5 comments about Crazy Horse.

1. Small book packed full of great history. Highly recommended. I wish that McMurtry wrote more non-fiction.



2. You are asking for it when you condemn those who have gone before you for doing what you proceed to do yourself. With a historical figure about whom so little is known, speculation is inevitable. All one can really ask is that the speculator be careful and honest about it, as Caleb Carr is in his speculative biography about the source of my pseudonym: The Devil Soldier: The American Soldier of Fortune Who Became a God in China. For the most part IMHO Larry McMurtry IS careful and honest about it, but after reading him taking so many of his predecessors to task for THEIR speculations, I like many reviewers have a lot less tolerance for his own and like many also wonder just what the Hell he was thinking for including descriptions of tribal gatherings in Africa and native warfare in New Guinea in a book about Crazy Horse!
   
   I also have to fault him for his noticeable pro-Indian bias. In particular one has to fault his condemnation of whites for their "foolish assumption" that some sort of leader could be found and negotiated with, without condemning the equally foolish assumption made by the Indians that what was almost from the beginning the strongest tribe imaginable would simply learn to put up with the traditional Indian practice of near anarchy that could burst into violence or open warfare through the uncontrollable actions of a single warrior.
   
   Then exactly 100 pages later he is bemoaning, "They had a hard time understanding that the Indians they had subdued would really stay subdued." Gee! I wonder why that might be? Could it perhaps be the fact that on more than one occasion "the Indians they had subdued" DIDN'T "stay subdued", due to this very lack of anything resembling a leader who could give them orders that would be obeyed? One needn't approve of ANY of the sorry, sordid dealings with the Plains Indians to see that even a more honorable (or at least less dishonorable) course of action would eventually have lead to much the same result, just perhaps with less guilt attached.
   
   Still, for a short work on exactly what little is known or credibly surmised about Crazy Horse, this will be hard to beat.



3. While musing over what to write for a review of this atrocious attempt at literature, one of my students said, "just say it sucked." IT SUCKED!



4. As he states in this volume, it's less a biography than a testament to the impact Crazy Horse had on his own people during and after his life and what he means to Americans today. Illusive yes, but Crazy Horse is a symbol of all that could've been for natives of the plains. He was an Indian who never capitulated, who never gave up on his way of life or on his dreams and those dreams, both figurative and actual, guided him through life and into the walk with the spirits. What does this man mean to us all? He's more than a simple representation. He's an embodiment to self-determination. He's an example of charity and caring of a leader who placed his own people ahead of all else.
   
   Unlike Geronimo, who spent time in prison and then ended up selling autographed photos of himself for a dollar apiece to the very white people he'd sworn to kill, Crazy Horse avoided contact with Whites until his last days and never accepted their systems or their ideas of justice. He only came to the reservation because his people were starving. He only talked to the Fort's doctor because his wife had tuberculosis. He never allowed his photograph to be taken and wasn't known for talking much.
   
   He took his responsibilities very seriously as a shirt wearer and did everything he could to provide for the poor of his tribe despite preferring to be alone and preferring the open prairie to population centers.
   
   I can't help but draw parallels between another mythical figure after reading this tightly told tale. Jesus was said to express great concern for the poor and Crazy Horse was told in a vision that this was his mission in life. Jesus was a symbol for his people of a spiritual life outside the realm of Rome. Crazy Horse was a symbol of a way of life on the plains, free to pursue the Sioux ceremonies and religious observation. Jesus was killed through the betrayal of a friend and stabbed in the side by a Roman spear while hanging from a cross. Crazy Horse was restrained by his friend, the tribal policeman Little Big Man, when he was bayoneted by a soldier. In death, both Christ and Crazy Horse are rallying points for more than just their own people, but for people everywhere.
   
   CV Rick



5. Larry McMurtry (Telegraph Days, Lonesome Dove) brings his clean and concise writing style to this brief but illuminating life of Crazy Horse.
   
   This compact little biography is one of the Penguin Lives series that features what Penguin Books web site describes as an "innovative series of biographies pairing celebrated writers with famous individuals who have shaped our thinking." The series is worth looking into for its other biographies of Churchill by John Keegan, Buddha by Karen Armstrong, and Saint Augustine by Garry Wills among others.
   
