Stone Cowboy [Paperback]

Mark Jacobs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2003

Burnt out and afraid to feel, Roger is the stone cowboy, an American expatriate reluctantly in Bolivia and trying to get out any way he can. Possible plans for escape include duping a fellow gringo named Agnes who is searching for her brother. She needs Roger's worldly know-how, he needs her money. Roger signs on as her unlikely guide through a horrifying Third World gauntlet as they pursue the magician brother, who dabbles in Russian roulette for amusement while looking for a mystical source of real magic no longer available in the First World. The brother also seems to have taken up residence with an international hood who shares his interest in how things disappear. Meanwhile, Agnes and Roger find that their wounded spirits become agents of redemption for each other.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Roger is being released from a Bolivian prison and would like to return to Flint, Michigan, but first he needs money. He becomes a guide and translator for Agnes, who has come to Bolivia to find her brother, Jonathan, a professional magician. While searching for the magic that is dead in the United States, Jonathan has taken the name Flame and is now playing Rasputin to one of Bolivia's most powerful drug lords. The trail leads Roger and Agnes through Bolivia's cocaine industry to the Chapare valley, where cocoa leaves are grown and stomped into paste. In its depiction of the disastrous effects of the drug war on Bolivia, this first novel by short story writer Jacobs's (A Cast of Spaniards, LJ 11/15/94) is essential reading for anyone attempting to understand the human side of our drug policies. Roger, like Flame, is searching for his own magic, making this a multilayered tale of spiritual renewal. Recommended.?Joshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. System, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

A burnt-out American doper, fresh from a Bolivian prison, starts out conning a naive social worker by helping her find her magician brother--and ends up conducting her on a tour of the hell that is the coca trade, while gradually recovering his humanity. Ringing new changes on the legacy of Chandler and Traven, this first novel by Jacobs (stories: A Cast of Spaniards, not reviewed), a longtime foreign-service functionary, matches noirish Roger, the Stone Cowboy, whose drug abuse has shorted out body and soul, with Agnes, a prissy Yankee social worker who's come in search of her magician brother Jonathan, now the pet of a major cocaine dealer. Narrating in the louche voice familiar to drug writers from Robert Stone to Jay McInerney, Roger takes Agnes backstage in the so- called war on drugs. Of course, the only way to get to Jonathan-- who seems to be seeking the real magic that fled North America with the coming of the Industrial Revolution--is to descend, and so our odd couple will hear Zen wisdom from the mouths of peasants, go for a wild ride with a mad revolutionary radio-broadcaster, work as forced laborers smashing coca leaves in a jungle pit for a vicious middleman, undergo interrogation and beatings by DEA henchmen--and finally travel with the brother and the druglord to the top of an Andean peak, where the last real magician lives. There, Jonathan will get his wish (he becomes a bird as the druglord executes him), and, like the Cowardly Lion, Roger will get to ask the god La Pachamama for his own wish: ``Give me back my heart.'' An unusual love story, to say the least--a little bit as if The African Queen were mixed with Panic in Needle Park--and an impressive debut from a writer with a generous imagination and a daring, if deeply weird, sense of character and fate. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Soho Press (July 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1569471363
• ISBN-13: 978-1569471364
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,892,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars ultimately, it's just rubbish, February 12, 2011

By 

Eric the Read "last word" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stone Cowboy (Paperback)

I found this book on a library shelf, bascially in stacks, not in the display libraries sometimes put up to entice people to read. I'd never heard of the author and wouldn't be surprised to never hear of him again.

The book actually started out kind of promising. It was hovering in category 7 for quite a while (on a scale of 1 to 10) before it began to move south. I made it to the actual middle of the book before I couldn't take it and jumped to the last chapter (which chapters, by the way, were EXTREMELY long). And in glancing through that, I discovered the same tired sophist nonsense and "clever" descriptions of people finally balling each other that began appearing first, it seems, in Tom Robbins novels way back when.