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OverviewThe narrator of Thomas Berger s masterly picaresque tale of the Old West is 111-year-old Jack Crabb, who, as a child, came to be the son of two fathers one white, the other a Cheyenne Indian chief who gave him the name Little Big Man. Jack drifts through the decades of expansion in the West and war against the Plains Indians with his loyalties divided. As a Cheyenne Jack Crabb feasts on dog, loves four wives and sees his people butchered by General Custer s soldiers. Later he is present at Little Big Horn and can claim to be the sole white survivor of the battle. As a white man, he helps hunt the buffalo into near-extinction, tangles with Wyatt Earp and survives a showdown with Wild Bill Hickock. Little Big Man is a hugely enjoyable fiction, part-farcical, part-historical, and the very best of all novels about the American West. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Thomas BergerPublisher: Vintage Publishing Imprint: The Harvill Press Edition: New edition Dimensions: Width: 13.00cm , Height: 2.70cm , Length: 19.70cm Weight: 0.315kg ISBN: 9781860466410ISBN 10: 1860466419 Pages: 448 Publication Date: 06 May 1999 Audience: General/trade , General Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of ContentsReviewsA seminal event in the most significant cultural and literary trend of the 1960s... Few creative works of post-Civil War America have had as much of the fibre and blood of national experience in them * Nation * One of the best novels of the decade and the best novel ever about the American West * New York Times * A successful, serious but, crack-brained burlesque of Indian mores and frontier life, this tells the story of Jack Crabb, the 111-year-old lone survivor of Custer's last stand at Little Bighorn. (Berger is the author of Crazy in Berlin and Reinhart in Love, both of which had patches of unorthodox brilliance.) The manuscript purports to be a taped memoir, during the last year of Crabb's long life. Jack, and his sister Caroline, were taken captive by the Cheyenne Indians who tragically mistook Caroline for a man. Caroline escapes (and later reappears as a kind of Calamity Jane) but Jack is reared by the tribe and is named Little Big Man. Deserting the Cheyenne, he later falls in with white folk and like Huck Finn, can't stand them. Back with the Indians, Jack's wife and child (Indian) are lost to him when Custer attacks their village. But later, after meeting Wild Bill Hickok, he joins Custer's Seventh Calvalry and fights beside the General he had once sworn to kill. Custer's paranoid ravings during battle as he fires his pistols from the classic West Point stance are an inventive highlight in a book with obstreperous originality. However, its greatest triumph is its ??depletion of the Cheyenne and their attitudes toward life and death. (Kirkus Reviews) When Little Big Man was first published in 1964 it was immediately hailed as one of the finest novels ever about the American West, presenting one of the most detailed and accurate portraits of the era in fiction. Familiar myths perpetrated endlessly by film and television were effortlessly debunked. Of particular note was Berger's grand and moving portrait of a white boy brought up among the Cheyenne in the 1850s. (Kirkus UK) A seminal event in the most significant cultural and literary trend of the 1960s... Few creative works of post-Civil War America have had as much of the fibre and blood of national experience in them Nation One of the best novels of the decade and the best novel ever about the American West New York Times Author InformationTab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |