Review by Choice Review
Stiles, winner of a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, focuses his attention on the life of George Armstrong Custer. One can hope that his insightful, well-written biography will limit the need for others to write more about his subject. The author's narrative gives a detailed, readable, and even-handed account of Custer's life based on a wide variety of existing historical literature and personal papers. It examines his marriage, family, and financial affairs as well as his military career. Although a skilled cavalry officer, Custer disregarded army regulations and could not manage a peacetime command effectively. Personally insecure and from a poor family, he sought patrons within the army and among wealthy civilians. After the Civil War, he spent almost as much time in New York City on personal business as he did serving with his regiment in the West. The account shows Custer as looking back to mid-19th-century individualism rather than to the newly emerging urban, industrial society that followed the Civil War. This is a good story, fairly told. Summing Up: Recommended. Most collections. --Roger L. Nichols, University of Arizona
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
IS IT POSSIBLE to read a biography of George Armstrong Custer without thinking about his death from the first page? One hundred and thirty-nine years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, we still cannot say his name without picturing the mutilated bodies of his men or being overwhelmed by the sharp, lingering shame of the Plains Wars and the wholesale slaughter of Native Americans. While we cannot forget how Custer died, however, few of us remember how he lived. Who he was, what he hoped to leave behind, even what brought him to that fateful day in 1876, these questions we cannot answer, and rarely ask. If anyone could make a reader forget Custer's last stand, at least for a few hundred pages at a time, it would be T. J. Stiles. Winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his 2009 biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, "The First Tycoon," Stiles is a serious and accomplished biographer, but he is more than that. He is a skilled writer, with the rare ability to take years of far-ranging research and boil it down until he has a story that is illuminating and, at its best, captivating. When reading "Custer's Trials," what quickly becomes clear is that while perhaps no man is better known for his death, Custer had a remarkably full life, especially since he lived to be only 36 years old. He was a West Point graduate (although he was last in his class, a position now known as the "goat"), a hero in the Civil War, a brigadier general at just 23 and a major general at 24. He tried, and failed, to be a Wall Street tycoon in the same league as John Jacob Astor and a writer of the renown of Mark Twain. He fought for the North but identified with the South. He was kind to his black servant, a recently freed teenage girl, but often harsh with his own men. As many loathed as loved him, begrudgingly admiring his courage while openly ridiculing his vanity. In fact, if there is anything we remember about Custer's life, it is his vanity. During the Civil War he vowed that he would not cut his hair until he entered Richmond, Va., but his long, blond locks, which curled over his collar, had been his defining feature well before then. At West Point, his fellow cadets had given him two nicknames: Fanny, because they thought his hair "gave him a girlish appearance," and Cinnamon, for the scented oil he used on it. He loved theatrical clothing, adding a brocaded velveteen jacket to his Civil War uniform and buying custom-made fringed buckskins before heading west to fight the Sioux and the Cheyenne. "General Custer appeared in his well-known frontier buckskin hunting costume," a reporter for The New York Herald wrote, marveling at the "comical sealskin hat" he wore with it. Custer, though, wanted not only attention but also admiration. After his first battle, during which his regiment fled before Custer had a chance to fire a single shot, he wrote a letter to a friend that went on for 24 pages, describing in rich detail his personal bravery and the essential role he had played in the battle, claims that ranged, Stiles writes, "from flatly untrue to greatly exaggerated." With gallantry, Custer believed, came fame, and with fame personal advancement. "My every thought was ambitious," he admitted to his wife. "Not to be wealthy, not to be learned, but to be great." He did, however, want to be wealthy, as wealth brought power. He also, despite his poor showing at West Point, wanted to be an intellectual, or at least to be considered one. "His perennial look-at-me hunger for attention seems juvenile," Stiles writes, "because it was." But as self-absorbed as Custer was, he wasn't a fraud. He was genuinely brave, trusting to what he and his friends called "Custer's Luck" to see him through. He never shied away from danger, always wanting to be the hero in every situation, and he played the part with relish. "Gen. Custer is, to those who know him intimately, the very beau ideal of the American cavalry officer," The New York Times wrote in 1867. "He is a magnificent rider, fearlessly brave, a capital revolver shot and without a single objectionable habit." While Custer was certainly a skilled soldier, he had more than a few objectionable habits, most of which were given free rein since he refused to feel remorse. Among the rules "which I have always laid down," he wrote, was "never to regret anything after it is done." He gambled; he was almost certainly unfaithful to his wife; and, in the confusion of war, he even stole a horse, a thoroughbred stallion named Don Juan, which he proudly rode in a military parade, Stiles writes, sitting "astride his sin." CUSTER'S GRAVEST SIN, however, and the one for which he will always be remembered, was his open, even eager willingness to drive Native Americans off their land and, in the process, kill as many as necessary. Although, as Stiles argues, he was not bloodthirsty, Custer certainly believed that the Plains Wars were justified. More than that, they were personally useful. In 1867 he was court-martialed for ordering deserters to be shot without trial and for abandoning his regiment while traveling to see his wife. He was found guilty and publicly humiliated. The Plains Wars were his chance for redemption. "I do not ask to shorten the campaign," he wrote. "On the contrary I am in favor of pounding away as long as we can stand it