Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

An Amazon Best Book of November 2015: As with many American icons, we really don t know much about General George Armstrong Custer. Born poor in Ohio, educated at West Point, where he barely graduated, Custer s reputation expanded quickly during the Civil War. He was brave, he could lead, and he possessed that Custer luck. We all know where that luck ended. Or do we? T.J. Stiles, who won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer for his biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, illustrates how Custer, who famously extended his military career by fighting in Indian country, lived on a chronological frontier even more than a geographical one. He wanted to be a hero. He wanted to be able to fight with a sword. But he came of age at the onset of modernity where the new order was industrial, corporate, scientific, and legal. Custer represents something to each of us whether brave fighter or ruthless Indian killer who got what he deserved but he was flesh and blood, and he lived a real life that was buoyed by ambition and hope and riddled with contradictions. T.J. Stiles writing and research is as much hero here as Custer, and it sets this biography apart from so many others. Chris Schluep