   In the case of Crazy Horse not a heck of lot is really known about the man. As McMurtry points out, most of what we know about Crazy Horse and most Indians derives from their contact with whites and Crazy Horse generally avoided whites to the fullest extent possible. He was a brave warrior, a leader of his people at times, but not truly a chief, a loner, an iconoclast within a tribe of iconoclasts.
   
   Crazy Horse is an iconic figure who captures the imagination. His life of some 35 or so years spanned the rapid transformation of the West from the free days of the nomadic Plains tribes and limitless buffalo herds to the confinement of those peoples on poor reservations and the destruction of the herds. Crazy Horse never really yielded to the whites unlike nearly all other Indian leaders, not that it mattered much in the grand scheme of things because no strategy was going to change the ultimate outcome. Crazy Horse declined to go to Washington, resisted any restraints, refused to attend the parleys with the whites.
   
   He did ultimately sacrifice his own freedom when he brought his 900 or so followers after the brutal winter of 1876-1877 - just months after the twin victories over Crook at Rosebud and Custer at Little Bighorn. Crazy Horse was killed, probably by the bayonet of a white soldier as he resisted his final arrest. His death was a blessing as the whites planned to ship him to Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, a tiny prison atoll in Florida.
   
   Unlike other popular authors, notably Stephen Ambrose, McMurtry resists the temptation to let his imagination roam too freely and sticks mostly to the known facts and reasonable deductions to be drawn from them. Those facts however immutably established Crazy Horse as perhaps the single most romantic and heroic figure of the great American Western epic. He lived free, defeated Custer, the great white romantic figure, and then died young "in the last moments when the Sioux could think of themselves as free. By an accident of fate, the man and the way of life died together...he came to be the symbol of Sioux freedom, Sioux courage, and Sioux dignity." (Page 17, hardcover edition)
   
   Highly recommended for any reader with an interest in the American West.

2 comments about A Double Thread: A Childhood in Mile End--And Beyond (Reminiscence).

1. I really enjoyed this book, especially the last chapter, in which Gross tells about his reading. Like Gross, I love books about books. Like Gross, I read a lot of comic books in my youth (mainly Wonder Woman) and, later, mysteries (all of Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie and many more). Like Gross, I thought there would always be time later to read the classics, and also like him, I tend to pick up whatever catches my eye at the library. Now I'm 63, and although I've read much of the great stuff, there's still much to be read. My tastes don't run to T. S. Eliot and Gross's moderns but backward to the nineteenth-century English novelists and beyond.

   Gross has a pleasant, low-key style and, it seemed to me, a realistic take on childhood and its memories.




2. In at least one sense, the title is misleading: What Gross has accomplished in this volume is to weave an enormous, vividly colorful, and immensely intricate tapestry with almost infinite "threads" or themes. They include "the story of [his] two separate entwined legacies of being English and being Jewish" during 1935-52 as well as the Battle of Britain when he and his mother were relocated from London to Sussex to avoid the Blitz, the gradual awareness of the Holocaust, and eventually the establishment of the State of Israel.

   For me, one of Gross's most powerful qualities is his modesty (almost self-deprecation) as his memoir proceeds through such volatile times. For example, on the matter of anti-Semitism, he observes that "to have had a religious upbringing at least assures that in your own mind you are a Jew first, and the object of other people's dislike second." Young Gross seems to have been spared the ordeal of what other Jews his age experienced during the Third Reich. With regard to his own faith, "for many Jews, whatever the larger historical balance sheet, anti-Semitism is the heart of the matter, the only significant reason why they still feel Jewish." I was also deeply moved by his portrayal of his father, Avraham ben Oser, who became a doctor. The adult Gross very closely resembles that wise and generous man. It is not so much that father and son tolerate anti-Semitism; rather, that they absorb it and thereby deprive it of any legitimacy.

   Frequently as I read this book, I wondered what their conversations would have discussed had young Andras Grof emigrated to London rather than to New York and become friends with young Gross. (Grof changed his name to Grove and later served as CEO of Intel Corporation. I highly recommend his own memoir, Swimming Across.) The balance of Gross's engaging and eloquent autobiography reveals his thoughts and feelings about the Cold War years during which Stalin executed so many Jewish artists and writers. He also comments insightfully on T.S. Eliot ("who may be a great poet but he isn't greater than the Jewish people") and W.H. Auden whose social values are more compatible with Gross's own. There is great sensitivity in this book but almost no sentimentalism. Were a higher rating available, I would gratefully give it to this unique and compelling personal narrative.

