The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. This New York Times bestseller and stunning historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West “is nothing short of a revelation…will leave dust and blood on your jeans” (The New York Times Book Review).Įmpire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories.
*Winner of the Texas Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award* *Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award* Should I even keep reading this book, friends? Is this bad history? I can't tell if I am just being too sensitive about his approach, and like I said, I don't know the history well enough to really say that he's doing a bad job beyond my basic instincts and what I've read about other tribes.⚠️ This book will unfortunately be removed from the service on the 14th of May. (I'm thinking of the Sun Dance or Powhatan manhood ceremonies.) It seems like a gross generalization and composed with little understanding of the ceremonial/cultural role that mutilation/pain played in other tribal cultures. I'm currently in a section where our boy is explaining how Comanche loved to torture because they didn't have agriculture or technological advances, so they were 4-6 thousand years behind European development in terms of morality, development, and enlightenment ("they had no da Vinci"). So the native peoples aren't humans? Oof.
Then there's this gem about the first whites moving into the native-controlled regions that would become Texas: "It was in Texas where human settlement first arrived at the edges of the Great Plains." Yikes, man. (Although I was reluctant to give it a pass for that Helen Rountree was writing in the 80s and 90s about the Powhatan and managed to be incredibly native-centric and respectful in her language.) I was shocked when I saw the book had come out in 2010. I assumed it was maybe an older work with less thoughtful diction. He repeatedly uses "savages" and "barbarians" to describe the proto-Comanche. I liked Rebel Yell well enough so I thought it would be a good introduction to the Comanche, a tribe I know very little about.Īt first, I was distracted by the language being more like something I would read in a mid-20th century textbook than a modern piece of scholarship. So what the hell- am I going crazy? I've been reading a lot about the Sioux wars, trying to catch up on my Plains tribe history in general this summer and I saw Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C.
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