In writing his superb life of Crazy Horse, Larry McMurtry faced the same obstacle as every previous biographer of the Oglala Sioux icon: a notable paucity of facts. This didn't inhibit such chroniclers as Mari Sandoz or Stephen Ambrose (whose dual portrait of Crazy Horse and George Custer featured a certain amount of authorial ventriloquism). In this case, however, the shortage of documentation actually works to the reader's advantage. Unencumbered by reams of scholarly detail, McMurtry's book has the shapeliness and inevitability of a fine novella. The author may describe it as an "exercise in assumption, conjecture, and surmise"--but his phrase does scant justice to this elegant, admirably scrupulous portrait.

As McMurtry recounts, Crazy Horse was born around 1840 in what is now South Dakota. Already the arrival of white settlers--who brought with them such mixed blessings as metal tools, firearms, and smallpox--had begun to transform the culture of the Plains Indians. But soon a more ominous note crept into the relationship: "The Plains Indians were beginning to be seen as mobile impediments; what they stood in the way of was progress, a concept dear to the American politician." As whites sought to remove these impediments with increasing brutality, Crazy Horse led his people in a sporadic and ultimately doomed resistance, which peaked at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. Within a year the young warrior (and occasional visionary) had surrendered to the United States Army. Four months later he was dead, stabbed in a highly suspicious scuffle with white and Indian policemen, and the Sioux resistance died with its legendary leader.

McMurtry's powers of compression are formidable. In no more than a few rapid paragraphs, he gives a sense of how this "prairie Platonist" divided the world into transient things and eternal, invisible spirits. He also conveys his opinion of Caucasian double-dealing with fine, acerbic efficiency: "In August, Custer emerged and described the beauties of the Black Hills in mouthwatering terms. In another life he would have made a wonderful real-estate developer. In this case he sold one of the most beautiful pieces of real estate in the West to a broke, depressed public who couldn't wait to get into those hills and start scratching up gold." McMurtry's Crazy Horse is the leanest and least rhetorical version yet of this American tragedy--which makes it, oddly enough, among the most moving. --James Marcus


From Publishers Weekly
Deceptively brief and seemingly lightweight, this wonderful work effectively cuts through decades of hyperbole. McMurtry illuminates the enigma and the myth of Crazy Horse to present him as a man?no more, no less. He has stripped away the incessant Noble Savage image that persists in many serious works about Native Americans, even to this day. He gently jabs earlier biographers who based entire volumes on little or no evidence of the events in Crazy Horse's life. "Still I am not writing this book because I think I know what Crazy Horse did?much less what he thought?on more than a few occasions in his life; I'm writing it because I have some notions about what he meant to his people in his lifetime, and also what he has come to mean to generations of Sioux in our century and even our time." McMurtry's simple, eloquent prose conveys Plains Indian culture far better than most anthropological efforts, leaving the reader with a clear, dignified image of the great warrior (who died in 1877) without needless conjectures of day-by-day activities. Although complicated by the politics of money and land, this is, as McMurtry ultimately shows, the story of a man "who had no politics, just the conviction that he wanted to live his life in accordance with the precepts of his own people." First serial to American Heritage; BOMC alternate. (Jan.) FYI: Viking plans to release two Penguin Lives titles each season, six each year. This volume, along with Edmund White's biography of Proust (see p. 62), is the first.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The new "Penguin Lives" series gives contemporary writers the chance to offer succinct biographies of well-known and significant figures in whom they are especially interested. Since so very little is known with any certainty about the Sioux warrior-leader Crazy Horse, he hardly seems the ideal figure with whom to start. Nevertheless, novelist McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, LJ 5/1/89) overcomes this handicap by constructing a thoughtful discussion of Sioux culture around the known facts to show how Crazy Horse was shaped by his society and how he reacted to its destruction as whites spread onto the Great Plains. Given the paucity of sources, McMurtry is careful to keep his own guesswork to a minimum, and he is critical of previous writers for going beyond what he thinks justified. This brief and well-written introduction to Sioux culture and the enigmatic Crazy Horse is recommended for school and public libraries.-?Stephen H. Peters, Northern Michigan Univ. Lib., MarquetteCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Peter Ackroyd
This is fine writing, and suggests once again that history and biography can best be restored by the creative imagination.