or as long as we can find Indians." As willing as he was to risk his own life, and to take the lives of others, Custer had wanted for himself a "good death." Early in the Civil War, he had seen a young soldier lying on the ground, about to be buried with some 200 other men. "I was struck by his youthful appearance," he wrote to his sister, "together with something handsome about his face which even death had not removed." Largely untouched in death, the man could be remembered as he had been or, better, as he wished he had been. When Custer "singled out a rare still-handsome corpse, he reinforced the illusion that his would be a Good Death as well," Stiles writes, "his body intact, his looks preserved, his family informed of his valor." Not only did Custer not have a good death - the bodies of his men, including his nephew and two brothers, horribly mutilated, his own body left naked and run through with an arrow - but he has been remembered for little else. Although, as Stiles himself acknowledges, there has been no shortage of books about Custer, most, like Nathaniel Philbrick's "The Last Stand," drive irresistibly toward his death. By explaining Custer's life without constantly looking over his shoulder at the fate that awaits him, even going so far as relegating the Battle of the Little Bighorn to the epilogue, Stiles has perhaps given him a measure of redemption. Yet even "Custer's Trials" cannot give the man the legacy he had imagined for himself, which, as Stiles writes of the fortune Custer never made, "vanished in the dark space between anticipation and realization." Custer's 'look-at-me hunger for attention seems juvenile,' Stiles writes, 'because it was.' CANDICE MILLARD is the author, most recently, of "Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President." Her new book on Winston Churchill in South Africa will be out next fall.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 5, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Stiles, winner of a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for 2009's The First Tycoon, grounds this spectacular narrative of George Armstrong Custer in skillful research to deliver a satisfying portrait of a complex, controversial military man. The biography centers on the importance of period context in understanding character, incisively showing that Custer lived uncomfortably on a "chronological frontier" of great modern change in the U.S. Though Custer is best known for his fatal "last stand" at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, Stiles recounts how the officer first attracted national attention for his cavalry exploits during the Civil War. Stiles also delves into the role of celebrity in Custer's life, tracing the ebb and flow of his popularity over more than a decade after the war, as Custer struggled to find a prominent place in the "peacetime" army that the U.S. deployed in the West against Native Americans. Custer's personal life was tumultuous: he was a womanizer before and during his marriage to Libbie Bacon, and their home life was complicated by the presence of a freed bondswoman as well as persistent rumors that he had taken a captive Cheyenne woman as his "mistress." Confidently presenting Custer in all his contradictions, Stiles examines the times to make sense of the man-and uses the man to shed light on the times. Illus. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stiles (The First Tycoon) doesn't disappoint with this powerful, provocative biography of George Armstrong Custer (1839-76). Determined to explore why Custer became a national celebrity, Stiles covers the entire life of "The Boy General," emphasizing the dynamism of Custer's life and times, rather than portraying him as on a slow march toward defeat and death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Custer's Last Stand), where Lakota and Northern Cheyenne warriors proved victorious in June 1876. Custer was an outstanding cavalry officer in Civil War battles, and his ascent to power is chronicled in the first half of the book while the latter narrative portrays its subject as a romantic war hero addressing the realities of a brutal westward Indian campaign. The historical context of 19th-century America becomes as much a part of the story as is Custer, his wife, Libbie, and Eliza Brown, a young escaped slave who became their household manager. VERDICT A highly recommended modern biography that successfully illuminates the lives of Custer and his family as part of the changing patterns of American society. [See Prepub Alert, 4/20/15.]-Nathan Bender, Albany Cty. P.L., Laramie, WY © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Stiles (The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 2009, etc.) gives a warts-and-all portrait of Gen. George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876), giving full rein to both his admirers and critics. Custer graduated at the bottom of his West Point class in 1861 with the most demerits of any of the students. Only the demerits foreshadowed the brilliant tactician's future. In the first half of the book, the author provides an excellent chronicle of Civil War battles and the politics of war. Custer's undisputed prowess as a cavalry officer in the war fed his ambitions. He gained a place on George McClellan's staff that would prove especially deleterious. His flamboyance, velvet uniform, and slouching hat might have made him a laughingstock, but his ability was real and his courage, sincere. His knowledge of tactics and ability to read his environment gained him promotions and celebrity. He led from the front, but he was incapable of management. His postwar assignments in Texas and Kansas brought out the cruel, tyrannical man who abused and humiliated his men. His published writings chronicle his fascination with natural history, but they provided little income. He dabbled in the railroads and a silver mine venture, and he gambled on stock speculation. Stiles ably points out his many defining flaws: his heroic style didn't work in an era of tact and skill, and there is no doubt that he was self-serving, generally assuming that rules weren't made for him and never showing remorse. In addition to examining Custer's life, the author also introduces his cook, the fascinating Eliza Brown, an escaped slave who deserves a biography of her own. Stiles digs deep to deliver genuine insight into a man who never adapted to modernity. The author confirms, but perhaps excuses, the worldview of the "boy general with the golden locks." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
