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Thomas S. Klise

The Last Western Paperback – January 1, 1974

by Thomas S. Klise (Author)

4.4 17 ratings

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Willie, an Irish-Indian-Negro-Chinese boy born in an obscure corner of the American Southwest rises to prominence as an athlete, religious leader, and peacemaker

Print length

559 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Argus Communications
Publication date

January 1, 1974
ISBN-10

0913592323
ISBN-13

978-0913592328
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Argus Communications (January 1, 1974)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 559 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0913592323
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0913592328
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.4 ounces

Best Sellers Rank: #3,132,371 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,227,797 in Literature & Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.4 17 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

17 global ratings

5 star		76%
4 star		12%
3 star 0% (0%)		0%
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1 star		12%

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KME

still relevant today

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 19, 2007

Verified Purchase

A classic; prophetic and able to tell the story of the core of Christianity in a contemporary setting. While I agree with Joseph Campbell that we have lost the power of myth in our culture, this book somehow gives a spark of the mythic the best sense. Read it, and you will laugh, cry and be a changed person.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

ProfZeb

WOrth Tryiing

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 11, 2015

Verified Purchase

This over the top cult classic has it all. Tom Robbins crossed with WIlliam Kotzwinke' with baseball and religion thrown in. It deserves to rise from obscurity into the light once more.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Tracy J. HICKS

The Theatre of Life can be Encompassing and Tragic

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 19, 2012

The main character in this novel is ...ME! Mixed mongrel race thrust into the vicious arms of the media, government and the people. The throngs, the masses ..the demands to fulfill their selfish desires...If you feel like saying with a struggle in your voice ,"I try to get out...but they KEEP PULLING ME BACK IN!", then this fiction is for you. They say that the theatre's stage of life is a weight balance scale of comedy and tragedy, but it is weighed down by the latter...because they laugh at ..so...much...pain...to maintain sanity. This novel prevented me from considering suicide in high school : only because I didn't know what i wanted to be in my adult occupational life. So much stress...but the movie "Better Off Dead" was hilarious and made me enjoy life to the fullest of my 17 year life. Can't say too much about the ending though..."Catch 22"?

Helpful

J. M. Turner

Thought provoking. Calls one to silence!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 6, 2019

I first read this book while a Catholic nun in a convent in 1979 and it sank deeply in my heart and woke something up in me. Now I read it 40 years later as an agnostic and find it just as captivating, and ever so relevant for our time. A reprinting, wider exposure would be so great, for the message is profound!

3 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

A very haunting book.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 3, 2007

I read this probably 30 years ago, at the insistence of a spouse who checked it out of the library. I think it's a good book, because it's rather like the blind guys and the elephant: you can make whatever you want out of it.

As the reviews attest it could be a religious book. It could be a baseball allegory, a speculative fiction book. Maybe a floor wax or dessert topping. Here's another one: I thought it was a very interesting way of explaining what was starting to alarm scientists in the climate data.

What still haunts me about this book is the short sentence on the demise of the birds -- that suddenly there was no more singing. No more birds. Jeez, maybe it's also a horror story.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Baldwin Library Wisconsin

Instant connection

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 28, 2014

One of my top 3 books of my 50 years, and I've read a lot (I'm a librarian).

Back in the early '80s I met someone in a foreign country who had read it and it was like we were instant soul mates, simply having that connection of loving the book.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Maria Bustillos

A spectacular novel that deserves wider recognition

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 23, 2008

The raves here are all spot-on. This is the kind of book that stays with you forever.

What I liked best was Klise's deceptively simple rendering of difficult questions. It's a bold, original, elemental book, Swiftian both in its savagely satirical indictment of church, state and society, and in the gentle humanity readily discernible beneath that mantle of rage. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about Klise despite the hilariously wicked satire in this book. His rejection of the "spiritual", for instance, as the mirror and equivalent of "bestial", I thought, was so surprising in a modern novel; it has a distinctly Enlightenment feel to it. I've heard it said that the book's Catholicism made a wider audience impossible, but I'm not sure about that ... the human race may not have a good vocabulary yet for the themes of this novel, but its Christian aspects only serve to bring it closer to what might someday become a new, all-inclusive human vocabulary, which would maybe be closer to what Jesus intended in the first place.

A mind-blowing book, just buy it!

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

Patrick Murtha

Neglected but Memorable

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 9, 2003

I am glad to see that this nearly forgotten novel has its fans: I'm hoping for a resurrection. I have tried to keep the flame alive by twice giving lectures on "The Last Western as a Neglected Baseball Novel" to regional gatherings of the Society for American Baseball Research. (Of course, it is much more than a mere "baseball novel," but that was at least a starting point for discussion.) Because The Last Western was essentially self-published (I once spoke to a gentleman who worked for the northern Illinois printing company where it was published, and he confirmed that the Argus imprint was Klise's own), it never gained the visibility that would have placed it on an equal footing with the other ambitious mega-novels of the era by Pynchon, Barth, Gadddis, et al. But it belongs in their company. Recently the book has come in for discussion on the David Foster Wallace listserv wallace-l, and there is some feeling that Wallace may have read it; there are certain similarities between The Last Western and Infinite Jest.

To give the flavor of the book is difficult, but one can say that it is simultaneously very serious and very funny, and that it weaves its subjects -- Roman Catholicism, baseball, racial politics, Latin American revolution, big business, and film-making, among others -- into an extremely impressive tapestry. The Last Western's near-future setting makes it a speculative science fiction novel as well (R.A. Lafferty and Philip Jose Farmer both blurbed it). The prose is first-rate. I wish I knew more about Klise (I heard that he died some years back), but that is a good research project for someone so inclined. In the meantime, a re-printing would go a long way toward rescuing this novel and starting it on the road to the classic status that I believe it deserves. Perhaps someone at a literary small press is listening?

20 people found this helpful

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