A highly entertaining and informative study ... The rare authorized biography that keeps its subject at arm’s length ... An unmistakable sadness clings to Western Star, fitting given that much of its subject’s writing was a lament for the passing of the old-timers and their ways, and the subsequent dislocations of future generations left to grapple with a new and homogenized West.
Streitfeld occasionally shares a sweet personal remembrance of McMurtry ... These moments are a window on a different sort of book that Western Star might have been ... Instead, Streitfeld opted for a more traditional biography, albeit one that seems subtly colored by that friendship even when it isn’t addressed directly ... Streitfeld’s quest to tell McMurtry’s story once and for all turns out to be nearly as quixotic as Gus and Call’s trek to Montana ... Sometimes, Streitfeld seems to forget that the reader doesn’t already know McMurtry well, like he does ... Can sometimes feel like a conversation at a bar with a friend who lets their stories get away from them, arriving at the punch line before they finish the setup ... Streitfeld, a less industrious literary critic than Daugherty, occasionally quotes from user reviews on Goodreads and IMDb in lieu of his own analysis—a dispiriting habit, especially because he often hits the nail on the head when he makes his own attempts ... In the end, Streitfeld seems less interested in McMurtry’s prose than in the stories he told about himself.
Impressive ... Streitfeld’s writing is notable for its descriptive energy and reportorial straightforwardness ... After reading this propulsive book, it is hard to imagine anyone could have done a more thorough, honestly reported yet compassionate job of revealing so much of this elusive figure’s interior life, including his well-hidden tender side and his private generosity
An intelligent ode ... Affectionate ... Streitfeld ably and lovingly tells his story ... Western Star is itself a treasure, though it’s not a hagiography. Rather, the biography is a heartfelt testimonial to the joys of finding tarnished gems hidden on the kind of musty shelves that only a true bibliophile could love.
McMurtry’s inventions went beyond the page ... This is the motivation for a new biography, Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry, written by McMurtry’s longtime friend the journalist David Streitfeld ... By treating McMurtry like one of his rogues, one finds that he—like all Americans, yarn-tellers every one—occupies an ambiguous relationship to his country’s history. Which is to say that we, Americans, all indulge in some kind of mythmaking, and it was McMurtry who understood how integral that was to the place we call 'the West' ... Readers learn that the story of McMurtry’s bookless upbringing is itself wound in fiction, and that the author’s bio on the back of his books stretched the truth as well in order to create a certain myth of McMurtry himself.
