Crazy Horse: A Life
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Average rating4
15
Ratings1
Average rating4
Legends cloud the life of Crazy Horse, a seminal figure in American history but an enigma even to his own people in his own day. This superb biography looks back across more than one hundred and twenty years at the life and death of this great Sioux warrior who became a reluctant leader at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. With his uncanny gift for understanding the human psyche, Larry McMurtry animates the character of this remarkable figure, whose betrayal by white representatives of the U.S. government was a tragic turning point in the history of the West. A mythic figure puzzled over by generations of historians, Crazy Horse emerges from McMurtry's sensitive portrait as the poignant hero of a long-since-vanished epoch. Marking the debut of the new Penguin Lives series, McMurtry's Crazy Horse is a masterly exemplar of biography in the short form, illuminating both the man and the age with the eloquent economy that will introduce to a new generation of readers this once-popular genre. - Jacket flap.
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You can feel McMurtry's pain and frustration throughout the whole book. There's so much to grieve over: the loss of a great man and of great Peoples; the lying and destruction and cruelty; the fact that we know so little.
This is a sober and sobering account of an honorable man's life. It is spun out of mere wisps, because we have so few sources and those are all inconsistent among each other. McMurtry is careful to note where the sources are scant or untrustworthy, and tries hard (mostly but not entirely successfully) to avoid conjecture; the result is a short but thoughtful book that has greatly informed and humbled me.