No comments about Kiri Te Kanawa: A Biography (ISIS Large Print).

No comments about The Movie Greats (Isis Large Print Nonfiction).

5 comments about America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918.

1. I saw this on sale and thought it would be a nice 'chaser' after David McCullough's long but excellent "John Adams" that I was just finishing up. I was right, but barely. First, on the good side: it's a well written quick review of the four famous and interesting generations of Adamses. It gets high marks for putting a lot into a small package. Also, all four get equal time, which, given the complexities of each, I appreciated.
   
   On the negative side: it did not surprise me that Brookhiser took a less flattering (and more mainstream) view of John Adams than McCullough. But when his disparagment stretched to the following three generations I started to wonder what size burr the author may be sitting on. If you buy Brookhiser's somewhat malignant view of these four, it then begs the question how such an irascible hypocritical set of men could be so successful. Which is neither asked nor answered.
   
   It was worth the $5 I paid, but I wouldn't pay full price.



2. Throughout much of human history, leaders of nations were the children of leaders of nations. Nearly 230 years ago, a radical notion was advanced in a document that would help to form a new republic: that all men are created equal. Many of those American colonists who declared themselves independent of their king wanted not only to limit the power of the executive but to be sure that they had the ability to choose who that executive would be, rather than to have it pass from father to son. Thus, "only three of the first eight presidents produced potential successors, [and] only three of those sons were considered presidential timber." Two of them were named Adams, and one of them would actually become president.
   
   In America's First Dynasty, Richard Brookhiser uses just under 220 pages to paint compelling biographies of four successive generations of a family from 1735 through 1918, an unusually active one that included two presidents of the United States, a public servant of the republic and his state, and a writer. These men lived through tumultuous and eventful times and played roles in them.
   
   The text appears to be well-researched and is quite readable. Quite a lot of history was packed into a very small number of pages; readers with a good understanding of the times and concurrent history will find their understanding of these characters enhanced. Readers who do not know much of the concurrent history might feel rushed.
   
   In groups of three chapters, each of the subjects is considered. Beginning with John Adams, we're introduced to him already in service of his country, at a dinner party in France. We follow him through the highlights of his professional career, and into retirement. We're suddenly focusing on his son John Quincy, as his career starts at an early age with his father, and how he differs from his brothers, who fall prey to the snare of alcohol. John Quincy himself was distinguished, even becoming president, but (much like his father) was hampered by his distaste for political parties and the method of serving in public office.
   
   Charles Francis Adams married well and held various public offices throughout his career, even running as a candidate for Vice-President on the Free-Soil party ticket. Most of his public life was in state and then federal legislature, followed by a diplomatic appointment by Abraham Lincoln. Brookhiser points out that it is in the family of Charles Francis that the family tendency toward alcoholism is broken.
   
   Henry Adams apparently had no taste for public life, preferring instead to become a writer. Much of the biographical sketch focuses on the creation of his best-known work, The Education of Henry Adams. With only his lineage and his wife's suicide to frame the work, we're left wondering what else Henry did. Perhaps this was Brookhiser's intention: to focus on that which each of the subjects left behind for posterity.
   
   Indeed, after the biographical sketches, we're given several more brief chapters that discuss the family habit of keeping a diary and the writing of history. Brookhiser then attempts to frame much of what we have read, discussing such matters as dynasty and legacy. I found the discussion a bit strange because while various Adamses were clearly concerned with the matter of greatness-returning to the question of who are great men-I was under no impression that the Adamses themselves were much concerned with the legacy of the family. I saw only that they were like every other family, wanting what is best for their children, hoping that they will be of good character and do well for themselves.
   
   Putting the discussion in terms of dynasty might not be so strange when viewed through the lens of history. The fact is that John Adams was there from the founding of the country, and his family remained prominent in American life into the twentieth century. Had Henry fathered children, perhaps the chain of prominent Adamses would be unbroken today.
   
   Given this country's interest in the families that produce presidents, it's hardly any surprise that there would be such interest in a family that produced two presidents, especially in light of the fact that the current president is also the son of a president. In all, America's First Dynasty makes for an engaging read, but the extreme brevity of the biographical sketches left me hoping for more.



