Review: Few of us really understand George Armstrong Custer

We may think we know Custer. However, as author T.J. Stiles shows in riveting detail in his commanding new biography, “Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America,” few of us really understand him, overshadowed as he’s been all these years by his controversial demise.

This is Stiles’ first book since “The First Tycoon,” a groundbreaking biography of robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt that won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Vanderbilt was in dire need of a modern biography; Custer, who is something of a cottage industry for writers, not so much.

But Stiles, who grew up in Foley, Minn., and was educated at Carleton College in Northfield, has given us a different way to look at the flesh-and-blood man and his times, before his Last Stand made it nearly impossible to see him with clear eyes.

This is that rare, practically unthinkable Custer book that devotes only about 15 of its 582 pages to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the 1876 High Plains clash that cemented Custer’s fame (or infamy) when he led his regiment to their deaths at the hands of a superior force of Lakota and Cheyenne chiefs and warriors.