Bray, Kingsley M. 1956-

PERSONAL:

Born 1956.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Manchester, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Bookseller and historian. BMA Hammicks Medical Bookshop, Manchester, England, senior bookseller.

WRITINGS:

Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life, University of Oklahoma (Norman, OK), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Kingsley M. Bray is a senior bookseller at Manchester's BMA Hammicks Medical Bookshop. He has devoted nearly twenty years of his life to studying the Plains Indians of North America. Bray has given the most attention to the history and ethnography of the Lakota people of the northern Great Plains of the United States. In his first published book, Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life, Bray covers the events surrounding the life of Crazy Horse, the most infamous of the Lakota chiefs. The biography covers the leadership of Crazy Horse not just on the battle field, but also in maintaining the social welfare of his people. Bray relies heavily on oral histories and interviews of Crazy Horse's contemporaries in addition reports written by U.S. government Indian agents, personal diaries of soldiers kept during wartime, and annual reports of the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

Reviews for the biography were mostly positive. Deborah Donovan, writing in Booklist, commented that one of the strongest aspects of the book is that Bray "places [the events of Crazy Horse's life] within the context of Lakota culture, past, and present." A contributor to Publishers Weekly, however, wrote that "Bray's compensatory rigor sacrifices some narrative flow to the exigencies of a detailed scholarly accounting." In a Library Journal review, Stephen H. Peters claimed: "This finely written biography is likely to become the standard account of Crazy Horse."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 1, 2006, Deborah Donovan, review of Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life, p. 22.

ForeWord, March/April, 2007, Deborah Donovan, review of Crazy Horse, pp. 51-52.

Library Journal, October 15, 2006, Stephen H. Peters, review of Crazy Horse, p. 69.

Publishers Weekly, August 21, 2006, review of Crazy Horse, p. 58.