I just finished a book that I very much enjoyed and wanted to share. It’s Buffalo for the Broken Heart by Dan O’Brien. I love the idea of ‘buffalo for the broken heart’ as an antidote for ‘chicken soup for the soul,’ but, alas, this is not that book. It is the memoir of a rather quixotic displaced eastern biologist who falls in love with the Great Plains and tries to find a sustainable niche for himself, his falcons, and his bird dogs. It reads like Barry Lopez’s observations of wild animals and ecology combined with Garrison Keiler’s wry observations of humanity. Highly recommended for anyone except vegetarians.
If you’re interested, here’s the route that led me to this book: driving back across I-90 from Toronto this April, I stopped at the Little Bighorn battlefield. I like to walk the ground and read the details of history, so I spent a couple of hours there, including bringing several questions to the park rangers. One of them heartily recommended Custer and Crazy Horse by Stephen Ambrose. I’d enjoyed his account of Lewis and Clark, so I purchased C&CH in the park bookstore and began reading it that day. (It is also excellent, and high recommended.) Then, this May, I was talking to a friend about the books we were reading, and he recommended The Indian Agent by Dan O’Brien, which is a well researched historical novel about a doctor who became the first agent of the reservation on which Crazy Horse was murdered, and who became a personal friend of Crazy Horse (the doctor and the friendship are factual). I enjoyed that, as well as The Contract Surgeon, also by O’Brien, and also about the same doctor, but during the years leading up to Crazy Horse’s death. The Publisher’s Weekly review on Amazon describes it well as “a thinking man’s western, in which action is secondary to O’Brien’s nuanced exploration of character and the tragic dimensions of a morally fraught conflict.” So, having read and enjoyed two of O’Brien’s books, I looked to see what else the library had, and couldn’t resist the title of Buffalo for the Broken Heart.
