"By the time I had turned the final page, I felt angry enough [...] to want to shout from the rooftops, 'Wake up, America, before it's too damned late!' For Matthiessen, in this extraordinary, complex work, powerfully propounds several large and disturbing themes which the white majority in America will ignore at extreme peril."
–Nick Kotz, The Washington Post "A giant of a book . . . indescribably touching, extraordinarily intelligent."
–The Los Angeles Times "
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse is really about contemporary America and the way American law is seen through the eyes of American Indians. . . . It is one of those rare books that permanently change one's consciousness about important, yet neglected, facets of our history."
–The New York Times Book Review "[Matthiessen] is neither gullible nor uncritical. He realistically portrays individuals, landscapes, customs, and problems that, though wholly American, are unfamiliar to most American citizens."
–The New Yorker
"One of the most dramatic demonstrations of endemic American racism that has yet been written–a powerful, unsettling book that will force even the most ethno-pious reader to inspect the limits of his understanding."
–The New York Review of Books
