often-read books every eight or nine years. So, from this perspective, the publisher is allowing Abbey's work a much longer life in one edition. Possibly a tribute to Abbey's philosophy, or merely a coincidence, either way I remain impressed by this. This may be the only paperback I own that I can pass to my grandson, as is, for his enjoyment in the future.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Abbey's free-spirited, fugitive, and very mythic cowboy. . .
Comment: It was one of Edward Abbey's regrets that he was appreciated more for his nature writing ("Desert Solitaire") than his fiction. And it was another regret that he was mostly forgotten as the author of the story on which the movie "Lonely are the Brave" was based. However, after reading "The Brave Cowboy," I'd have to vote with those who find his nonfiction far more inspiring and satisfying. It's a novel that still rewards the reading, but almost 50 years after its publication in 1956, it seems somewhat dated, while "Desert Solitaire" remains as fresh and relevant as if it were written yesterday.
Abbey was still in his twenties when he wrote this novel, and its point of view is that of a young man full contradictory passions and attitudes. The brave cowboy of the title, a prototypical figure on horseback, is the central character in maybe half the pages of the novel. A younger college friend, imprisoned for refusing to register for the draft, is another character. The local sheriff gets a large section to himself. The novel also follows the progress of a long-haul truck driver across the country. The lives of these four characters intersect in the narrative, while each of them also represents a different perspective. And they don't all quite converge in a single point of view. But that was Abbey, an outspoken man who wasn't afraid to contradict himself.
To its credit, the novel can be read on more than one level. It uses the cowboy to represent free-spirited, libertarian ideas set in conflict with brute ignorance and repression. It decries urbanization and celebrates the limitless, stark beauty of the mountains and desert (the novel is set in northern New Mexico). It's also a prison drama, and it tells a satirical yet gripping story of heavily armed but mostly inept law officers in pursuit of a fugitive. A reader interested in a 1950s view of the West and its people in post-war transition will find much to enjoy in Abbey's youthful book about a mythic cowboy's adventure and the lives it disrupts.
As a companion volume, I'd also recommend James Galvin's "Fencing the Sky," which tells a similar story about a cowboy pursued across a Western landscape by the law.
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