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

Stiles, T. J. [signed]

ISBN 10: 0307592642 / ISBN 13: 9780307592644

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2016

About this Item

Hardcover with DJ. Yellow paper over boards; black spine with gold lettering. Small white smear on spine, with minor rubbing at crown and foot of spine; otherwise binding clean and tight. Black and white pictorial DJ with gold raised lettering. Gold sticker on front reads "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize." DJ has minor rubbing, mainly to crown and foot of spine. Title page dated 2016. Copyright page dated 2016. Stated fifth printing. 582 pages. Black and white illustrations in the text. Pages clean throughout with no marks or tears. Signed on title page by T. J. Stiles with inscription, "To Bob and Kay, all the best!" Overall very good signed copy. Please email with questions or to request photos. Note: if there is a photo beside this listing, it s a STOCK photo that ABE put there (for reasons that we cannot understand or control) and might not match this actual book.

Seller Inventory # 24-1668

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America [signed]
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0307592642
• ISBN 13: 9780307592644
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Signed

About this title

Synopsis

Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History

From the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, a brilliant biography of Gen. George Armstrong Custer that radically changes our view of the man and his turbulent times.

In this magisterial biography, T. J. Stiles paints a portrait of Custer both deeply personal and sweeping in scope, proving how much of Custer’s legacy has been ignored. He demolishes Custer’s historical caricature, revealing a volatile, contradictory, intense person—capable yet insecure, intelligent yet bigoted, passionate yet self-destructive, a romantic individualist at odds with the institution of the military (he was court-martialed twice in six years).

The key to understanding Custer, Stiles writes, is keeping in mind that he lived on a frontier in time. In the Civil War, the West, and many areas overlooked in previous biographies, Custer helped to create modern America, but he could never adapt to it. He freed countless slaves yet rejected new civil rights laws. He proved his heroism but missed the dark reality of war for so many others. A talented combat leader, he struggled as a manager in the West.

He tried to make a fortune on Wall Street yet never connected with the new corporate economy. Native Americans fascinated him, but he could not see them as fully human. A popular writer, he remained apart from Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, and other rising intellectuals. During Custer’s lifetime, Americans saw their world remade. His admirers saw him as the embodiment of the nation’s gallant youth, of all that they were losing; his detractors despised him for resisting a more complex and promising future. Intimate, dramatic, and provocative, this biography captures the larger story of the changing nation in Custer’s tumultuous marriage to his highly educated wife, Libbie; their complicated relationship with Eliza Brown, the forceful black woman who ran their household; as well as his battles and expeditions. It casts surprising new light on a near-mythic American figure, a man both widely known and little understood.

About the Author

T. J. STILES is the author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, winner of the 2009 National Book Award in Nonfiction and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History. A member of the Society of American Historians and a former Guggenheim fellow, Stiles lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and two children.