Leckie (History/University of Central Florida) deftly discerns Elizabeth Custer's central role in the making of the Custer legend, thus simultaneously celebrating a strong woman and deflating a frontier hero. When George Armstrong Custer was killed in 1876 during the battle of Little Bighorn, his wife, Elizabeth, was only in her mid- 30s. Childless, she inherited a mass of debts—Custer was a notorious gambler—and the charge of securing her husband's reputation. Custer, the Union's daring boy general, had throughout his short life inspired either great affection or visceral dislike among his fellow soldiers. His death on the battlefield provided an opportunity for both his admirers and his detractors to define his place in history. To his critics, the battle, in which 210 of Custer's men lost their lives, was typical of the man's ambition and vanity—he would do anything to advance himself. In letters to the secretary of war, Custer's detractors accused the general of disobeying orders and indulging in reckless behavior—but they soon came up against Elizabeth, who, devotedly enduring all the privations of army life on the frontier, had accompanied her husband to Texas and out to the West. Widely respected and admired, she would soon silence the critics as she devoted the rest of her long life—she died in 1933—to creating and maintaining the legend of her beloved ``Autie,'' whom she eloquently extolled in well- received memoirs and lectures. Leckie records all the relevant biographical and historical events: the couple's courtship in Michigan; Custer's Civil War exploits; his postwar campaigns; the pair's married life, not always idyllic (Custer was a flirt as well as a gambler); and changing contemporary attitudes to the general's once heroic status. An admirably researched, well-wrought portrait of a talented woman who attained literary fame, financial independence, and—by shaping her husband's image and keeping his name alive—her ``heart's desire.''
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8061-2501-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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