3. The old style of biography was much like theatre criticism. The more cleverly you could trash the subject, the more you were -- or felt yourself to be -- a winner. When personality peculiarities made subjects as vulnerable to witticism as John Adams' was, we got decades of historical biographers trying to out-acidify the likes of Bernard Shaw. This style had faded significantly by the time David McCullough wrote a biography of John Adams that was unabashedly laudatory...an open fan letter...clear hero worship!

   From Brookhiser's race through four members of the Adams family I learned only two things for sure.
   1. The Adams's irritate him.
   2. The old adage that "the things you criticize most in others are usually your own worst fault" appears to be true.

   The author's rancor calls and raises the rancor he attributes to his subjects. Reading it was an unpleasant experience with little to no redeeming informational or ideational value for anyone but the author's therapist.




4. "America` First Dynasty" by Richard Brookhiser. Sub-titled: "The Adamses, 1713-1918".
   Understandably, this book concentrates on the two presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Their contributions as one-term presidents help to establish democracy in the nascent United States. Brookhiser notes that the two Adamses were the first presidents not from Virginia. Much of what John Adams did became precedents for later presidents.

   It appears to me that the author makes the tacit assumption that the reader has a fairly good knowledge of American history, so he casually introduces lesser know subjects, such as the "Know Nothing Party " (Native American Party) and the anti-Masonic efforts in upstate New York. This, of course, leads you to things that you want to examine further, but, on the other hand, inhibits the free-flow of the book.

   I think that the author is stretching to consider Charles Francis or even Henry Adams as "greats" who were continuing the Adams "dynasty". I did, however, enjoy Brookhiser's "book review" approach to "The Education of Henry Adams" and Henry's book on Mont St. Michel. Perhaps the next book by Brookhiser would be the comparison of the contributions of the Adamses, the Harrisons, the Roosevelts and the Bushes: all presidents who related by blood.

   I listened to the seven tapes as I commuted around Boston; excellent reading by Dan Cashman. It is appropriate to note the name of the town of Haverhill is pronounced as HAV AAAA rill by the natives.. The reader sounded it out and said Have Er Hill, which is logical but not the way it is said in Massachusetts. Further, the hometown of the Adamses , Quincy, is said as "QuinZZZy".




5. I've read all of Richard Brookhiser's biographies of the Founding Fathers (Washington, Hamilton, Morris) and I've enjoyed them all, but I liked this one the least. Brookhiser writes very well and his observations on the character of his subjects are always revealing. He shows how often the best quality in a biographer is not polished prose or research skills, but judgment.

   In his book on the four generations of Adams, however, Brookhiser overreaches. Had he kept his focus on the men, this would have been a fine if undistinguished book. But Brookhiser appears to be trying to say something about families, American dynasties, and the difficulties of sustaining greatness. What he wanted to say, I could never quite figure out. The wonderful aphoristic quality of Brookhiser's prose -- that makes him so good when writing some sharp and brief observation -- fails him when he must sustain an argument.

   An example of this is when Brookhiser writes in his introduction of the contradiction of an egalitarian society having so many political family dynasties, from the Adamses to Bushes. In noting this, he writes "[An American political dynasty] is the tribute democracy pays to aristocracy." This sounds very nice, but it's meaningless. Most of Brookhiser's comments on the significance of American political dynasties and how the Adamses were able to sustain their greatness fall along this line.

   Thankfully, most of this book is on the Adamses, and it is when writing on them that Brookhiser shines. Still, the bad ideas -- even though they don't make up a substantial part of the book -- hang over it. Brookhiser is always interesting when writing about a person, but is not at his best when trying to come up with a conceptual framework to make sense of it all.

No comments about Vailima Letters (Large Print Edition).

1 comments about Ava's Men: The Private Life of Ava Gardner.

1. i am not a big fan of the author's especially after the book on grace kelly but her book on ava gardner was very engaging...she tells of some very interesting stories, especially the one of the time in africa when they were making mogambo and she lifted the natives cloth

5 comments about Family (Ulverscroft Large Print Series).

1. The author blends his own family legacy into larger themes that apply to us all. He addresses the legacy of his own family in a way that is applicable to all of us. Very tender, but also practical and a little bit shocking, like most family histories at least should be.



