University of Nebraska Books

The author's considerable literary ability (she is professor of Romance Languages at Harvard) is evident in the exquisitely sensitive descriptions of events and emotions from both a child's and adult's viewpoint. She seems to have learnt well from the authors on whom she has based her distinguished career. Emotions leap at the reader from every page, often rapidly traversing the spectrum of joy, sadness, longing, confusion and humor. At all times there is a strong prevailing sense of the author's awareness of how her uniquely Hungarian Jewish background profoundly influenced every important outcome of her life and her world outlook.

The dilemma of being an outsider, yet identifying culturally and nationally with a sovereign state is well known to many Jews and constitutes the fundamental European Jewish experience. Many of those (myself included) who underwent this in repressive political systems fled to the western world and became very successful and yet experienced a sense of national and cultural alienation in their adopted societies.

Despite addressing emotionally charged, controversial and sometimes uncomfortable subjects, there is always a sense of lightness and what is almost playfulness. Not all issues are serious and there is one hilarious description of Hungarian toilets, which every Westerner must have felt (if not voiced) upon their initial experience with these dreadfully designed pieces of porcelainware.

Although an emotionally charged book, it never descends into unrealistic sentimentalism - the message seems to be that no matter what we do with our lives, where we come from has a profound effect on who we are and how we see the events around us. Acknowledging this can be liberating.

For the rest of the world I would like to say that this is not big literature, but an important book. Once individuals stop to be interested to investigate in their history and to try to understand what was happening when and why, we will loose a chance to prevent dark parts of human history from coming back. This is why this book has a right to exist and this is what we can learn from it. It gives us an example for ourselves. And Suleiman does not celebrate herself, as her critic says, but gives us an unproctected view into her feelings. This makes her vulnerable and the "reader from Cambridge" takes his freedom to eagerly touch her wounds.

I say it very clearly: Books like Suleiman's help to make sure that "readers from Cambridge MA" buy a book about the Iraque war the other day and complain that it is not really on the oil business.

Must us old Custer Buffs be subjected to a rehash of everything we read on the subject dating back to the 1930's and wonder why the same old ground is plowed over and over. I think I know. It makes reputations for PhD's who find it easy to send their graduate students to the library to assemble a (new?) book for them.

It reminds me of Victor Borga's famous act in which he excerpts scraps from the Blue Danube and Shubert's Serendae, plays them, sometimes backward, pastes the scores together, we are told a he goes along, and finally plays the result, which he calls Blue Serenade by Strubert. At least he made no bones about it. Happily it is nearly impossible to compose original music in a library, and unhappily it is easy to appear to compose an original book in a library.

I am waiting for the day that an "uppity" and enterprising graduate student notices that he can use the Library's computers to find relatives of Custer and those who were his associates and do a book about the survivors and what they may be able to find in the attic that hasn't yet been published.

They will have to look for a new "advisor" and perhaps a new school to get their Graduate Degree, but they may get famous in the process.

Originally published in 1950, this reprint of Ms. Merrington's work interleaves selections from the personal letters of the Custers between a sympathetic narrative of their personal lives, providing an intimate view of his controversial career and their happy marriage. We see him as he leaves his family homestead in New Rumley, Ohio, for a military education at West Point; spy long glimpses of him during his rise to prominence in the Union Cavalry to early fame as the acclaimed Boy General; saunter alongside as he courts Judge Bacon's daughter Libby in Monroe, Michigan; march behind him during his daring campaign on the Washita; sit in silent shock during his unwarranted court martial; and watch with growing trepidation as he delivers his forthright testimony before Congress about the mismanagement by the War Department immediately prior to his return to Fort Lincoln and his final campaign in the Dakota Territory. We see Custer through his own eyes, and through the eyes of his devoted wife, and what we view is a portrait of a strong, courageous leader whose skill, gallantry, and wit account for his remarkably successful military career. It is customary in these later years to deny the underlying truth of this view and paint the man in colors few of his contemporaries would recognize. But there are enough artists of history to paint horns where none may have existed; we may suffer the Custers to sketch a faded halo above his engaging visage, and let it serve to counter the later brushstrokes of politically corrected historians and politicians.

