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Read Buffalo Girls (2001)

Buffalo Girls (2001)

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Rating
3.56 of 5 Votes: 1
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ISBN
0743216296 (ISBN13: 9780743216296)
Language
English
Publisher
simon & schuster

Buffalo Girls (2001) - Plot & Excerpts

I like to think about this: while 2nd generation Puget Sound pioneers were felling the old growth Doug firs from which my house is built, and Irish immigrant carpenters were nailing together my roof beams, Calamity Jane was still alive and kicking around Deadwood. It's true that the American wild west was history by then, but young Calamity had lived that wild west in her youth when it was the real thing.This book isn't about the wild and audacious life Calamity lived, it's about the truth that the bigger the life, the more poignant its inevitable decline. What a girl! McMurty understands that even though these hard riding pioneers suffered the broken heart of watching their youthful wild west disappear, they loved their choices, refused to compromise and rode their dreams into the sunset. It's interesting that the main focus in most of her biographies isn't her amazing life. At 15 she became the provider for her 5 younger siblings when her parents died along the wagon-train trails heading west. She became a professional scout, a daredevil rider, and a trick shooter. She wore a soldier's uniform, fought in the Plains Indian wars and fearlessly nursed dying pioneers during the small pox epidemics. When her detachment was ordered to the Big Horn River in 1885, under General Crook, she swam the Platte River with crucial dispatches and raced 90 miles at top speed, wet and shivering, to deliver them. One brave woman. Ok she had some character flaws - it is after all the 'wild' west. But her biographers are completely obsessed about which of her stories were exaggerations or fabrications. They seem desperate to distract us from her real adventures. And they harp on her decline at the end of her life. It seems we want to be consoled that there will be miserable hell to pay if someone lives a life too adventurous and unconventional. Makes us feel better about our compromises.

Summer at Tiffany by Marjorie HartThe memoir SUMMER AT TIFFANY is the delightful story if two Iowa sorority sisters great adventure to NYC in the summer of 1945. Marjorie and Marty, inspired by a fellow Kappa's summer job as a sales girl at Lord & Taylor, leave Iowa for the first time to hopefully find jobs at the famed store themselves. With a bit of luck, a good connection and a bit of mixup, they are hired as the first female pages at Tiffany & Co. earning $20.00 per week! Their "pied a terre" became the weekend haunt of the 2 girls and several of their fellow Kappa's.Working at Tiffany, not only did they observe Marlene Dietrich and many of NY's famed"400"(the famed upper, upper crust of the Social Register), to their swooning delight, newlyweds Judy Garland and Vincente Minelli came in. Garland picked out a stunning emerald bracelet, while Minelli chose a gold Patek watch. The items were paid for by MGM as wedding presents for the couple.At a Midshipman's Dance at Barnard College, the roommates met their summer loves. Over the course of the summer the girls went to El Morrocco, Jack Dempsey's Bar, Broadway and Sardi's. They saw the ocean for the first time at Jones Beach, the tragedy if a plane crashing into the Empire State Building and they were amongst the 2 million people in Times Square on August 14, 1945 when Truman announced the Japanese surrender. I loved this charming, sweet fairy tale.

What do You think about Buffalo Girls (2001)?

I liked the idea of this story more than the execution: Calamity Jane traveling the old west and accompanying Wild Bill Cody to England with his Wild West Show, which they performed for the Queen. Exciting stuff! Well, not exactly. By the time the book opens, Jane is a drunk that wanders around with other sad friends as they pine for the time before the west was won. Most of the characters behave like idiots, and you can't believe they survived as long as they did. Jane spends most of the story drunk and crying, feeling sorry for herself and wishing she could change (but she never does). I enjoyed the parts that were written in Jane's voice, as letters to her daughter. I was a little confused, however, when the author jumped between this format and others. There were five "sections" in the book, which made it feel a bit unfinished. Like maybe he meant to go back and tie the parts together.I would have liked the story to dwell a bit more in England. At least different things happened there, instead of the same day replayed over and over. I understand that, day-to-day, life is repetitive. That doesn't mean I want to read about it!The most compelling character in the book turns out to be the one indian, No Ears. He's more pensive than the white folk, and spends much of his time philosophizing. At least he wasn't sad like Jane's other friends.
—Michele

Historical fiction with such historical names as Martha Jane Canary, Dora DuFran, Teddy Blue Abbott, William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, Jack Omohundro, Sitting Bull, Annie Oakley, the Countess of Warwick (Daisy), Russell of the Times, and Potato Creek Johnny. But the person who steals the whole book is a fictional ancient Indian scout named No Ears. When he's in the story, it's MacMurtry at his finest. One flaw in the book for me were the letters from Calamity Jane to her daughter who is also called "Jane." It was a mistake having her tell us about events that MacMurty should have had happen in the story.
—Jimmy

An old compliment to actors that you rarely hear anymore is, "I'd listen to him read the phone book," and I thought of that as I was reading Buffalo Girls. When it comes to Larry McMurtry, I'd read it if he wrote the phone book because, as plotless as it might be, he would somehow manage to convey in it all the pain of daily living. Not that Buffalo Girls has no plot, but it's a thin one; it's mostly just a few old characters coming to grips with the fact that the time of the American West as an untamed frontier is coming to an end. The reader gets to wander along with Jim Ragg, an old beaver trapper who laments the near-extinction of the beaver because of people like himself, his partner Bartle Bone who mostly just goes where Jim goes, Dora DuFran, who walked into Abilene a starved girl wearing her dead father's shoes and found success in one of the few ways available to women of the time, as well as other less central but no less tragic characters. Mostly though, this is Martha "Calamity Jane" Canary's story, and the narrative device that McMurtry uses to portray her marginality and loneliness is as heartbreaking as it gets. I'd be unlikely to read this book again as it's far too sad and, frankly, a little boring in stretches, but I understand there's a movie based on it starring a miscast Angelica Huston as Calamity Jane (and a woefully miscast Melanie Griffith as Dora), so I might try to watch that just to have something to complain about.
—Rachel

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