Washington Post Book Reviews
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Monday December 20, 2010
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THE KILLING OF CRAZY HORSE
Thomas Powers
Knopf
ISBN 978-0375414466
565 pages
$30
Reviewed by David Treuer
It is easy to see why people are still fascinated by the Oglala Sioux leader Crazy Horse. He is the frontier version of James Dean. He lived fast, died young and left a good-looking corpse. Crazy Horse and Dean even share the honor of having their own U.S. postage stamps. Crazy Horse's stamp was worth 13 cents; Dean's is 32 cents.
What is unique about Thomas Powers' approach to Crazy Horse is the dramatic staging of his meticulously researched and gripping account. The Oglala war chief nearly wiped out Gen. George Crook, who led the Black Hills and Yellowstone Expeditionary Force meant to drive the Sioux from the Black Hills and settled instead for killing Gen. George Armstrong Custer and his command at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25th and 26th in 1876. Powers sets up the story as a tragic drama played out between Crazy Horse, the heroic and implacable Indian leader; Crook, the antagonist with a flaw -- a few of them actually; Frank Grouard, the ethnically vague, self-promoting scout; Little Big Man, the friend who betrayed the chief; and jealous rival chiefs like Red Cloud and Spotted Tail. Fate hangs over the book's pages like smoke over a battlefield. Powers shows Crook at his worst -- unable to best Crazy Horse in battle, he lures the chief in to Camp Robinson, where he is murdered in a mystifying storm of deceit on the part of Crook, jealousy and frustration among his Sioux allies, and a series of simple blunders. One can't help feel after reading Powers' account that Crazy Horse was fated to die that day.
As the narrative unfolds, Crazy Horse emerges from the pages as he must have to those who wanted his head: as a mystery, a rumor, someone sighted from a distance. It is not known exactly how old he was -- born circa 1840 -- or how he got his great name (either from his father or from a vision), or even how he felt about all the bloodshed. Powers leaves one to speculate: If Crook's sin was pride, did Crazy Horse share that tragic flaw? Was his decision to fight Americans a calculated political decision? Or was fighting such a way of life on the plains that it was impossible for him to imagine an alternative?
It is violence that defined the West during the Indian Wars and violence that defines Powers' book. Perhaps more gripping than the way in which Crazy Horse's life begins in soft focus, becomes sharper and then eludes capture (no one knows where his body is buried or what happened to his medicine bundle) are the small moments of violence that Powers relates. These are chilling and unforgettable. In one episode the Sioux catch a Crow horse thief who is shot and killed, and his arms and legs hacked off and tied to the bushes before the Sioux band decamps. In another occurrence U.S. soldiers drag the bodies of two Sioux warriors back to the Sioux camp and, within sight of the friends and relatives of the slain, throw them on a fire and laugh as their flesh sizzles and pops in the flames. Much later in the book, Shoshone scouts working alongside the U.S. Army under Crook's command sack a Cheyenne village and find a buckskin bag full of the severed right hands of their own children, who they'd assumed were safe at home.
In such a time of rapid, cataclysmic change, it would have been easy for an author to take sides. In some ways Powers' decision to withhold judgment is a wonderful thing, but in his quest for balance he glosses over the fact that, while Crook might have been fighting for his pride and his command, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and Red Cloud were fighting for their lives. Crook's defeat would have spelled the end of his career; Crazy Horse's defeat was the end of an age. What, after all, are you to do when you have been born and bred and taught to live a certain way and then that way is no longer open to you? In the case of many Indians at agencies throughout the West, the question of what to hunt and how to express their culture was answered by the government allotment of beef cattle. Instead of killing the cows in their pens and butchering the meat there, Indians released the cows and chased them down on horseback in mock hunts that meant a great deal to those doing it. "The beef issue at Red Cloud (Agency) was part of the tour given every visitor," Powers writes, "and they all returned with stories of the festival atmosphere, the dramatic slaughter and quick work done by Indian women with their butchering knives; of the children and young men with blood running down their necks as they chewed into livers or kidneys plucked steaming from the freshly killed beeves; of the intestines, carelessly washed of their grassy contents, chewed on by infants and old people alike."
