Summary
Summary
Pulitzer Prize winner Larry McMurtry crafts works synonymous with the grandeur and beauty of the American West. Here McMurtry turns his attention to George A. Custer, a complex man who has captivated historians for over a century. From graduating last in his class at West Point to leading the ill-fated 7th Cavalry in the attack at Little Bighorn, Custer forged a legacy- still very much alive today- as one of the West's most enduring historical figures.
Reviews (4)
Kirkus Review
A Pulitzer Prize winner's idiosyncratic take on one of American history's great blunderers. Clearly well-read on the subject--McMurtry (Hollywood: A Third Memoir, 2011, etc.) generously refers readers to Evan Connell, Nathaniel Philbrick and others for more detailed information--once the owner of a vast collection of Custer-ology, twice a visitor to the Little Big Horn battlefield, the celebrated novelist offers not quite a history and barely the "short life of Custer" he proposes. Rather, this effort is best understood as an informed commentary on the dashing cavalry officer and on the Custer moment, the closing of "the narrative of American settlement," which featured an unusual twist: a dramatic victory by the ultimate losers, the Native Americans. A few of McMurtry's observations are not especially interesting (the author's own encounters with the Crow and Cheyenne tribes), and some wander off topic (Sitting Bull's passion for Annie Oakley), but many offer fresh insights on the Custer story. McMurtry fruitfully muses on the striking similarities between Custer and another overhyped western legend, John C. Fremont, the "confusion of tongues" that complicated the period of Western settlement, the willingness of Custer's Indian scouts to accompany their commander to a certain death, George and Libbie Custer's complicated marriage and the "modern" (in 1876) media mechanisms poised to supercharge Custer's fame. Many products of that publicity machine are spectacularly reproduced here, including photos, maps, paintings, lithographs, posters, magazine covers and newspaper headlines, all of which attest to the national fascination with this endlessly revisited story and with the man whose final message to his subordinate--"Come on, be quick. Be quick"--went tragically unheeded. The distilled perceptions of a lifetime of study, beautifully illustrated.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Pulitzer Prize winner McMurtry continues to be an outstanding chronicler of western legend and lore. He has retained a long fascination with the myths surrounding General Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn. This book is neither a comprehensive nor a conventional biography of Custer. Instead, McMurtry offers a series of vignettes and musings about various aspects of Custer's career, his personality, and the cultural milieu that led to his iconic status. Despite his interest in his subject, McMurtry often paints an unflattering and probably unfair portrait of Custer. He claims all of his officers despised him, which ignores his small but loyal core of supporters within the Seventh Cavalry. He suggests Custer lacked conscience, forgetting his principled but damaging (for him) testimony before Congress about corruption on Indian reservations. Still, newcomers to Custermania will find many of the tidbits very interesting, and that should encourage them to read more comprehensive biographies.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A full 136 years after the last bluecoat in the Seventh Cavalry fell, the literary autopsy of the Battle of the Little Bighorn shows no sign of letting up, with fresh students drawn to the historical morgue every year. George Armstrong Custer - we can't quit you. What happened on that hot day of June 25, 1876, one of the last violent clashes in the mostly one-sided Indian wars, is an evershifting narrative, moving with the times. For quite a while now, Custer has been shorthand for hubris, ignorance and had-it-coming, but in earlier decades Custer was a hero. An iconic picture called "Custer's Last Fight" once graced the beery interior of nearly every saloon in the United States, courtesy of an aggressive bit of cultural imperialism by Anheuser-Busch. Larry McMurtry, the prolific Texas author, screenwriter and book collector, knows something about the fetish for the fallen commander, and confesses that "as a rare book dealer I once owned a collection of Custerology numbering more than 1,000 items: scrapbooks, diaries, trial transcripts, regimental histories, publications of learned societies, reprints of reprints, and so on." And he seems to have brought along every artifact to his latest book, "Custer," a brief, breezy tour of the man and the conflict, complete with an astonishing variety of photographs and artistic renderings. McMurtry, the author of too many books to count but