It may puzzle readers of Son of the Morning Star and fans of They Died with Their Boots On, but this is an intriguing...
An eccentric though highly readable blend of history, travelogue, and memoir that follows a wobbly trail behind George Armstrong Custer’s globetrotting widow.
Enigmatic and a little shy, Libbie Custer was thrust into the spotlight following her husband’s conversion from war hero to greasy spot on the grass of the Little Big Horn, and for the next 60 years, she labored endlessly to rehabilitate Custer’s reputation while mixing uneasily with the crowned heads of Europe and the New York plutocracy. It was an uphill battle at the start, since, writes English novelist Poolman, even “President Grant, within a week of the disaster, was telling all who would listen that it was Custer who was responsible—and Custer alone—for the deaths of so many.” She did a reasonably good job of it, though Custer still has the checkered reputation in death that he did in life. Gracefully written, this is less a straightforward biography of Libbie Custer (who deserves one—after all, even Custer’s horse has been the subject of a booklength treatment) than an elliptical meditation on all sorts of matters of life and death, the moral lesson of which comes early on in Poolman’s pages: “Perhaps . . . the only thing to be learned from the memory in our lives of the dead is that they are there and we are here. Maybe life—death—really is as simple and as final as that.” Poolman follows a zigzag path across continents, seeking Libbie Custer, but, more, seeking himself through all kinds of lenses, including the blurry vision of his often drunk, Custer-obsessed father; in the end, while meditative, this is not without its humorous moments, and reminiscent of Ross McElwee’s curious documentary film Sherman’s March (1986)—and just as brilliant.
It may puzzle readers of Son of the Morning Star and fans of They Died with Their Boots On, but this is an intriguing addition to the Custer literature all the same.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2002
ISBN: 1-58234-121-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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