ELIZABETH BACON CUSTER AND THE MAKING OF A MYTH

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ELIZABETH BACON CUSTER AND THE MAKING OF A MYTH

Name: ELIZABETH BACON CUSTER AND THE MAKING OF A MYTH
Author: Shirley A. Leckie
ISBN: 0-8061-2501-2

by Shirley A. Leckie ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1993

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)