But, having said that, the prospective reader must be warned that the book is a love letter to Scott, and has been utterly eclipsed by Roland Huntford's The Last Place on Earth, a far more scholarly and accurate account of the race to the South Pole.

In the face of these consistent attacks which decimate the South's army, McClelland, believing himself outnumbered, retreats and Lee's only course of action, attack, bluffs the Union commander into submission. Today most people recognize that Lee had no alternative. Equally important, most observers, North and South, are aghast at McClelland's horrific performance which he would repeat against the same antagonist at Antietam.

There is no doubt that Robert E. Lee rose to the occasion and did his very best under the most difficult circumstances. But before we deify Lee, it must be remembered that he all but destroyed his army facing a general who simply would not fight. This is an overview of those battles.

Dowdey describes, in rich detail, the initial Union planning and preparations for the amphibious landing on the York Peninsula (between the James and York Rivers). He details the Union Army of the Potomac's successful landing on the York Peninsula in May 1862 and its methodical advance up the peninsula towards Richmond led by its commanding officer, Major General George B. McClellan. The Confederate forces, commanded by General Joseph E. Johnston, are seen by Dowdey as ill-led as they continually retreated in successive fashion towards the outskirts of the Confederate capital and prepared themselves for a siege. Finally, with the Union Army divided north and south of the Chickahominy River, Dowdey chronicles Johnston's decision to turn on the Union forces at Seven Pines on May 31, only to fight an inconclusive battle. Johnston himself was wounded in the late hours of the battle, and his replacement was General Robert E. Lee, until that moment the military advisor to Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Upon assuming command, Lee immediately devised a series of offensive strikes against the still-divided Union forces, but Dowdey argues that Lee's ultimate failure to crush the Union Army was due to a combination of many factors. Poor Confederate staff planning was in clear evidence from the beginning to the end of the Seven Days Battles. General Lee failed time and again to assume direct operational control of ever-changing battle situations where his subordinates failed to drive forward against the enemy (for example, "Stonewall" Jackson's failure to push forward his drive on the Confederate northern and left flank at the Battle of Mechaniscville). Lee was also hampered by the uneven quality of his subordinate commanders, particularly the deaf and old Theophilus Holmes, the inept Benjamin Huger and the mentally exhausted Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (who suffered, according to Dowdey, from stress fatigue). Last, but certainly not least, the surprisingly well disciplined, hard-fighting and well-led (at the brigade, divisional and corps levels) Union troops frustrated Lee's strategic and tactical battle plans at virtually every turn.

Dowdey's work provides wonderfully detailed descriptions of all of the major battles: Seven Pines, Fair Oaks Station, Mechanicsville, Gaines's Mill, Savage's Station and Malvern Hill. In addition, he also aids the reader by providing a series of detailed maps and descriptions of the complex web of major and minor roads and country lanes that were fundamental to the movement of the armies - Union and Confederate - during the Seven Days Battles. I found, however, one very annoying aspect about the work. I strongly disagreed with Dowdey's one-sided and dismissive view of Confederate General Joseph Johnston as a defeatist general who possessed no redeeming personal or military abilities. Johnston was clearly one of the most effective of all the Confederate generals, one whose primary concern was the care and welfare of the men under his command. He never took unnecessary risks in battle, for he knew that the Confederacy had a limited pool of available manpower with which to fight the Union.

Despite this one point of disagreement, I found Dowdey's work to be an excellent study of the Seven Days Battles. His insistence on "visual history" - that a historian must visit the battlefield that he is studying in order to more effectively understand the movements of the opposing armies, thereby aiding him in writing a work that the reader will follow clearly - is very much in evidence in this book.

From the murder of English entrepreneur John Henry Tunstall by a "posse" of outlaws sent with the blessing of Lincoln County Sheriff John Brady, one of the primary villains in the affair, to the cold-blooded murder of Tunstall's lawyer and surviving partner, Alexander McSween, with the help of another "posse" led by famed murderer and rapist John Kinney and his own army of bandits, the reader is shocked to see the misapplication of law to protect the guilty.

