The Cowboy Way

Starred review from March 29, 1999
Newly divorced, having left his job as assistant managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner, McCumber (Playing Off the Rail) set out to see what life as a cowboy was like. The guest was part of what he calls "a rather thoroughgoing midlife metamorphosis." It is telling that he chooses the word "metamorphosis" rather than "crisis," for McCumber eagerly embraces his new life and spends hardly any energy mourning his old one. He soon found out that the cowboys of a real working ranch are not the stuff of popular culture. For starters, they rarely use horses (they often use what McCumber calls "Japanese quarter horses," a nickname for four-wheel all-terrain vehicles). Death is a constant threat to the herd and to the area's wild animals. Because of that, perhaps, McCumber and the other men of the ranch have a genuine respect for animals. But it's a tough respect, one that inspires McCumber to slit the throat of a doe who has cut an artery on a barbed-wire fence. What McCumber reveals of himself, he does so indirectly, through his descriptions of life on the Birch Creek Ranch, where the seasons are marked by the extremes of weather and the stages of cattle ranching--calving, branding, fencing, etc. Even his brief journal entries, interspersed throughout the book, look outward rather than inward. McCumber can be salty in one sentence, lyrical in the next, whimsical, stoic and, only occasionally, wistful. His book will creep up on readers, who will come away with admiration for McCumber and a strong, vibrant sense of the ranching life he has come to love.

February 15, 1999
It may come as a surprise to many people to learn that cowboys still exist in the western U.S. Among those who are aware of their existence, all too many visualize the cowboy's life as being similar to that which they have viewed countless times on television and in films--an image that proves to be quite far from the truth. This book should serve as a very effective antidote for those suffering from just such a misapprehension. The author, having worked for a year as a ranch hand in the Rocky Mountains, provides a firsthand account of his personal experiences in a book that is full of life and rich in detail. He relates the hardships as well as the joys found in the lifestyle of today's descendants of what Eugene Manlove Rhodes so aptly described many years ago as "hired men on horseback." It is a riveting adventure that will provide the reader with a much truer appreciation of and admiration for modern cowboys and the purpose that they fulfill. ((Reviewed February 15, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)

December 1, 1998
This book provides the reader with a clear description of contemporary cowboy life, a tough, back-breaking, often dangerous occupation definitely not for the faint of heart. Anyone who has experienced a Big Sky winter knows that it takes a special person to endure the "cowboy way." For his new book, McCumber, an award-winning journalist and author of the pool hall odyssey Play It Off the Rail: A Pool Hustler's Journey (LJ 9/1/95), took the initiative and hired himself out as a Montana ranch worker for one year to sample all of its possible adventure and hardship. The result is an entertaining firsthand account of the renaissance nature of the 20th-century cowboy. Recommended for public libraries.--Larry Little, Penticton P.L., BC