Crazy Horse: A Life

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.