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Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America Audiobook
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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.
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“Custer represents something to each of us…but he was flesh and blood, and he lived a real life that was buoyed by ambition and hope and riddled with contradictions. T. J. Stiles’ writing and research is as much hero here as Custer, and it sets this biography apart from so many others.”
— Amazon.com, editorial review
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“In this definitive reconsideration of an icon, Stiles reminds us why Custer remains such a fascinating fixture in our national consciousness: To understand Custer is to understand a significant sequence in the American DNA.”
— Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author -
“Confidently presenting Custer in all his contradictions, Stiles examines the times to make sense of the man—and uses the man to shed light on the times.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review) -
“[A] powerful, provocative biography of George Armstrong Custer…emphasizing the dynamism of Custer’s life and times, rather than portraying him as on a slow march toward defeat…A highly recommended biography that successfully illuminates…the changing patterns of American society
— Library Journal -
“Stiles…[brings] meticulous research and vivid narrative style to this reappraisal of a mythic American figure.”
— BookPage -
“A warts-and-all portrait…Stiles digs deep to deliver genuine insight into a man who never adapted to modernity.”
— Kirkus Reviews
Awards
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A BookPage Top Pick for November 2015
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An Amazon Best Book of the Month for November 2015
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A #1 Amazon bestseller
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A 2015 Amazon Best Books of the Year Selection for History
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A New York Times Editor’s Choice
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Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History
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Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
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An iBooks bestseller in Biographies & Memoirs
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Among shortlisted titles for California Book Award, 2016
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Among shortlisted titles for Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, 2015
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Among longlisted titles for Mark Lynton History Prize, 2016
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Among shortlisted titles for National Book Critics Circle Awards, 2016
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Among shortlisted titles for Plutarch Award, 2016
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Winner of Pulitzer Prize (History), 2016
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Winner of Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award, 2016
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About T. J. Stiles
T. J. Stiles has held the Gilder Lehrman Fellowship in American History at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, taught at Columbia University, and served as adviser for the PBS series The American Experience. His first book, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, won the Ambassador Book Award and the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, and was a New York Times Notable Book. The First Tycoon won the National Book Award in 2009. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, Salon.com, Smithsonian, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in San Francisco.
About Arthur Morey
Arthur Morey has won three AudioFile Magazine “Best Of” Awards, and his work has garnered numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and placed him as a finalist for two Audie Awards. He has acted in a number of productions, both off Broadway in New York and off Loop in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard and did graduate work at the University of Chicago. He has won awards for his fiction and drama, worked as an editor with several book publishers, and taught literature and writing at Northwestern University. His plays and songs have been produced in New York, Chicago, and Milan, where he has also performed.