The Cormac McCarthy Value Collection: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio CD]

Cormac McCarthy (Author), Brad Pitt (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 23, 2005

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES
The first volume of the Border Trilogy–tells of young John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of Texas ranchers. Across the border Mexico beckons–beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. With two companions, he sets off on an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

THE CROSSING
In the late 1930’s, 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 beings an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet like ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightening–a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there."

CITIES OF THE PLAIN
It is 1952 and John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are working as ranch hands in New Mexico, not far from the proving grounds of Alamogordo and the cities of El Paso and Juarez. Their life is made up of trail drives and horse auctions and stories told by campfire light. They value that life all the more because they know it is about to change forever.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Read by Brad Pitt
Six Cassettes, 9 hours

Contains:
All The Pretty Horses
The Crossing
Cities of the Plain

Save over 40% off the individual price of these classic McCarthy audiobooks!

The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.

Following All the Pretty Horses in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, The Crossing is a novel whose force of language is matched only by its breadth of experience and depth of thought.

In the bootheel of New Mexico hard on the frontier, Billy and Boyd Parham are just boys in the years before the Second World War, but on the cusp of unimaginable events. First comes a trespassing Indian and the dream of wolves running wild amongst the cattle lately brought onto the plain by settlers -- this when all the wisdom of trappers has disappeared along with the trappers themselves. And so Billy sets forth at the age of sixteen on an unwitting journey into the souls of boys and animals and men. Having trapped a she-wolf he would restore to the mountains of Mexico, he is long gone and returns to find everything he left behind transformed utterly in this absence. Except his kid brother, Boyd, with whom he strikes out yet again to reclaim what is theirs -- thus crossing into "that antique gaze from whence there could be no way back forever."

In this final volume of The Border Trilogy, two men marked by the boyhood adventures of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing now stand together, in the still point between their vivid pasts and uncertain futures, to confront a country changing or already changed beyond recognition.

In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham--nine years apart in age, yet with a kinship greater than perhaps they know--are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch encroached upon from the north, at Alamogordo, by the military. To the south, always on the horizon are the mountains of Mexico, looming over El Paso, Ciudad Juárez and all the cities of the plain.

Bound by nature to horses and cattle and range, these two discover that ranchlife domesticity is compromised, for them and the men they work with, by a geometry of loss afflicting old and young alike, those who have survived it and anyone about to try. And what draws one of them across the border again and again, what would bind "those disparate but fragile worlds," is a girl seized by ill fortune, and a love as dangerous as it is inevitable.

This story of friendship and passion is enfolded in a narrative replete with character and place and event--a blind musician, a marauding pack of dogs, curio shops and ancient petroglyphs, a precocious shoe-shine boy, trail drives from the century before, midnight on the highway--and with landforms and wildlife and horses and men, most of all men and the women they love and mourn, men and their persistence and memories and dreams.

With the terrible beauty of Cities of the Plain--with its magisterial prose, humor both wry and out-right, fierce conviction and unwavering humanity--Cormac McCarthy has completed a landmark of our literature and times, an epic that reaches from tales of the old west, the world past, into the new millennium, the world to come. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Cormac McCarthy is the author of eight previous novels, and among his honors are the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Random House Audio; Abridged edition (August 23, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 073932067X
• ISBN-13: 978-0739320679
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 1.3 x 6.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,220,635 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars excellent abridged version of McCarthy's work, January 15, 2005

By 

Reader (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cormac McCarthy Value Collection: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain (The Border Trilogy) (Audio Cassette)

Cormac McCarthy is undoubtedly one of the best American writers alive today. This is precisely why I purchased one of his works for my first venture into the "books on tape" world. I feared that hearing his works read to me my a Hollywood actor would diminish its impact, but I am happy to report that Brad Pitt does a good job of keeping the spirit and humor of his writing up to par. There are, however, times when he seems bored with the task as his voice takes on a particularly lullaby-like quality, so be sure to keep a cup of coffee handy if listening while driving!

I have read all of these novels before so I was familiar with the stories. The abridgement did cut out some of my favorite passages (especially in the Crossing) where McCarthy embarks on a style parade worthy of Fitzgerald's or Faulkner's attention.

My wife and I listened to the stories while traveling through the Southwest, and it was a delight to experience the landscape through the eyes of the stories. If you are planning a cross country drive or a long drive through the New Mexico-Arizona-West Texas area, I cannot recommend enough these books on tape as travel companions!

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Brad Pitt a Poor Reader, September 23, 2006

By 

Jeeves "Civil War Fan" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Cormac McCarthy Value Collection: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain (Audio CD)

Buy the other, the All The Pretty Horses alone, with reader Muller (sp?) Frank. Brad Pitt does a very poor job, and I was amazed how poor. He hardly seems like a trained actor. He badly mispronounces Spanish (pronounces 'jefe' as 'jeffy')and his reading is like something a grade-school child would produce. He carries the question tone over to the 'he said' in interrogative sentences and does not change voice tone from one speaker to another. He sounds like a slacker who has been forced to read a high-school composition. This guy is an actor?

And the abridgement ruins the stories in all three novels.

Now I have to go back and buy the other because I love ATPH very much and want to hear it read by someone who has had voice training and a good voice.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Just don't bother--, May 16, 2010

By 

E. Willingham "Toys, dolls, and books" (Heart of Texas, the USA,) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cormac McCarthy Value Collection: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain (Audio CD)

The abridgment keeps the work from making sense, especially in "The Crossing." Brad Pitt does not even bother to try to shape Spanish phonology, whether the Spanish is meant to be spoken by a North American who probably speaks the language fairly well but not with native phonology, or meant to be spoken by a native speaker.

The North Americans in these books would be speaking from "heard" language--not written language--so they would not say "jay fay" for Spanish "jefe," for example.

Brad Pitt's reading is so abysmal that you may be unable to continue to listen to it, especially if you speak or understand Spanish.

A competent producer would never have let a reader get away with this insulting performance. Insulting to the literature and insulting to the listener.

Pitiful effort by the reader. Pitiful production values. Should be withdrawn and re-recorded unabridged by someone who gives more than a rooty-toot-toot about literature, language, performance, and product on both sides of the glass.