From AudioFile
Nineteenth-century Native American leader Crazy Horse is a shadowy figure for the very good reason that he spent most of his life either as a recluse or among people who kept no written records. McMurtry respects those shadows. In addition to its nominal subject, this book has much to say about how history is written, and about the irreducible uncertainties that must sometimes be accepted. Scott Brick has a rich voice; he shapes every phrase with intelligent engagement. This reviewer is inclined to characterize nonfiction audiobooks as primarily an eye-freeing convenience. Here is an exception. Fine prose beautifully read is a pleasure in itself. J.N. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
The publisher has lined up an impressive list of writers to provide digestible biographical sketches of a variety of historically and culturally significant authors, politicians, military leaders, religious figures, scientists, and artists. Best-selling novelist and history buff Larry McMurtry helps launch the Penguin Lives series with an elegantly styled tribute to enigmatic Sioux warrior Crazy Horse. Though essentially a loner and devoid of political ambition, Crazy Horse was a respected military tactician, equally feared and admired for the strength and the intensity of his convictions. Rather than merely attempting to sort out fact from fiction, McMurtry incorporates conjecture and legend into this philosophical portrait of both the man and the myth. Titles to follow in this promising and original new series include Edmund White on Marcel Proust, Jane Smiley on Charles Dickens, Garry Wills on St. Augustine, Carol Shields on Jane Austen, and Marshall Frady on Martin Luther King Jr. Margaret Flanagan


The New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers
McMurtry ... has an uncanny ability to strip the mental attic of book-learning and enter imaginatively into the minds of Indians.... [W]hile the known facts of the life of Crazy Horse are few, they are not zero, and McMurtry lays them out in a crisp fashion that includes many sharp observations of the Western scene...


Book Description
Legends cloud the life of Crazy Horse, a seminal figure of American history but an enigma even to his own people in his own day. Yet his story remains an encapsulation of the Native American tragedy and the death of the untamed West. Crazy Horse strips away the tall tales to reveal the essence of this brilliant, ascetic warrior-hero. Larry McMurtry's vivid, carefully considered, succinct biography will lure not only his own fans but history buffs, Western enthusiasts, students of all things Native American, and anyone concerned with the white man's atonement and restitution to native peoples. In a portrait that only he could render, Larry McMurtry captures the poignant passing of a time and offers a vibrant new understanding of the mythic Crazy Horse and what he stood for.


Download Description
"Legends cloud the life of Crazy Horse, a seminal figure of American history but an enigma even to his own people in his own day. Yet his story remains an encapsulation of the Native American tragedy and the death of the untamed West. Crazy Horse strips away the tall tales to reveal the essence of this brilliant, ascetic warrior-hero. Larry McMurtry's vivid, carefully considered, succinct biography will lure not only his own fans but history buffs, Western enthusiasts, students of all things Native American, and anyone concerned with the white man's atonement and restitution to native peoples. In a portrait that only he could render, Larry McMurtry captures the poignant passing of a time and offers a vibrant new understanding of the mythic Crazy Horse and what he stood for. "

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Legends cloud the life of Crazy Horse, a seminal figure of American history but an enigma even to his own people in his own day. Yet his story remains an encapsulation of the Native American tragedy and the death of the untamed West. Crazy Horse strips away the tall tales to reveal the essence of this brilliant, ascetic warrior-hero. Larry McMurtry's vivid, carefully considered, succinct biography will lure not only his own fans but history buffs, Western enthusiasts, students of all things Native American, and anyone concerned with the white man's atonement and restitution to native peoples. In a portrait that only he could render, Larry McMurtry captures the poignant passing of a time and offers a vibrant new understanding of the mythic Crazy Horse and what he stood for.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

McMurtry tackles the life of Native American legend Crazy Horse.

Peter Ackroyd

[In Crazy Horse], Crazy Horse remains a figure trapped in a history that he himself only partly understood, and the narrative must essentially remain at the level of supposition rather than of truth.
-- The New York Times Book Review

Anthony Sacramone