Joining the crowded ranks of new books about General George Armstrong Custer's now mythic final battle in 1876 is this newfound eyewitness account by a private in the Seventh Cavalry, attached to Major Marcus Reno's command. Unearthed and edited by Martin, the director of the Western memorabilia department of a San Francisco auction house, Taylor's manuscript, completed five years before his death in 1923, vividly recounts the heroics of his badly outnumbered comrades and provides further evidence of Major Reno's incompetence and cowardice on the Little Bighorn. Reno, sent by Custer to flank a suspected Indian force, was attacked and fled the field. Taylor, despite losing his mount and his pistol, and with soldiers dropping all around him, managed to gain the bluff to which Reno's disordered force retreated. Trapped under a broiling sun with little water, surrounded by snipers, they listened to the fusillade of gunshots signaling Custer's last stand. While Taylor recounts such horrifying battlefield details as the mutilation of the bodies of dead soldiers by the Sioux, he speaks with great empathy of the Indians' plight. Upon seeing the body of a Sioux who had been scalped by soldiers, Taylor reflects, ``I could not help a feeling of sorrow. . . . He was within a few hundred rods of his home and family which we had attempted to destroy and he had died to defend.'' Some remarkable materials lend a homely power to Taylor's narrative: statements by army officers and Sioux leaders; period poetry about the battle; photographs of soldiers, Indians, and army scouts; and even a listing of such personal items as soldier's rings and watches recovered from Indians long after the event. This sweeping account by a surprisingly gifted writer is more than a battlefield epic; it is vibrant, living history that easily leaps the 120-year chasm between us and combatants that day at the Little Bighorn. (Editor tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86803-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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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