An admiring and dutiful account of the military exploits of the Civil War hero and leader of the Seventh Cavalry at the ill- fated battle of the Little Bighorn. Civil War historian Wert (General James Longstreet, 1993) crafts a well-documented (at times excessively so) portrait of a boyish, vain, unfailingly heroic figure who might never have graduated from West Point had there not been a war. By 1863, however, Custer, then 23, had attained the rank of brigadier general in the Union army, winning national acclaim for his fearlessness in combat. A dashing cavalryman, Custer earned the love of his subordinates and the enmity of many fellow officers, a pattern that persisted throughout his soldiering life. While Wert's voluminously detailed recounting of Custer's tactical heroics may overwhelm nonCivil War buffs,, the author ably counters Custer's primary identification as the tragic victim of 1876. Custer's long- suffering mate, Libbie, is revealed here as a stout-hearted army wife, resigned to a childless marriage (Custer contracted gonorrhea immediately after entering West Point), uncomplainingly accompanying her husband to remote frontier posts. Custer's story, as well as Wert's writing, gets more exciting as the book approaches its inevitable climax. As the commander of the Seventh Cavalry, Custer once more proved his mettle by battling the Plains Indians, but his aggressive tactics, as Wert makes clear, finally spelled his doom, as well as the deaths of 262 other soldiers at the hands of some 2,000 Sioux warriors. Lamenting the way in which the battle has since obscured the life, Wert writes that Custer ``has become the singular symbol of the nation's guilt over its sad history of continental conquest. The loser at Little Big Horn has overshadowed the excellent Civil War general.' This accessible biography presents a much fuller historical picture of this near-mythic American hero. (maps, not seen) (Book- of-the-Month Club alternate/History Book Club main selection)
Pub Date: June 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81043-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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
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