Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) recounts six Western frontier massacres in this meandering mixture of memoir, literary criticism, jeremiad and history. "In most cases," McMurtry acknowledges, "the only undisputed fact about a given massacre is the date on which it occurred." Rightly enough, such disputes don't keep him from approaching these subjects with strong opinions. "Whites killed whites" at Mountain Meadows (1857); "a camp of one hundred percent peaceful Indians" was attacked at Sand Creek (1864). At Marias River (1870), Blackfeet Indians "dying anyway" of smallpox were slaughtered, and at Camp Grant (1871) "all the people killed-excepting one old man and a `well-grown' boy-were women and children." McMurtry's easygoing voice and hop-and-skip pace leave comprehensiveness to the many books to which he refers, but his own volume would have been stronger, and more accessible to readers unfamiliar with frontier history, if it had been organized more systematically. As is, the book feels tossed off, and his passing references to contemporary massacres-in Rwanda, New York and Iraq, for example-don't add much resonance. Agent, Andrew Wylie. (Dec.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Noted novelist McMurtry makes another nonfiction foray, this time studying several of the 19th-century massacres that occurred between native tribes of the American West and the white settlers who were moving there. He focuses on six massacres in particular: those that took place at Sacramento River (1846), Mountain Meadows (1857), Sand Creek (1864), Marias River (1870), Camp Grant (1871), and Wounded Knee (1890). He selected these as "the famous massacres," each resulting in more than 100 dead, a toll of violence notable in its day. His goal here is not to lay blame or dispute the facts and conclusions he relates from other writers-almost the only universally agreed element of each massacre is the date on which it happened-but to capture the essence of the event and offer a few comments and conjectures. This he does in a very relaxed style that makes readers feel that they are having a conversation with the author. While academic libraries are likely to have the previous studies used and cited by McMurtry, his book is a good introduction for lay readers and high school students. Recommended for public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 8/05.]-Stephen H. Peters, Northern Michigan Univ. Lib., Marquette Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

A suitably cheerless tour of several 19th-century massacres, guided by the increasingly gloomy master of all things Wild West. Having written of Blue Duck, the Texas Rangers, Billy the Kid and others handy with a gun, McMurtry (The Colonel and Little Missie, 2005, etc.) is well versed in the business of slaughter: "What massacres usually do," he writes by way of welcome, "is reduce human beings to the condition of meat, though the bits of meat will be less tidily arranged than the cuts would normally be in a decent butcher shop." Such is the spirit in which McMurtry visits the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where, in 1857, a mixed group of Mormons and Paiute Indians slaughtered 140 westbound settlers from Arkansas, both to get at their fat cattle and to chase away "gentiles" from Utah. The male settlers were shot by Mormons, the females and children bludgeoned by Paiutes; either way, they wound up as "in effect a meat mountain." So, too, did the unfortunate "peace Indians," Cheyenne mostly, who were butchered at Sand Creek in 1864 by white militiamen led by a thunderous fundamentalist preacher; and so too did the Apaches slaughtered at Camp Grant, Ariz., in 1871, by a mob of white vigilantes, Hispanic ranch hands and even Indians; and so, too, did the unfortunate Sioux massacred in the snows of Wounded Knee in 1890, who believed that their Ghost Dance would keep away the bullets. (Interestingly, McMurtry remarks, similar ideas were afoot all over the world, always arrayed against white imperialists.) If McMurtry has a thesis, it is to show that the nervous doctrine of the preemptive strike seems always to be a precursor to massacre-a doctrine "President George W. Bush has recentlyrevived." But it needs no real thesis; the mayhem speaks for itself. Minor McMurtry, but, as always, superbly written: dark reading for a Western campfire surrounded by ghosts. Agent: Andrew Wylie/Wylie Agency

"As always, superbly written." —Kirkus