VENGEANCE: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull

VENGEANCE: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull
TOM CLAVIN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dramatic new look at Custer's last stand in time for the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, by the #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Heart of Everything That Is.

On June 25–26, 1876, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was fought between combined forces of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. Along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, the battle resulted in the devastating defeat of U.S. forces and was the most significant action of the Great Sioux War of 1876.

Now, for the 150th anniversary of this famous engagement, #1 New York Times bestseller and coauthor of the biography of Sioux warrior Red Cloud, The Heart of Everything That Is, Tom Clavin takes a fresh look at Custer's Last Stand.

This dramatic look at the Little Bighorn battle has to not only include the Native American point of view―with two dynamic Native figures, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, on prominent display―but also the impact it had on the Plains Indians. It turned out to be their last stand too because a vengeful nation quashed any remaining resistance, with a conclusive massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, almost simultaneous with the murder of Sitting Bull.

In addition, Custer’s character by June 1876 is at the heart of this world-famous disaster. For all his celebrated bravery, especially at Gettysburg 13 years earlier, Custer became a devout media hound, desperate to gain fame. Even, some say, his own demise was a misguided attempt at grabbing national headlines: He envisioned a massacre – just not his own. As both the camera and the tabloid came of age, George Armstrong Custer became America’s first bona fide celebrity.

Vengeance is a thrilling read, filled with action, legendary characters, and poignance for the impact this had on Native Americans and the shape of the American West.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I wondered what the hell there could be left to say about this military engagement that could illuminate the events in a light, through a lens and filter, that could deepen the focus and increase the contrast. "Hold my beer" said Author Clavin.

I know there are full biographies of all the men at the center of the story being told, excellent ones that delve into psychology, racism, nationalistic myth-making and resistance to it. The short chapters and broad focus of this historical analysis of causes and effects can't offer that depth or completeness. It can, and does, offer more accessible takes on the dramatis personae and thus that much more context for the pyrrhic victory won at the Little Bighorn River.

It's not a story where breaking news is likely to occur...the souces cited in the notes tell you we're not hot on the trail of some newly discovered textual evidence breaking open some of the enduring mysteries of Custer's uncharacteristically stupid actions. It's not that book; it's very much a useful primer, broadening its intended white, history-buff audience's awareness of how the battle looked from its different combatants' eyes. I enjoyed the quick-hit chapters because I'm only very slightly interested in the battle bits, more in the people bits. The carnage is not stinted herein. But we're not *immersed* in it because no piece of the story as retold here lasts long enough to make the reader feel he's going to need to scrub blood off his footgear after the read.

It's a popularization of more scholarly, and a contextualization of more white-triumphalist, works that have come before it. As I do not care to subject myself to the dizzying heights/depths od historiographic work done on Manifest Destiny and its concomitant Native American genocide, it's a work that suited my reading needs.

THE JAGUAR'S ROAR, Brazil's Indigenous genocide wasn't always physical

THE JAGUAR'S ROAR
MICHELINY VERUNSCHK (tr. Juliana Barbassa)
Liveright (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The story of an Indigenous girl’s kidnapping during a colonial expedition intertwines with a young woman’s modern-day search for identity and ancestral truths.

In 1817, explorers Spix and Martius returned from their three-year voyage in Brazil with not only an extensive account of their journey, but also with an Indigenous boy and girl, Iñe-e and Juri. Kidnapped from rival tribes as part of the colonialist trend of collecting “living specimens” on scientific expeditions, the two tragically perished shortly after arriving in Europe. This lyrically rich novel takes their perspective to illuminate their harrowing journey.

Micheliny Verunschk’s fifth novel, the first to be translated into English, powerfully challenges dominant historical narratives by centering the voices of these stolen Indigenous children. Intertwining their story with a narrative set in contemporary Brazil, we meet Josefa, a young woman grappling with her own identity when she encounters Iñe-e’s image in an exhibition. Through its poignant exploration of memory, colonialism, and belonging, this novel stands out in Brazilian literature, offering readers a profound reflection on the enduring impact of history on personal lives.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Pay attention! I think that could be the epigraph of this story as told by Author Verunschk. It starts with a lithograph of a stolen Indigenous child that alters someone's internal compass, there must be some reason I'm seeing this thinks Josefa; it continues as the story of the stolen child, Iñe-e, is revealed to Josefa, then the reader; it concludes its course with History being revealed as a polyphonic braid of voices, one we must always realize we are selectively seeing in parts.

One part Josefa, descendant of colonizers, never considered was the cultural arrogance of the colonial project she inherited. It can easily veer into trauma porn, that; it gets away from the dreaded, dreadful inauthenticity of trauma porn by going into the other register of eyebrow-raising Othering, the Holy/Saintly/Betterness of Indigenous exoticization. I can't read Portuguese but I will stake my imaginary bank account on the fact that there are colonizers' descendants in Brazil who feel this book is an accusation, a finger-wagging jeremiad. (In under 200pp, that's a hard feat; it's also not true for all of me.) I've got to acquire Brazilian Portuguese so I can look into the native-language reviews.

While I applaud the inclusion in this story of non-human narrators, I don't think it necessarily makes the read more accessible to general audiences. It's often unclear when PoVs switch, a jarring experience for the uninitiated; I'm not saying it shouldn't be done simply noting that this is not a story to pick up unless you can devote real attention to it. It's quite short, it's really beautifully written, and it's telling a really interesting story. It's not a cocktail-peanut read to be chucked unthinkingly into your eyes, but a glorious spread of literary tapas or sashimi in great variety to be savored bit by bit.

I think it's beautiful, but flawed. It should be read by all interested in books about memory and its edit buttons, focusing on what they elide.

SENSELESSNESS, short and bitter and galvanizing...literary double espresso, genocide and atrocities oh my

SENSELESSNESS
HORACIO CASTELLANOS MOYA (tr. Katherine Silver)
New Directions
$15.95 trade paper & ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100 page report on the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including the testimonies of the survivors. The writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants, "that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger." Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases ("the houses they were sad because no people were inside them"), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger—after all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's a horrible, horrible story; it destroyed its narrator and bid fair to make me a whispering zombie; man's inexpressible vileness and irreducible cruelty are a weight too heavy for me to bear. His task is to copyedit a human-rights report commissioned by the Archbishop to ascertain the guilt and/or innocence of the parties to a genocide. Every step of the narrator's descent into mental illness's loudest darkest corners is punctuated by italicized phrases he's culled from this report...all one thousand one hundred pages...for their unusual, beautiful, euphonious horror: I am not complete in the mind greets the reader on page one. A man who lived beyond the violence that stole his family from him utters those words, to a psychologist, as the report takes shape, as the professional records the words and assesses the soul that left the body of the speaker, so as to bear witness.

I didn't read the original Spanish, but I'll wager there's nothing significant lost in Katherine Silver's translation. It's too precisely evocative. It's also extremely prolix in its one hundred forty-two pages. Words pile up, words wind around your eyestalks, words make dizzyingly alien geometries as they flow from the desperately purging narrator. Words distance him, though not the reader, from the blood and hate and evil he must view as structures and concepts in order to earn his five thousand United States dollars for copyediting one thousand one hundred pages of agony. The slaughter of untold bodies is actually the less revolting part of the tale...Wounded, yes, is hard to be left, but dead is ever peaceful is not something a grandmother should have cause to say of her murdered descendants...and the litany of one thousand one hundred pages reminds us that the narrator is doing a job, is taking the written results of an investigation, is applying grammar and punctuation to the massive, traumatized shouting of the victims of genocide.

We all know who are the assassins.