In this entire affair, William Henry Bonney, later known as "Billy the Kid", was simply a Tunstall hand and loyalist, and one of many Tunstall and McSween partisans to carry the fight to the perpetrators when the corrupt Sheriff Brady refused to have the murderers rounded up and tried. The Tunstall and McSween partisans, commissioned by the local justice of the peace to bring in the killers Brady would not, formed themselves into a semi-formalized group calling themselves "the Regulators". Here, Billy Bonney was one of the Regulators' crack shots, but the leaders were Dick Brewer and Frank McNab, both killed in the course of the war.

Against the regulators, the corrupt establishment brought to bear the weight of the established military outpost at Ft. Stanton, west of Lincoln. The commander, Col. Dudley, actively breached the posse comitatus act of 1878 to side with the forces of J.J. Dolan, Murphy, US attorneys Rynerson and Catron, and Governor Axtell. Thus, Dudley committed his men to the final siege of the regulators in Lincoln, which culminated in the shocking murder of Alexander McSween and two partisans as they attempted to surrender to Deputy Beckwith.

The story vindicates Billy Bonney to some extent. While the murders of Tunstall and McSween were never punished (the establishment never attempted to punish them), Bonney was the only one singled out for execution. The appearance, in fact, is that the territorial government of Lew Wallace chose him as the scapegoat for the general breakdown in public order.

Indeed, the author successfully demonstrates that the "Lincoln County War" resulted from the partisanship of successive territorial governors, and the federal officers in Santa Fe, in a matter having to do with two competing enterprises in Lincoln. In this sense, the Lincoln County War was a case of Republican monopolists bringing in armed paramilitary forces to get rid of their upstart English competitor, who was thriving on the patronage of the ancestral Hispanic community. The "Ludlow Massacre", which took place just across the New Mexico line in Colorado sometime later, represents a similar case, where the state powers intervened on behalf of established economic interests (there, the mining firms) against disgruntled miners and their families. In both instances, the "good guys" lost.

Jacobsen brings to his work a successful prosecuting attorney's clear eye for evidence and testimony, and a singular degree of industry in working through the vast amount of material available to him. He relies notably on the heretofore largely ignored investigative records of the US justice department's special agent Angel, sent to investigate the misdoings of US Attorney Catron (the boss of the Santa Fe Ring) and Gov. Axtell. He does not set out to vindicate Billy Bonney, but his narrative leads in that direction. Along the way, he writes real history, where what we have gotten up until now has basically been establishment history.

My own take from the books is that Billy Bonney was one of the good guys, an Anglo cowhand and crack shot who threw in his hand with the Englishman John Tunstall, and who remained loyal to his mentor after Tunstall's murder. An interesting note is that Bonney was a ladies' man, and that he had wide popular support, especially in Lincoln proper, and among the Hispanic cowhands of the region, who rode with him. He was fluent in Spanish (uncommon among Anglos at the time) and his last words were spoken in that tongue.

Several striking facts highlight the miscarriage of justice in Bonney's case: the subsequent success of the villains, including Catron, appointed as the first US Senator to the new state of New Mexico, the acquittal of Col. Dudley on his own testimony in the face of the sworn testimony of 21 witnesses so that he could retire with pay of a full general, the escape of the murderer Jesse Evans (one of Tunstall's shooters), and the failure of Gov. Lew Wallace (author of the novel Ben Hur) to grant Bonney a promised full pardon in return for Bonney's testimony against the killers of Sue McSween's lawyer, Chapman.

Too often, the forces of law in the western territories were forces of corruption and crime. Wyatt Earp and his brothers faced a similar situation in Tombstone, Arizona, where Sheriff Johnny Behan held power, but Earp was able to command better and more effective guns than "the Regulators". As a result, he was able to hunt down and kill those who had shot his two brothers, Virgil and Morgan. Consequently, the Earps, along with their partisan Doc Holladay, avoided Billy Bonney's fate and went down in history as upholders of law and order, and not as outlaws.

Jacobsen's book is so factually based and at the same time so well-narrated that it makes for a gripping read. I chopped through it in three days of sporadic concentration. The only other account of the Old West that can compare is the late Paul Wellman's A Dynasty of Western Outlaws, which details the rise and fall of the James-Younger Gang and its successors.