Reviews for Zeke and Ned

The average rating for Zeke and Ned based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-01-16 00:00:00 Glenda Deyloff Larry McMurtry is my new discovery. For years I've looked at his many books on the shelves of bookstores with their pictures of cowboys on the covers and passed them over thinking that someone who wrote so many books and so many popular ones could not have written them well. I know. I'm ashamed to have thought this way. But with age sometimes comes wisdom and better yet humility. This is my second McMurtry book and the thought of all those other of his books of his yet to read fills me with hope. I'll get through many long winter days, many commutes to and from work, with his stories keeping me happy. Zeke and Ned is part yarn, part history, part memoir of two Cherokee men living in the territory assigned to them by the U.S. government. A very realistic western that reads as if you're sitting by a fire on a starry night and an old man is telling you a story. The style of writing is unique. As someone who loves to write and wants to do it carefully and well, I am learning so much from Larry McMurtry's books

Review # 2 was written on 2012-09-05 00:00:00 Rosalie Burdett 10/2/18 Chanced upon a video about Ned that has interesting photos. ("Our Geronimo. Our Sitting Bull. He represented the Cherokee People.") *** 3/20/18 Read McMurtry's famous one, and multiple others by him. Annoyed by his South Pacific piece. Zeke and Ned pleasantly surprised me, curious about co-author. In Zeke, there are memorable characters, some reminding me of the outlaws in Douglas Jones' HF, set in the Territory. Think Douglas deserves more attention than Larry. A Spider for Loco Shoat ** And the customary Kirkus: "KIRKUS REVIEW Pulitzer Prize winner McMurtry (Dead Man's Walk, 1995, etc.) and his collaborator on Pretty Boy Floyd (1994) attempt to bestow mythic stature on a maverick American Indian in this for-want-of-a-nail yarn set in 1870s Oklahoma. A half-breed member of the Cherokee Nation, Zeke Proctor is a hard-drinking, happy-go-lucky smallholder. Although married and the father of five, he is surreptitiously bedding the local miller's wife. When her aggrieved husband, a white man, takes revenge by shoveling weevils into Zeke's ground corn, the Civil War vet accidentally shoots and kills his paramour while gunning for the cuckold. Afraid of being hauled before a white judge and swiftly condemned, Zeke takes shelter with his Cherokee son-in-law Ned Christie, claiming the right to be judged by his own people. On the day of his trial in an Indian tribunal, the departed's vindictive brothers precipitate a massacre that leaves 12 more dead. Acquitted in a sham proceeding, Zeke is eventually granted amnesty by President Ulysses S. Grant. By contrast, Ned (unjustly blamed by white officials for the courthouse bloodbath and subsequent murder of a federal marshal) is forced to take to the hills. At the cost of an eye and his young wife's unborn child, he repulses the first posse sent to bring him in. After this violent, embittering brush with the law, the wanted man takes a warrior's vow, refuses to speak English, and digs in for a long siege. Ned holds out for years until a crew of outlaws with badges manages to blast him from his mountain redoubt, albeit not before he becomes an immortal legend among his fatalistic people and in the wider world. A mock-heroic tale of culture shock and sudden death along our westering frontier in which the principals (whether red or white) are portrayed as simple-minded primitives." My favorite by McMurtry