In fact, if there is anything we remember about Custer’s life, it is his vanity. As many loathed as loved him, begrudgingly admiring his courage while openly ridiculing his vanity. He was kind to his black servant, a recently freed teenage girl, but often harsh with his own men.

He fought for the North but identified with the South. He tried, and failed, to be a Wall Street tycoon in the same league as John Jacob Astor and a writer of the renown of Mark Twain. He was a West Point graduate (although he was last in his class, a position now known as the “goat”), a hero in the Civil War, a brigadier general at just 23 and a major general at 24. When reading “Custer’s Trials,” what quickly becomes clear is that while perhaps no man is better known for his death, Custer had a remarkably full life, especially since he lived to be only 36 years old. He is a skilled writer, with the rare ability to take years of far-ranging research and boil it down until he has a story that is illuminating and, at its best, captivating. Winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his 2009 biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, “The First Tycoon,” Stiles is a serious and accomplished biographer, but he is more than that. If anyone could make a reader forget Custer’s last stand, at least for a few hundred pages at a time, it would be T. Who he was, what he hoped to leave behind, even what brought him to that fateful day in 1876, these questions we cannot answer, and rarely ask. While we cannot forget how Custer died, however, few of us remember how he lived. Is it possible to read a biography of George Armstrong Custer without thinking about his death from the first page? One hundred and thirty-nine years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, we still cannot say his name without picturing the mutilated bodies of his men or being overwhelmed by the sharp, lingering shame of the Plains Wars and the wholesale slaughter of Native Americans.

The first tycoon by tj stiles