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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780865475106
ISBN number: 0865475105
Label: North Point Press
Manufacturer: North Point Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 448
Printing Date: October 30, 1997
Publishing house: North Point Press
Sale Popularity Level: 56850
Studio: North Point Press
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Custer's Last Stand is among the most enduring events in American history--more than one hundred years after the fact, books continue to be written and people continue to argue about even the most basic details surrounding the Little Bighorn. Evan S. Connell, whom Joyce Carol Oates has described as 'one of our most interesting and intelligent American writers,' wrote what continues to be the most reliable--and compulsively readable--account of the subject. Connell makes good use of his meticulous research and novelist's eye for the story and detail to re-vreate the heroism, foolishness, and savagery of this crucial chapter in the history of the West.
Amazon.com Review:
On June 25, 1876, Gen. George Armstrong Custer and some 200 cavalrymen under his command blundered into a coulee along the banks of Montana's Little Bighorn River. They never came out; several thousand Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho warriors saw to that. The name and the event of the Little Bighorn have subsequently entered into American mythology, reverberating throughout the nation's history. Custer's famous demise has yielded thousands of books, and Son of the Morning Star is exceptional among them: part anthropological study of Plains Indian life, part military history, and part character study of the principal actors in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Evan Connell's work presents the very first truly balanced account of Custer's career.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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'Song of the Morning Star' is a lyrical masterpiece that leads you along a dreamy and, at times, surrealistic portrayal of the characters and events before, during and after June 25, 1876; soemthing that can be called The Battle of the Little Big Horn or Custer's Last Stand. As an exercise in wriitng it is nagnifcant, as any rype of history it should come with a warning label.
Evan Connell would probably call it 'The Day the White Man Got What he Deserved,' and it stars George Armstrong Custer as the contras-Jesus who dies for all our sins commited upon the native Americans. Mr. Connell takes the facts at hand and - garbing them in a absolutely superb writing styles lies us to his conclusions about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. A lesser writer would have botched this effort at propaganda, producing something more akin to 'Obamanation.'
If you have read nothing about Custer before this book, be sure to read something thereafter that is less soothing to read but more accurate. I suggest 'The Day the World Ended at The Little Bighorn,' a much more equitable presentation of the story.
Rated by buyers 
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This slightly dated work by an accomplished novelist is well worth slugging through its lack of organization and meanderings to extract the huge compendium of facts contained therein. Please note; while other readers have thought this was an historical novel, it isn't fiction. It would deserve five stars if better organized and possessed a better index, but alas, one can't have everything. The reader will read and note a fact or story, but find himself unable to locate it later without reading through the entire book again.
The "slightly dated" aspect is deserved as it, a 1984 work, does not contain the archeological data unearthed by Fox et al since that time. Nonetheless, for sheer facts, statements, and opinions, this is the reader's single best source on the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
I recommend this book for purchase and reading.
Rated by buyers 
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Those who study the Little Big Horn battle seem to fall into two camps where this work is concerned, some love it for it literary style, others loath it as it doesn't adhere to a strict timeline in recounting the events preceding and encompassing the battle. Instead, this book is a literary collage but its coverage is so well written that it is absolutely captivating. It encapsulates the spirit and mystery of the Little Big Horn like no other book. It's all here-the "hotspur" Custer as Connell calls him, the defiant Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, Reno described by the Crow scouts as "frothing at the mouth," the surly Benteen, Keogh and Comanche, spurious survivor stories galore and the evocative landscape of the battlefield itself. All captured in words and conveyed in a highly entertaining manner. It's almost as if Connell says we can never solve all the mysteries of this battle, so let's dispense with chronological history and just have fun! Besides, there are tons of excellent histories that do follow the conventional route that one can turn to for a more ordered look.
My very first visit to the Little Big Horn took place in 1994 and I took a special paid tour that included the Crow's Nest. I remember our guide talking about Connell and how, when he was shown factual errors in the very first edition of this book, he readily agreed to change them and acknowledlged his mistakes. Our guide said that not all authors are that way where their books are concerned. Speaks well of him and his book. Only drawback--the index is very scanty so don't rely on it if you look for references for, say, the names of all of Custer's officers.
Rated by buyers -
On a whim, I purchased this book at a London bookshop in the late 1980's, and was immediately captivated by it. Since then, I have reread Son of the Morning Star at least half-a-dozen times, each time with greater pleasure. Notwithstanding the passage of more than two decades since its original publication, "Son of the Morning Star" remains magisterial. One Amazon review I read denigrated this book because it was, according to the writer, inadequate for the serious historian. Perhaps. There exists no shortage of books devoted to Custer, intended for the "serious historian," among them Evan's 1999 exhaustive "Custer's Last Fight." "Son of the Morning Star" does not purport to cater to the "serious historian." It is, as Dee Brown remarked, "unique and for that reason should endure." Buy it. Read it.
Rated by buyers 
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I have been to the battlefield and have read and seen numerous documentaries of the Big Horn" battle (even watched the made for television series by the same title as this book), and I can say that the series was not as good as the book and neither has anything else I have seen or read about that fatal day in Montana over one hundred and thirty years ago.
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