Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

James Donovan's "A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn: The Last Great Battle of the American West" is not a book aimed primarily at the serious student of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. There are numerous books published each year about this famous battle, but most of them are full of dense, intricate arguments about quite narrow aspects of the historical event and really only of interest to -- or even intelligible by -- the serious Little Bighorn student (I should know -- I am one; and I completely understand that many works that I find fascinating would inevitably be rated as "unreadable" by most readers.) Donovan's book is something else entirely: a thorough, highly detailed narrative, drawn from primary sources (not just a tired rehash of secondary accounts, as is too often the case with such books), mountains of evidence carefully sifted and weighed, resulting in a judicious, well-balanced, fair-minded analysis of what actually happened. It's a big book -- nearly 400 pages of text plus voluminous and valuable source notes -- that provides background and context and also vivid word portraits of personalities and activities. I consider it be quite simply the best available account of the Little Bighorn for the intelligent general reader who wants to know what was what and who was who, without those biases and distortions so common in writings about Custer and his last battle. In the book's foreword, Donovan comments that he has departed from the strict historical record only in the area of the part played by Custer's direct command after he had sent his last messenger. Of necessity, any account of those activities requires interpretation of highly conflicting evidence and of some plain-old educated guesswork -- and James Donovan has done a superlative job of crafting a reasonable, plausible account of what happened.