known best for "Lonesome Dove," is short on words and long on illustrations here. For a writer of epics, "Custer" qualifies as haiku. But the reader is in good hands; it's as if McMurtry invited a customer to the back of his Texas bookstore to spend an afternoon going through his collection. And even though there is nothing new, from a scholarly perspective, in this account, a student of the American West will learn something in the margins. At least I did. Custer loved animals - dogs, horses, even a pet antelope. He liked fine dining, white linen under the Army tent. His men, fellow officers and subordinates alike, did not like him; many hated him. The only sympathy, of a sort, that he ever showed for the native people he pursued with mortal intent was in a passage of his autobiography, "My Life on the Plains," in which he says: "If I were an Indian I think that I would greatly prefer to cast my lot with those of my people who adhered to the free life of the plains rather than to the limits of a reservation, there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with the vices thrown in without stint or measure." As in the usual modern telling of this tale, McMurtry's Custer gets what he asked for, falling, along with at least 250 of his men, to an enormous tide of Cheyenne and Sioux, after pushing ahead of other officers in the hope of adding glory to a decidedly mixed career. He was, after all, court-martialed some years before the battle for, among other counts, abandoning his command. And his earlier claim to military fame in the Indian wars was the routing of a pathetic and bedraggled group of Cheyenne who were on their winter reservation, in the Battle of the Washita in 1868. The specific origins of the fight at the Little Bighorn date to an 1868 treaty giving the whole of the Dakota Black Hills to the Sioux in perpetuity - in this case, perpetuity being about five years. McMurtry cites Alex Shoumatoff's claim that the United States made more than 350 treaties with the Indians and broke them all. The pact with the Sioux was violated because gold was found on their land. Custer protected the trespassers. "We are goading the Indians to madness by invading their hallowed grounds," he told the press. The Sioux fought back, massed with the Cheyenne and eventually gave Custer the last surprise of his life: he always believed Indians would run if faced with an assemblage of well-trained troops. There are a handful of inconsistencies and somewhat lazy conclusions here. McMurtry says Custer was a teetotaler for most of his adult life, yet he has him "sampling two fine kegs of liquor" on the day of the battle. He says Custer "probably had no idea" that a subordinate, Maj. Marcus Reno, was being forced to retreat after ordered to make an initial attack across the river. Yet research from the time of the photographer Edward Curtis up to the present day suggests that Custer may even have watched Reno's rout, with amusement. McMurtry's best character is the formidable Libbie Custer, the widow and the keeper of the mythic flame, who outlived her husband by nearly six decades. She fought anyone who dared to write the truth of her beloved's last day. McMurtry compares the Battle of the Little Bighorn to the 9/11 attacks of 2001, "in that the whole nation felt it." We continue to feel it, and most likely will for as long as seasoned storytellers like Larry McMurtry decide to pass on the lasting lessons of that bloody day, when two worlds collided for nearly the last time. Timothy Egan's latest book is "Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis." He writes for the Opinionator column on NYTimes.com.
Library Journal Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) assesses the short life of Gen. George Armstrong Custer and Custer's ongoing role in shaping concepts of the American West. As a seasoned Western literary icon, McMurtry cuts through the immense body of Custer literature to write an engaging, often irreverent, biography for a 21st-century audience more familiar with pop culture than detailed academic accounts of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Contemporary documentary photographs and artwork (more than 150 color images) are used to great effect for providing historic context. McMurtry produces a balanced account of Custer's controversial life and death, keeping his comments relevant, succinct, and compelling. -VERDICT Strongly recommended for public and school libraries as a masterful and insightful biography, as well as a guide to the key historical sources about Custer. This text will be appreciated by both scholars and Custer enthusiasts, even though theories about whether the general's nature was inherently heroic, psychotic, or cowardly are not discussed here at any length.-Nathan E. Bender, Albany Cty. P.L., Laramie, WY (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.