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George Armstrong Custer Booklist

 

Fiction and Nonfiction related to Custer and his life. Also: Crazy Horse Booklist

 

Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.

Fiction

  • Marching to Valhalla: A Novel of Custer's Last Days
    Author: Blake, Michael
    Publisher: Villard $ 23 ISBN: 0679448640 Date: 1996
    star PW
    The author of Dances With Wolves turns his creativity and imagination toward America's doomed romantic hero, George Armstrong Custer--the youngest general of the Civil War, trailblazer, Indian hunter, passionate lover, obsessive husband, and tormented, guilt-ridden soul. A wonderful merger of fact and fiction.
    Updated 11.7.05
  • An Uncommon Enemy
    Author: Blake, Michelle
    Publisher: Forge $ 26.95 ISBN: 0765301032  Date: 2001
    When a white woman is found living among the Cheyenne by Custer's troops at the Battle of Washita, she entrances many of the soldiers, and puts into motion a chain of events that will echo all the way to Little Bighorn.
    Updated 11.2.05
  • A Road We Do Not Know: A Novel of Custer at Little Bighorn
    Author: Chiaventone, Frederick J.
    Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 24 ISBN: 0684830566 Date: 1996
    This stirring novel captures the moment-by-moment impact of the tragic bloodbath at the Little Bighorn 120 years ago--a narrative to thrill all who are partisans of the American West.
    Updated 11.2.05
  • Crofton's Fire
    Author: Coplin, Keith
    Publisher: Putnam $ 21.95 ISBN: 0399151125 Date: 2004
    star Booklist star Kirkus
    In this highly original first novel, a green second lieutenant barely escapes Little Bighorn--only to find that his life's adventures have just begun. "Keith Coplin's wry historical vision compellingly informs every graceful line of Crofton's Fire.--Robert B. Parker.
    Updated 11.2.05
  • The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer
    Author: Jones, Douglas C.
    Publisher: Scribner $ 8.95 ISBN: 0684182556 Date: 1976
    A fictional account of the court martial that might have taken place if General Custer had survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
    Updated 11.2.05
  • The RIver and the Horsemen: A Novel of the Little Bighorn
    Author: Skimin, Robert
    Publisher: Herodias $ 26 ISBN: 1928746004 Date: 1999
    The most compelling account of the Little Bighorn ever written, this powerfully detailed historical novel vividly recreates the lives of two of the most celebrated leaders of nineteenth-century America, General George Armstrong Custer and Chief Sitting Bull. The Battle of the Little Bighorn itself, described in all of its frightening detail, is the riveting climax to an artfully portrayed collision of two civilizations: one reaching for its manifest destiny, one struggling for survival. - Publisher Marketing.
    Updated 11.2.05

Nonfiction

  • Touched by Fire: The Life, Death and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer
    Author: Barnett, Louise
    Publisher: Holt $ 30 ISBN: 0805037209 Date: 1996
    star Booklist
    This new biography undertakes the search for, as one historian put it "a man waiting to be discovered" between the extremes of his experience. Barnett traces the entire story of Custer's erratic and complex personality, from his days at West Point to his last stand at the Little Bighorn.
    Updated 11.2.05
  • Son of the Morning Star: Custer and Little Big Horn
    Author: Connell, Evan S.
    Publisher: North Point $ 20 ISBN: 0865471606 Date: 1984
    Custer's Last Stand is among the most enduring events in American history--more than one hundred years after the fact, books continue to be written and people continue to argue about even the most basic details surrounding the Little Bighorn. Evan S. Connell, whom Joyce Carol Oates has described as "one of our most interesting and intelligent American writers," wrote what continues to be the most reliable--and compulsively readable--account of the subject. Connell makes good use of his meticulous research and novelist's eye for the story and detail to re-vreate the heroism, foolishness, and savagery of this crucial chapter in the history of the West. - Publisher Marketing.
    Updated 11.2.05
  • A Wounded Thing Must Hide: In Search of Libbie Custer
    Author: Poolman, Jeremy
    Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 24.95 ISBN: 1582341214 Date: 2002
    star Kirkus
    Brilliant, inventive, but not in any conventional sense a biography, this is Poolman's first foray into nonfiction, taking as its subject the fascinating wife of General Custer. He relates key scenes in Libbie's extraordinary life, each episode proving rich in relishably surreal detail.
    Updated 10.25.05
  • Custer: The Controversial LIfe of George Armstrong Custer
    Author: Wert, Jeffry D.
    Publisher: Simon & Schuster 27.50 ISBN: 0684810433 Date: 1996
    star Booklist
    In a stunning biography of one of America's mythic figures--the first in four decades to examine Custer's complete life--Jeffry Wert answers the central question of Custer's life: How did an officer who enjoyed the unquestioning loyalty of his Civil War troops come to be reviled by many of the soldiers who served under him on the Plains?
    Updated 11.2.05

For Younger Readers

  • Jim Dandy
    Author: Irwin, Hadley
    Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry $ 15 ISBN: 0689505949 Date: 1994
    star Kirkus star PW
    A 12-year-old boy's life on a Kansas homestead is lonely until the foal Dandy is born. But circumstances force the sale of Dandy to General Custer's cavalry. Based on fact this vividly told novel, set among conflicts of courage, loyalty, and death, will engage and challenge young readers.
    Updated 10.25.05