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In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowThe Last Cowboys
A Pioneer Family in the New West
Narrator
John Pruden
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Length
8 hours 8 minutes
Language
English
A Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter’s gripping portrait of one western family struggling to hold on to age-old American ways
New York Times reporter and bestselling author John Branch takes listeners to the magnificent red soil and rocky arroyos of southern Utah, where the Wright family of Smith Mesa have for generations raised cattle and world-champion saddle-bronc riders—some call them the most successful rodeo family in history.
Filled with vivid scenes of cattle ranching and the high drama of rodeo, The Last Cowboys follows three generations of Wrights through the seasons as they are battered by drought, the falling price of beef, battles over land-use and federal regulation, and rodeo’s ever-present risks of serious injury.
This is an epic but intimate story of real-life cowboys squeezed by social change in the twenty-first century, their soiled boots planted firmly in the past while they optimistically build a future.
John Branch is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the New York Times. His first book, Boy on Ice, was a New York Times bestseller and the winner of the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting. He lives near San Francisco.
John Pruden is a professional voice actor who has recorded audiobooks, PSAs, Indie films, documentaries, video games, radio dramas, corporate and online training narrations, and radio and TV commercials. An Earphones Award winner, his audiobook narrations include Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers, which was chosen by The Washington Post as the best audiobook of 2011.
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Reviews
“This compelling audiobook grabs the listener’s attention and holds it. Narrator John Pruden pivots skillfully from the megawatt excitement of saddle bronc riding to the lonely drudgery of driving long distances between rodeos. His engaged style fits the eight-second adrenaline-soaked life of the rodeo/ranching Wright family from southern Utah…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
“A beautiful book, threading deep reporting into a gorgeously written narrative. It is American portraiture at its best.”
“Remarkable….It’s a story not just of rodeo but of the contemporary West…Branch avoids the sentimentalism that can seep into such a tale. He also does an impressive job of making the rodeo life come off the page.
“Compelling…The Last Cowboys is an excellent, compassionate book.”
“What Branch focuses on so beautifully is how one remarkable American family navigates the situation of wanting to do dangerous, peculia,r and deeply impressive kinds of work.”
“An excellent, compassionate book.”
“Avoid[s] country clichés and reveal[s] not only why rural Americans must adapt, but also the reasons they might want to.”
“A real-life story that’s not only compelling, but oddly reassuring.”
“A tribute to the things that matter.”
“The Last Cowboys isn’t just about winning saddle bronc titles…It’s about the Old West becoming new.”
“Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter Branch records in utterly enthralling detail the efforts of a multigenerational Utah ranching family, the Wrights, to survive a shifting American West.”
“A dramatic and personal account of the Wright family and how they developed a second business in the modern rodeo circuit to support their family ranch at Smith Mesa. Recommended for understanding twenty-first-century American cowboy culture.”
“Branch’s fly-on-the-wall reporting and evocative prose renders this a memorable tale of family and the American West in a state of flux.”
“Packed with fascinating information, lively writing, and a certain pleasant nostalgia.”
“Branch has composed a wonderful ballad of intrepid Old West men bucking a modern world that’s going dry fast.”
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