Crazy Horse [Audio CD]

Larry McMurtry (Author), Scott Brick (Author)

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Books on Tape (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 073665190X
• ISBN-13: 978-0736651905
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,319,741 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the coauthorship of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Academy Award. His most recent novel, When the Light Goes, is available from Simon & Schuster. He lives in Archer City, Texas.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fine Meditation on a Life, February 13, 2002

By 

C. Ebeling "ctlpareader" (PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Crazy Horse: A Penguin Lives Biography (Hardcover)

This is the third Penguin Lives volume I've read and I find the series is holding up to positive first impressions. The Lives books are short, averaging around 200 pages each, but are saved from being mere outlines by creative matchmaking of subject with author. In CRAZY HORSE, Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Lonesome Dove, takes on one of the legendary Indians of the 19th century American west. Like the as yet unfinished monument of him that is being carved out of the Black Hills of the Dakotas, Crazy Horse looms large in oral tradition and is the subject of some weighty tomes, including a biography by controversial historian Stephen Ambrose. Despite the heft of the Crazy Horse canon, McMurtry says that the actual facts of his life are wispy and he chooses to devote his book to sorting the man from the fiction. In doing so, he offers up a lucid picture of the changing state of Indian culture as Manifest Destiny chewed its way across the plains. What facts do come to light reveal Crazy Horse as better suited to his culture's past, a reluctant though dutiful leader who preferred wandering alone in the hills. At one point, McMurtry makes a quiet observation of dust kicked up on a latterday trail ride, an image that becomes a central metaphor expressing the problem of retrieving a truth that has been filtered through so many biases. Some readers may be at a slight disadvantage because McMurtry assumes the reader possesses a certain amount of familiarity with the facts of Little Big Horn and the legends. Some may be disappointed that this book offers less about the man then about politics, both Indian and white, and the process of historical investigation and perspective. I think it is a fine meditation on all subjects. McMurtry is unafraid to express a controversial opinion.

26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A novelist's literary take on history., November 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Crazy Horse: A Penguin Lives Biography (Hardcover)

The Sioux Christ

Crazy Horse was perhaps the most enigmatic - and celebrated - Indian leader. He was neither a chief nor a frequent combatant in the wars that emptied the West for white settlement. He was a loner and even a bit of an oddball. In the end, his own people despised him - and took part in his murder. Yet among Indians today, Crazy Horse is considered the greatest of warriors, a man who defiantly resisted white intrusion, who was so charitable he earned the nickname "Sioux Christ." Larry McMurtry embraces the unenviable task of distilling this man in "Crazy Horse," part of the Penguin Lives series. It's a rather interesting project, in which famed authors study the great figures of our past. (Jane Smiley, for example, will soon publish a biography of Charles Dickens.) McMurtry ("Lonesome Dove," "Terms of Endearment") isn't a historian. That's what makes this book compelling. Instead of the trudging prose of academia, we're treated to a more literary take on Crazy Horse - part storytelling, part analysis. This wasn't an easy job. Crazy Horse spent much of his life shunning whites. He also shunned most of his tribe, preferring to be alone. Hence, there's little documentation on his life. And most of what's been written since is wracked by speculation. Where McMurtry excels in dissecting the many myths. Unlike many Indian biographers, he doesn't fall for the idyllic "noble savage" viewpoint. He condenses Crazy Horse down to a good man, perhaps a great man, confused by an era of rapid change. McMurtry doesn't have a historian's zeal. He spends much of the book dissecting the work of others instead of producing his own. At 140 pages, this is something of a Cliff Notes biography - not commensurate with the $19.95 retail price.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Crazy Horse, January 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Crazy Horse: A Penguin Lives Biography (Hardcover)

A lean and powerful book very well written. Lean because the author wrote only what is actually know about Crazy Horse but places this information in the context of the places and events surrounding him. For the reader who wants to read more about those events and the speculations about Crazy Horse's participation in them as well as his character, a bibliography is included. I am a great fan of McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove" trilogy and am certainly able to discriminate between fiction and the unadorned truth of "Crazy Horse". I recommend this book without reservation.