[Matthiessen] has had considerable experience observing others hunt all sorts of beasts and fish. This is the first time he has observed manhunts, and there are moments in [In the Spirit of Crazy Horse] when I get the feeling that, though he follows the events with meticulousness and gusto, he almost wishes he were back dealing with more admirable predators, such as the lion in Kenya that snapped off a schoolgirl's head (Sand Rivers) or the shark that swam off with the bottom half of a Californian (Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark).

Those who have, through his books, accompanied Peter Matthiessen on his wide-ranging adventures know that he is a man of great courage, conscience, insight, sympathy, and tenderness. Those characteristics are seen again in In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. But unless I am badly misled by the internal evidence, there has also been a profound change in Matthiessen: he is losing confidence in mankind, and perhaps in himself. In Sal Si Puedes, his 1969 book about Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, Matthiessen, after quoting a black migrant farm worker as predicting "the world gonna be great one day," adds that "Cesar Chavez shares this astonishing hope of an evolution in human values and I do too; it is the only hope we have." On the final page of that book, he predicts that sooner or later "the new citizens" who prefer freedom to conformism and fear will "win, for the same reason that other new Americans won, two centuries ago, because time and history are on their side, and passion." But fourteen years later, in this, his first "social issues" book since Sal Si Puedes, there is no such note of hope, no assurance that mankind will outgrow its orneriness. (p. 115)

Maybe I read too much hopelessness into Crazy Horse. But I am fairly certain of one thing, and I think it relates to his depression: Matthiessen has lost, for the moment at least, his touch of poetry. At its best, Matthiessen's prose is so right that it becomes more than prose, as when he tells us of the song of the whales in Blue Meridian, those marvelous oinks, squeaks, grunts, and whistles, "tuned by the ages to a purity beyond refining, a sound that man should hear each morning to remind him of the morning of the world"; or recalls his meeting with the sharks in "a nether world of openmouthed dead staring forms that moved in slow predestined circles"; or paints that primordial scene, in Sand Rivers, of "spleen-yellow" crocodiles feasting on a rotting hippopotamus, "swollen a pale purple, that was stranded like a huge rubber toy on a hidden bar out in mid-river." Death and violence have often inspired him before; victims have stirred him to some of his finest writing. But not here. Here there is only prose hardened by unhappiness with a mean system that defies reform. In this respect, I guess, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse is a perfect book for our times. (p. 116)