Of some interest to history buffs, though as a supplement to weightier books on Custer and Little Big Horn, including...
A familiar story peppered with little-known insights into the workings of a family whose name has become a byword for foolhardy behavior.
When George Armstrong Custer went ill-advisedly into that coulee in Montana nearly 150 years ago, it wasn’t just he and his command who died. As popular historian Yenne (Operation Long Jump: Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Greatest Assassination Plot in History, 2015, etc.) writes, Little Big Horn cost two Custer brothers who had ridden with George as well as a brother-in-law and a nephew—a significant portion of that generation of Custer men and a lineage that has all but disappeared following the deaths of descendants to causes ranging from suicide to old age. Much of the story will be known to students of Civil War history and the American Indian Wars, to say nothing of Custerologists; still, Yenne spins the tale accessibly. As he writes, Custer was always a skin-of-his-teeth fellow who was loyal to his men and he to them; several of the soldiers who died with Custer also fought with him as members of his Michigan cavalry regiment during the Civil War. There’s a touch too much speculation to please academic historians (“Nevin Custer might have been at this meeting. The parents of the Custer boys, Emmanuel and Maria, may have been there as well, but Maria was in poor health and the death of three sons would probably have laid her low and rendered her housebound”), and the best part of the book is the slender closing section that deals with the fates of various Custers in the aftermath of Little Big Horn, from the resourceful Libby to the now-forgotten, quiet brother who preferred to stay on the farm rather than follow his siblings to glory.
Of some interest to history buffs, though as a supplement to weightier books on Custer and Little Big Horn, including Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand and Evan Connell’s Son of the Morning Star.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5107-3034-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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