2. I think it's Frazier's style that is the most attractive thing about this book. He writes in simple declarative sentences with little embellishment - exactly the way someone would tell you a story orally. No histrionics, no deep reflections - just straight facts, boom, boom. It works magnificently here.
   
   He tells a history of his family (it's not really a memoir, at least not until the end, which is the weakest part), going back to his ancestors who first came to America. The best part I think is the first half; Frazier is very interested in the Civil War and spends a lot of time tracing relatives as they fought with the 55th Ohio Volunteer Infantry and the 11th Corps. (He goes way off on a tangent writing about Stonewall Jackson; it's interesting but probably could have been edited out.)
   
   Commendable is his willingness to reveal some not very pleasant things about his relatives at times: prejudices, job failings, embarrassments - things that other writers would have kept secret. Unfortunately, as his family history becomes more contemporary he comes across as more self-serving: I felt suddenly that he was writing more for himself than for his audience. An excellent first half, though - and that style is terrific.



3. Ian Frazier is a good writer--let's get that straight. The downfall of this book is not how he writes but what he writes about. I wasn't bored out of my mind reading this book, but it just didn't do anything for me. I like to read books that move me and this book had a cruising speed of 0-1 mph. This book is a generational playback/story about his family. I often thought how amazing it was that the author could write in a way to sound like he was speaking to the reader and to keep me (just barely) reading on to the next page. This was sllooowwww reading and I thought, "with all the books out there, I am just wasting my time reading about something I really couldn't care less about. There was nothing too fascinating about his family story. (At least to the point where I finally quit---about 1/2 way) I would never ever recommend this book. I would recommend sitting comatose in front of the tv watching really bad sitcoms over reading this book.



4. Many of the books I love, such as Carolyn See's "Making a Literary Life" and Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's "Italian Days," are as much about their authors as their stated subjects. Ian Frazier's "Family" also is highly personal, yet remarkable in how Frazier presents his memoirs of growing up in Ohio, adds a meticulously researched history of his ancestors, and conflates it all into a profoundly moving meditation on a country, a society and the human condition. "Family" is a book that you'll read from cover to cover without being able to put it down, then pick up often to dip into, savoring favorite parts and the rich, supple excellence of Frazier's prose. Always poignant but never sentimental, "Family" takes us through two hundred years of the lives of various Fraziers, Wickhams, Hurshes, Bachmans and Chapmans--the genealogy that culminated in David and Kate Frazier of Hudson, Ohio, their son Ian, and his four brothers and sisters. Frazier leads us off into far-ranging but fascinating and germane tangents: Discussing a Civil War skirmish in which his great-great-grandfather Charlie Wickham fought, Frazier goes off into the life story of the leader of the opposing forces in that skirmish--Stonewall Jackson. Throughout the book, Frazier shows an unerring eye for the telling detail that throws situations and personalities into dazzling focus. He also makes us love each and every one of the family members, past and present, that he writes about, and moves us to tears with his descriptions of the deaths of his father, his mother, and his young brother Fritz. Here is how Frazier describes his thoughts at his mother's deathbed: "(S)oon all the people who had accompanied me through life would be gone, too, and then even the people who had known us, and no one would remain on earth who had ever seen us, and those descended from us perhaps would know stories about us, perhaps once in a while they would pass by buildings where we had lived and they would mention that we had lived there. And then the stories would fade, and the graves would go untended, and no one would guess what it had been like to wake before dawn in our breath-warmed bedrooms as the radiators clanked and our wives and husbands and children slept." To read "Family" is to gain a fonder, fuller appreciation of our own families, and of all the blessed ties that bind.



5. Frazier's gifts as a writer shine in this climb through his family tree. Deadpan, folksy, soulful, urbane, Frazier captures the complexities of his family's unique history within the context of our country's history. Lots of real people and their small eccentricities. The negative editorial reviews reflect a collective missing of the boat. "On the Rez" is another great Frazier book.

No comments about Napoleon Bonaparte (Large Print).

1 comments about A House in Flanders (Magna (Large Print)).

1. a HOUSE IN fLANDERS WRITTEN BY A HIGHLY INTUITIVE INDIVIDUAL , ONE WHO SEEMED TO HAVE INSIGHT WELL BEYOND HIS TENDER YEARS. ELOQUENT, ROMANTIC AND A DELIGHTFULLY LIGHT ROMANCE WITH FRANCE.