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.
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.
