The Collected Works of Billy the Kid - Softcover

Ondaatje, Michael

3.96

4,279 ratings by Goodreads

9780747572602: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747572607 ISBN 13: 9780747572602

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2004

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

William Bonney first killed another man when he was just twelve. By the time he was twenty-one he had slain nineteen more. He was known as Billy the Kid, a bloodthirsty outlaw; a boy with buck teeth and a pleasant face who could shoot a stranger in the heart and calmly walk away while birds ravaged the corpse. Drawing on contemporary accounts, photographs, dime novels and his own imagination, Ondaatje takes you inside the mind of Billy the Kid, tracing his bloody passage across the blasted landscape of New Mexico and through the battles with his captor and eventual killer, Pat Garrett.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

'Ondaatje is a poet and even his prose moves with rhythmic, circular precision a good little book, carefully crafted, thoroughly literate' New York Times Book Review 'A compassionate and convincing portrait not only of a savage individual but of the casually brutal human wilderness in which Billy was both villain and victim Sharply conceived and brilliantly carried through' Times Literary Supplement 'Wonderful Ondaatje's language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art' Annie Dillard 'Ondaatje's eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint' Larry McMurtry, author of The Last Picture Show

From the Back Cover:

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient comes a visionary novel about an icon of American violence. William Bonney killed his first man when he was twelve. By the time he was twenty-one he had, by his own reckoning, slain nineteen more. In the intervening years he had become "Billy the Kid", bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint, a boy with buck teeth and a pleasant face who could shoot a stranger calmly in the heart and walk away while birds ravaged the corpse. Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own prodigious fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje traces Billy's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.