More than the story of Crazy Horse or the battles between two implacable foes, Powers gives us the portrait of a place -- a portrait done in the blood of the heartland, a heart still beating on after all these years. Powers has given us a great book, a great painting of that still-beating heart.
David Treuer's latest novel is "The Translation of Dr. Apelles." His nonfiction book on contemporary reservation life, "Rez Life," will be out in 2011. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Leech Lake Reservation.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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AMERICAN GRACE: How Religion Divides and Unites Us
Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 978-1416566717
673 pages
$30
Reviewed by Michelle Boorstein
Even as a religion reporter, I was surprised by some of the findings in this hefty new book about American religion by political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell.
Among them: Secularism is increasing most rapidly among the less educated (the opposite of what happened in the 1960s and '70s); the growth of evangelicalism ended nearly two decades ago; and evangelicals diverge most from the rest of the country in their opposition to premarital sex, not in their views on abortion or same-sex relationships.
In his seminal book "Bowling Alone" (2000), Putnam focused the country's attention on its deteriorating community life. "American Grace" will likely spark similarly fierce debates. It has already commanded attention from some evangelical leaders, who have sounded the alarm about growing secularism. Yet the book seeks to tamp down the culture wars and takes a cautious tone (its conclusions are expressed in the most non-inflammatory language possible). Most of its findings have already appeared elsewhere, but "American Grace" is still perhaps the most sweeping look yet at contemporary American religion. It lays out the broad trends of the past 50 years, assesses their sociological causes and then does a bit of fortune-telling.
After World War II, the authors explain, America was such a religiously moderate nation that one couldn't predict someone's politics based on whether he or she attended church. Then came what Putnam and Campbell call the "shock" of the 1960s, when intense social change and experimentation pushed many Americans away from organized religion. That was followed in the 1970s and '80s by a strong reaction -- the rise of religious conservatives and their political activism; church construction and Bible publications boomed. In the 1990s and 2000s a growing percentage of Americans told pollsters they had no religion, and the estrangement of young people from organized religion was higher than in previous generations.
"American Grace" depicts a country losing its religious moderates as the highly religious and the highly secular migrate to opposite poles and shape their religious identity to match their politics.
Putnam and Campbell also find a growing group of unaffiliated, undecided believers floating about in the center.
The authors cheer a contrary trend -- a growth in religious mixing and marrying that they argue reinforces tolerance and moderation.
But there are millions of religious conservatives for whom interfaith marriage is a major problem. I suspect that some of their religious leaders will use Putnam's stature and this book as an excuse to re-emphasize orthodoxy.
Seen through the authors' sociological lens, religion in America is inherently subject to changing currents. In the past half-century, some of the major forces influencing religion and politics were the women's movement, the income gap and increasing diversity caused by immigration. The book encourages speculation on which current trends will be tomorrow's religious influences.
Though it's written in an easy-to-digest, journalistic style, "American Grace" is more like a textbook than a popular title.
But it is packed with fun facts: The intensity of one's religious belief is more predictive of one's politics than religious denomination; about 60 percent of people who switched religious identities didn't do so because of marriage; 89 percent of Americans believe heaven is not just reserved for people of their own faith. The book also brings to life complex issues such as how politics play out in a synagogue in suburban Chicago and in a megachurch in Minneapolis.
The authors aren't shy about declaring their agenda: peace. They detail how religious mixing has taken place in their own families and see the trend as the solution to the puzzle of how to maintain tolerance and diversity. The rise in religious blending and diversity, they say, is the "American Grace" of the title. But sometimes they seem to be cheering a bit too loudly.
Michelle Boorstein can be reached at boorsteinm(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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