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Original Title:	Heart of the Country
ISBN:	0393022897 (ISBN13: 9780393022896)
Edition Language:	English

Heart of the Country

Greg Matthews

Hardcover | Pages: 218 pages

Rating: 4.01 | 387 Users | 41 Reviews

Mention Of Books Heart of the Country

Title	:	Heart of the Country
Author	:	Greg Matthews
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 218 pages
Published	:	February 11th 1987 by W. W. Norton & Company (first published April 17th 1986)
Categories	:	Historical. Historical Fiction. Westerns. Fiction

Narration In Pursuance Of Books Heart of the Country

On the washstand by his bed lay a small shaving mirror. Joe picked it up and examined his face. I'm only fifteen, he told himself. I've got years and years of life ahead of me. He wondered how it was possible to endure life until old age and death. What kept people sane for so long? How did others manage it? The answer, of course, was simple: other people were not hunchbacks.

In the mid-1800s, a prominent St. Louis doctor brings home a half-breed infant who was left in a churchyard, and his life begins a "descending spiral." The doctor's wife refuses to have anything to do with the child, and a permanent wedge is driven between the couple. As the boy, Joseph, grows, his malformation becomes evident, yet he resists all of the doctor's efforts to correct the situation. Joe does not do well at school, but has educated himself by reading every book in the doctor's library.

The boy was a freak; worse, he appeared to take pride in his freakishness. The long hair had been clumsily braided, the blanket now a permanent fixture across hump and shoulders. The doctor ground his teeth weakly, kept his voice at a reasonable level. 'What manner of creature do you take yourself for?'
'A hunchback Indian,' said Joseph, equally determined not to provoke a disturbance between them.
'You did not continue with your exercises.'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'They did no good.'
'You should have persevered.'
'A maple can't be an oak, no matter how hard it tries.'
'Most poetic, Joseph, and utterly nonsensical. You are not a tree.'
'No, I'm a hunchback Indian.'
'Is your impertinence deliberate?'
'I'm not being impertinent, Father. Possibly facetious.'
The doctor regarded Joseph with alarm; the child was not only deformed, but precocious. 'I take it your education has proceeded along satisfactory lines.'
'Yes. I stopped going to school.'
'Explain yourself.'
'I stabbed a teacher on the first day and didn't go back. They kept the fee.'

(That may just be my favorite literary conversation - EVER!)

Eventually the doctor proclaims, 'My boy, if you are not hanged in the meantime, you may someday be a remarkable man.'

Joseph heads west at age fifteen. His goal is to become a buffalo hunter. After a brief stint as a whorehouse bouncer, he finds himself looking down a rifle barrel at an ungainly creature with a hump on its back - the American Buffalo.

The accounts of buffalo slaughter are horrifying and astounding. Unfathomable numbers were shot simply for sport, or their skins alone.

The old Americans saw their herds, sacred gift of the Great Spirit who brought them into the world of men from a hole in the earth, dwindle in the space of twenty moons from abundance to paucity. A man could walk from sunrise to sundown on the naked, rotting bodies of buffalo without once setting foot on the ground.

Joseph becomes known for his hunting prowess, and earns the name Joe Buffalo. He also comes under the scrutiny of twitchy, weaselly Calvin Puckett, a mentally unhinged man who believes God has commanded him to "kill the crooked man."

Somehow, Joe stands strong, if not tall, and even manages to assemble a strange family of his own.

The book is crammed with fascinating, unforgettable characters - the furnace attendant at the whorehouse who longs to open a school for black children, an elderly woman who fakes an injury to torment her daughter-in-law, a mute girl who believes she bleeds for Jesus... I don't remember the last time I was so completely drawn into a book.

He was what he had wanted to be, a hunter of buffalo, a man (for remarkably few ever guessed his true age) with a reputation. That reputations west of the Missouri were generally purchased with the aid of gunpowder and lead and gaping flesh, either animal or human, was not a fact that Joe allowed to fill him with misgiving. The newly opened territories were a man's world, and contained within their westering boundaries a stage so vast, so impervious to normal emotion as to demand of its actors a minimum of dialogue and a preponderance of action, the most exalted (and opposing) forms of which are creation and destruction.

This is indeed a book about creation and destruction. And the story of a remarkable man.

Rating Of Books Heart of the Country

Ratings: 4.01 From 387 Users | 41 Reviews

Judgment Of Books Heart of the Country

Waiting impatiently for this wonderful, amazing, sorrowful, fateful book to be on kindle. Loved it when I read it years ago. Not a light-hearted read or for those who expect a fairy tale. Greg Matthews writes as clean as Larry McMurtry with the nostalgia of Robert McCammon. This book is possibly the most underrated book EVER.

A most unique western adventure with a totally unusual anti-hero an orphaned, hunchbacked, half-breed buffalo killer. It's a don't miss.

Would have been a 5 star book if it was 400 pages. However, Mr. Matthews never met a paragraph that he couldn't expand to 12-15 pages long.

This was absolutely the most depressing book I have ever read! It seems nothing good happened to any of the characters. I kept reading it in the hopes that eventually someone would find happiness in life. Set in Kansas in the late 1800's the story follows a half-breed Indian raised by a doctor whose wife was mad. Granted much of the story probably was true of that period of time, but hopefully most of our ancestors fared better.

This could have been a better book if there would have been one decent likeable character. The hero of the story is a deeply resentful and troubled man who I could not warm to. He carries a deep and bitter resentment though life due to becoming a hunchback as a child and he can never rise to a place of acceptance. He hurts too many people throughout his life to feel sorry for him in the end. The writing is excellent and it was an easy read. I enjoyed the references to classic literature

Extremely well written. Matthews can write of the intricate details of thoughts of everyday human interaction. Though this story is a tragic commentary of the dark side of these situations and their unfortunate (no character in this story is fortunate) outcomes.

Excellent, authentic, American history of the West.