A Wounded Thing Must Hide by Jeremy Poolman

A Wounded Thing Must Hide by Jeremy Poolman

A vibrant, deeply personal portrait of the wife of General Custer.

Brilliant, inventive, but not in any conventional sense a biography, A Wounded Thing Must Hide is Jeremy Poolman's first foray into nonfiction, taking as its subject the fascinating wife of General Custer. He relates key scenes in Libbie's extraordinary life-her brushes with Empress Elizabeth of Austria, Tsar Alexander III, and Henry James, to name a few-each episode proving rich in relishably surreal detail. We see Libbie ferrying dung from Vienna to St. Petersburg (a present from empress to tsar, to ward off cholera and typhus); taking delivery of the present of a bear from Alex himself; stumbling into a soldier who might perhaps be the great-great-grandfather of Bob Dylan. Throughout it all, we catch glimpses of the glorious, wayward career of the General himself, culminating in the famous slaughter at Little Big Horn.

Far from an aridly factual outline of who did what where, Poolman offers us a vividly, tangibly real re-creation of historical events. He gets to places other biographies can't reach, bleeding, at times, into autobiography. Haunted by the death of his own wife, the narrator follows Libbie's itinerary in search of something unnamed in himself. Through exploring a widow's determination to protect her husband's damaged reputation, he hopes to find a way to deal with his personal loss. By exploring Libbie's and Custer's enduring love and devotion, he finds a form for his own.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781582341217
ISBN 10	1582341214
Title	A Wounded Thing Must Hide
Author	Jeremy Poolman
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Bloomsbury USA
Year published	2002-08-03
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable