…where the buffalo stopped roaming…

Book review:

Crazy Horse

by Larry McMurtry (1936-2021)

Bibliophile, novelist, Pulitzer Prize winner

New York: Penguin Group, 1999 (Penguin Lives series)

148 pages

Apparently it is Larry McMurtry’s goal in life to avoid writing everything I don’t like.

Crazy Horse is a gem: crisp, appealing, well-informed, in McMurtry’s signature style—crafted words, no nonsense, literate. This is a candid assessment of the life and times of Ta-Shunka-Witco (“His horse is crazy”) (c1840-1877).

If there had been no relentless assault against the American Indians by white America and its government, Crazy Horse might have been an anonymous, eccentric figure among the Oglala Sioux. His compatriots probably understood him about as well as we do—that is, not much.

From several points of view, in the middle of the 19th century and now, Crazy Horse was a loner and a lone eagle. McMurtry does a commendable job of trying to see the world as Crazy Horse saw it. The world as Crazy Horse wanted it to be was shriveling around him during his entire life.

It’s too bad that Crazy Horse wasn’t born in an earlier, less contentious, more agreeable time. It’s too bad that he couldn’t simply have made his home where the buffalo roamed.

* * * * * *

Book review: The Lost History of Stars

Dave Boling’s delicate story

about a brutal war

click here

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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”