When the Legends Die Author:Hal Borland When the legends die, the dreams end. When the dreams end, there is no more greatness. — The theme of this novel lies deep in the human experience, and its significance is universal: what happens to a man when he tries to stamp out of his own life the heritage of his fathers. — After the Ute Indian boy Thomas Black Bull has been betrayed both by h... more »is own people and by the white man, he dedicates himself to killing the legends that gave him his distinction and his pride--and becomes a man without a dream, with emptiness inside him. The story of how he comes back, how he achieves regeneration and maturity--in large measure through the world of nature to which he returns--is one that is hard to leave and impossible to forget.
Hal Borland's writing has a quality of concealed power which engages the reader's imagination. He makes us share Tom Black Bull's experience: his boyhood in southwestern Colorado, his spectacular rodeo career, and his self-redemption in the West, In all the telling there is the magi of the author's feeling for nature, for the animals and the flowers, the sounds and smells and beauty of the Southwest.« less