As one of the inaugural volumes in Penguin Lives, a series of slim biographies pairing well-known writers with appropriate biographical subjects, Larry McMurtry's Crazy Horse gets things off to an inauspicious start. McMurtry is among the contemporary writers most comfortable depicting the Old West, but as a biographer and historian, he reveals himself to be only a few notches above a talented collector of facts. Part of the problem may be a lack of information on his subject, although McMurtry conveys what information exists with great clarity. A recluse known for his hot temper and considered an eccentric among his own people, Crazy Horse emerged as a great leader of the Sioux during their conflicts with the U.S. Army in the 1870s, including the fateful Battle Of Little Bighorn. Anyone who doesn't know much about Crazy Horse's life will leave McMurtry's book knowing considerably more, but the author doesn't get much deeper, creating no real sense of Crazy Horse as a person, the Sioux as a people, or the 19th-century Great Plains as a place. For example, when McMurtry reaches a point at which it would be logical to describe the Fort Laramie council of 1851, he instead inserts a British account of a gathering of indigenous Africans in 1916 (a trick repeated elsewhere), as if all indigenous people were interchangeable. This sort of historical shorthand gets in the way of McMurtry's book serving as a definitive account of Crazy Horse's life. Informative as it is, it's hard not to wish that this pairing of author and subject could have turned out better. Given little with which to work, McMurtry hasn't really added much.