Sweet Promised Land

Laxalt, Robert

Biographies & Memoirs

Harper [1957]

The words of native Nevadans and a picture essay on Nevada as it is today accent a narrative review of the state's historical development and the diverse facets of its makeup

Nevada: A Bicentennial History (States and the Nation)

History

Americas

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Sagebrush and neon, shepherds and gangsters, a crossroads and a refuge, Nevada is a state that "didn't deserve to be." Through a turbulent history, Nevada has searched for an identity to call its own. How well it has succeeded is the subject of Robert Laxalt's evocative portrait of the state and its people.

W.W.Norton&Company

146p hardback with dustjacket, excellent fresh and clean copy

In a Hundred Graves: A Basque Portrait

Univ of Nevada Pr

In this slim tale, Laxalt shows the ugly, desperate, and sometimes violent world of the contrabandiers, Basque smugglers in the Pyrenees. Set in the 1960s, the terse story begins with Nikolas, driven by his family’s financial despair, taking on work from Gregorio, the patrón of a small team of smugglers. Nikolas must smuggle fifty horses over the mountain ridges between France and Spain. If he’s caught, jail and ruin are certain; death is possible. This engrossing novella, told with tight narration and compelling dialogue, shows the grinding poverty and ethnic tensions in Basque lands, fifty years ago. 

A cup of tea in Pamplona (Basque series)

Literature & Fiction

Literary

University of Nevada Press

Sweet promised land (Basque series)

The account a son writes of his father, an old Basque sheepherder who lived and worked in the American West for most of his life, who, in fulfilling his dream of returning to the Pyrenees, came to a new realization of what America meant to him.

Sweet Promised Land (Basque Series)

Set in a small Nevada town of Italian immigrants, this allegorical tale illustrates the human traits of evil and fear. Laxalt relays his shocking story simply and concisely. Father Savio Lazzaroni is obsessed with a vision of evil. Mayor Manuel Cafferata is only concerned with his own standing in a tiny village peopled with Italian immigrants. Into their isolated town comes Smale Calder, the first outsider to set up business in the tightly knit society. The events that befall these three men and the villagers reveal the chilling ways in which people deal with fear and prejudice. When Calder’s secret passion for rattlesnakes is discovered, the lives of all involved are changed in a dramatic sequence of emotions and events. Laxalt’s quiet buildup of suspense and violence will sneak up on readers and leave them questioning the meaning of good and innocence. One of the best works written in the West, this novella was honored alongside Hemingway and Bellow upon its first release in 1964.

A Man in the Wheatfield

United States

The Basque Hotel (The Basque Series)

The time is the 1930s and the setting is a western frontier town of a few thousand people, with one dubious distinction. Carson City, Nevada, is the smallest capital in the United States. Pete's world is circumscribed by Main Street - shops and stores, a pool hall, boarding-house hotels, and a capitol whose main contribution is as a place of liquid shade and precious green grass in blistering summers. By far the most important event of the day is when the steam whistle of the V &amp; T sounds, signaling thee passage of the shortline railway on its journey from Virginia City to Reno, "that impossibly big town of 20,000 people 30 miles away." Pete's immigrant parents run the Basque Hotel, bed and meals, whiskey and wine in Prohibition time for sheepherders and town characters. Pete is indifferent to his heritage except for disquiet about his parents' ignorance of such American traditions as Christmas trees. The heroes that figure in the boy Pete's growing up consist of a motley collection as delightful as the reader will ever meet: Buckshot Dooney, the town drunk who "travels from trouble to trouble"; Hallelujah Bob, who pursues his demons with a shotgun when he has imbibed too much; Irish prospector Mickey McCluskey; Mizoo, the cowboy with a ten-gallon hat; Pansy Gifford, the handyman who always wears a suit with a flower in his lapel; and George Washington Lopez, who swamps out the local whorehouse a block away from the capitol. Pete, too prone to dreams, undergoes his rites of passage - cruelty and kindness, disillusionment, love and terror, pathos and hilarious adventure, and finally, a cautious understanding of his world.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Laxalt, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Laxalt, Robert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Laxalt, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Sweet Promised Land

Nevada: A Bicentennial History (States and the Nation)

Nevada: A Bicentennial History (States and the Nation)

In a Hundred Graves: A Basque Portrait

A cup of tea in Pamplona (Basque series)

Sweet Promised Land (Basque Series)

Sweet promised land (Basque series)

A Man in the Wheatfield

Sweet Promised Land (Basque Series)

The Basque Hotel (The Basque Series)