Custer completists will want to have a look, but there are many better books on the subject.
Revisionist study of one of the most signal defeats in the annals of America.
By Hatch’s (Glorious War: The Civil War Adventures of George Armstrong Custer, 2013, etc.) account, it is an enduring myth to think that Custer committed a mistake by splitting his forces and entering the field of battle on the grass of Little Bighorn in multiple columns. In previous engagements in the Civil War and Indian Wars, Custer had separated his command and lived to tell the tale, once at the Battle of the Washita River. Hatch does not add that at Washita it was mostly women and children who stood in Custer’s way, though the warriors managed to rub out one of those separated units, but his point stands: Viewing the lay of the land and where he thought his enemies were and how they would react, Custer was rightly engaging in a strategy that he had proven in past battles. In a library that includes work by such fine writers as Nathaniel Philbrick and Evan S. Connell, Hatch’s book is no competition in literary terms; the prose sags and strains (“the powers that be did not have to work too hard to demonize the Sioux and Cheyenne in the eyes of the average cavalryman”). As a purely military account that draws heavily on that library, though, it has its merits. Hatch does a good job of describing firearms, tactics, the minutiae of cavalry mounts and the terrible fury of a battle that might have been won had Marcus Reno's and Frederick Benteen’s columns arrived. To his detriment, though, Hatch goes on too long about “brotherhood under fire,” a sentiment the victorious Indians no doubt felt themselves. The author’s nonironic contrasting of the “civilized world” with theirs is something at home in Custer’s era but not in our own.
Custer completists will want to have a look, but there are many better books on the subject.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05102-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Highly recommended, even for those who have already read the excerpts in the New Yorker. Fey is one of the funniest people...
One of the world’s cleverest comedy writers debuts with a frequently hilarious memoir.
Perhaps best known to mass audiences for her writing and performances on Saturday Night Live, Fey’s most inventive work is likely her writing for the critically acclaimed TV show 30 Rock, in which she stars alongside Alec Baldwin and fellow SNL alum Tracy Morgan. In typical self-deprecating style, the author traces her awkward childhood and adolescence, rise within the improv ranks of Second City and career on the sets of SNL and 30 Rock. The chapter titles—e.g., “The Windy City, Full of Meat,” “Peeing in Jars with Boys” and “There’s a Drunk Midget in My House”—provide hints at the author’s tone, but Fey is such a fluid writer, with her impeccable sense of comic timing extending to the printed page, that near-constant jokes and frequent sidebars won’t keep readers from breezing through the book with little trouble, laughing most of the way. Though she rarely breaks the onslaught of jokes (most at her own expense), she does offer an insightful section on the exhaustively analyzed concept of the “working mom,” which she finds tedious. (Even here, the author finds plenty of room for humor—not wanting to admit she uses a nanny, Fey writes, “I will henceforth refer to our nanny as our Coordinator of Toddlery.”) Fey may not sling a lot of dirt about her many famous co-stars in Second City, SNL and 30 Rock, but her thoughts on her geeky adolescence, the joys of motherhood and her rise to TV stardom are spot-on and nearly always elicit a hearty laugh. Even the jacket copy is amusing: “Once in a generation a woman comes along who changes everything. Tina Fey is not that woman, but she met that woman once and acted weird around her.”
Highly recommended, even for those who have already read the excerpts in the New Yorker. Fey is one of the funniest people working today.Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-05686-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2011
Demonstrates how very thin is the gilt on the Golden State.
With humor, history, nostalgia, and acerbity, Didion (Political Fictions, 2001, etc.) considers the conundrums of California, her beloved home state.
Pieces of this remarkable memoir have appeared in the writer’s usual venues (e.g., the New York Review of Books), but she has crafted the connections among them so artfully that the work acquires a surprising cumulative power. Didion tells a number of stories that would not in lesser hands appear to be related: the arrival in California of her pioneer ancestors, the nasty 1993 episode involving randy adolescents who called themselves the “Spur Posse,” the fall of the aerospace industry in the 1990s, her 1948 eighth-grade graduation speech (“Our California Heritage”), the history of the state, and the death of her parents. Along the way she deals with some California novels from earlier days, Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon and Frank Norris’s The Octopus, and explores the community histories of Hollister, Irvine, and Lakewood (home of the Posse). She sees fundamental contradictions in the California dream. For one, older generations resented the arrival of the “newcomers,” who in their minds were spoiling the view. But as Didion points out, the old-timers had once done the same. More profound is her recognition that Californians, many of whom embrace the ideal of rugged individualism and reject “government interference,” nonetheless have accepted from the feds sums of money vast enough to mesmerize Midas. Water-management programs have been especially costly, but tax breaks for all sorts of other industries and enterprises have greatly enriched some in the state (railroad magnates, housing developers, defense contractors) while most everyone else battles for scraps beneath the table. Most affecting are her horrifying portrait of Lakewood as a community devoted to high-school sports at the expense of scholarship and her wrenching accounts of the deaths of her father and mother.
Demonstrates how very thin is the gilt on the Golden State.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2003
ISBN: 0-679-43332-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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