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The first tycoon by tj stiles5/27/2023 ![]() 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. ![]()
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