Crazy Horse: A Life (Penguin Lives Biographies) [Mass Market Paperback]

Larry McMurtry (Author)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Lives Biographies | Publication Date: December 27, 2005

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 120 years at the life and death of this great Sioux warrior who became a reluctant leader at the Battle of 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

McMurtry's historical biography of Crazy Horse, the Sioux warrior who was a leader at the Battle of Little Big Horn, is one of two initial audio releases in the new Penguin Lives series. (The other is Marcel Proust by Edmund White, read by Barbara Rosenblatt). In each, an accomplished novelist tackles the short-form biography as a literary challenge (note: as audio programs, these are only "slightly" abridged). For McMurtry, this means reexamining the American Old West, the territory of his epic, multivolume fiction adventures (Lonesome Dove, etc.). Noting that almost nothing that Crazy Horse said was ever recorded, McMurtry relies on the historical record, interviews with elderly Sioux conducted early in this century and on his own thoughtful analysis of the general mood of the times. As audio, it's this sense of the author's fresh curiosity that keeps the program interesting. Actor Conger performs his narration in subdued tones, which respectfully reflect the academic spirit of McMurtry's project. Simultaneous release with the Viking hardcover. (Feb.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (December 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143034804
• ISBN-13: 978-0143034803
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #193,294 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #76 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National > Native American

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.