A Wounded Thing Must Hide: In Search of Libbie Custer

Jeremy Poolman

ISBN 10: 0747549494 / ISBN 13: 9780747549499

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London, 2002

About this Item

Extraordinary biography of the wife of General Custer. 306pp illustrated with one black and white portrait. Gilt lettering to spine. Slight bumping to spine and some faint marking to rear endpaper, otherwise very good plus copy with no inscriptions. Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

Seller Inventory # 011789

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Wounded Thing Must Hide: In Search of Libbie Custer
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0747549494
• ISBN 13: 9780747549499
• Binding: Black Cloth Boards
• Edition: First Edition, First Printing.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Book Type: Book
• Seller catalogs:
  • Biography

About this title

Synopsis

Haunted by the death of his own wife, Karen, the author follows Libbie Custer, wife of General Custer, through her life in search of he knows now what.

Review

Surviving a legend can be hard work. Consider Libbie Custer, widowed after her husband's death at [Little Big Horn], and who spent the next 60 years arguing against Ulysses S. Grant's judgment that "It was Custer who was responsible--and Custer alone--for the deaths of so many."

English writer Jeremy Poolman follows a looping, sometimes loopy path across the world on Libbie Custer's trail, celebrating the life of a decidedly modern, self-assured, even driven woman who lived in a time when women were too often voiceless. Poolman's approach is, well, idiosyncratic: he communes with Custer's ghost, argues the Georgia-born Libbie's case for having married the Yankee Custer at her graveside against a group of unimpressed Southern ladies, and invokes his hard-drinking father, who harbored a scholar's passion for Custeriana, an obsession that "was like a virus (one for which, I know now, there is no cure)." Throughout it all, though, Poolman keeps Libbie Custer well in his sights, telling her tale even as he spins plenty of his own. And quite a tale it is.

It's far from the usual biography, far from the usual journey--but it works, and fans of Western history will enjoy Poolman's wild ride. --Gregory McNamee