A novel about a landmark battle that’s too disorganized to make anything of its intriguing parts.
A debut historical novel from U.S. Marine Sumrall that retells the story of Custer’s “Last Stand” in savage detail.
Little Big Horn is as familiar a battle as any in American history. The utter failure of the 1876 campaign, in which U.S. Army Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led a force of some 700 cavalry soldiers against a much larger number of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, has lodged it in the nation’s mythology. It stands out against its larger historical context, the Great Sioux War, which was actually a total victory for the American government. Still, the conflict made heroes out of some Native American leaders, including Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota holy man whose showdown with Custer lies at the center of this novel. Sumrall’s version of Sitting Bull is drawn straight from legend; he’s a powerful magician who, through ancient rites, can channel gods and see the future, and he spends much of the book in a trance, mutilating whatever is at his disposal. The novel gives Sitting Bull’s warriors similarly dramatic treatment, and, with a few exceptions, they are more creatures than men: muscly, painted killers who feast on human flesh. Custer, on the other hand, is all-too-human—an egomaniac with presidential aspirations. Although readers are told that Custer is a great war hero, Sumrall makes no effort to make any of the lieutenant-colonel’s command decisions seem reasonable. The book distractingly focuses on sexually transmitted diseases; Custer himself has a gonorrheal infection, and the rest of his command is syphilitic. One very exciting battle scene is interrupted when a soldier leaves his post to painfully relieve himself. The novel does contain some engaging historical details, such as a description of the Far West steamboat (“The Far West had set numerous speed records and had the ability to crawl over sandbars by use of steam capstans and spars”), as well as a few memorable images that stick in the imagination, as when Maj. Marcus Reno, with brain matter and blood covering his face, refuses to dismount his horse when faced with a charging band of warriors. However, the novel is too poorly structured for these moments to coalesce into an intelligible whole.
A novel about a landmark battle that’s too disorganized to make anything of its intriguing parts.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0692381786
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Shanti Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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