Thomas Flanagan's book Louis 'David' Riel, though biographical in form, is not intended to replace George F.G. Stanley's standard biography, which remains indispensable though lamentably pedestrian. Flanagan does tell Riel's life-story, but with less political, military, and legal detail than Stanley gives, concentrating on what was clearly most important to Riel himself: his religion and his mission as "Prophet of the New World." It's a tragic story of a man who might have achieved much if it had not been for a fantasy-life that grew in scope and complexity until it became his only reality. (p. 53)

[In] his last chapter Flanagan attempts to show that Riel's religion is characteristic both of the millenarian Christian cults of the dispossessed that were frequent in the Middle Ages and have continued to appear ever since (as in Jonestown), and the nativistic resistance cults like the Rastafarians and the Black Muslims...