The Heart Of Everything That Is: The Untold Story Of Red Cloud, An American Legend (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
This book was a major disappointment. Clearly the authors know little about, nor do they particularly care about, the culture of the Plains Indians. The book is a tedious stream of minutiae about the whites and an abysmally shallow and overtly dismissal of the Indians and Red Cloud and his life.The book is clearly a con - using the image of Red Cloud and sub-title to sell the book. It is not the "Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend". Instead the authors deliver the untold and mostly uninteresting story of the white's efforts to push the Plains Tribes off of their land.There is the normal, faux guilt ramblings of how badly the whites treated the Native Americans. Then follows an incredibly boring recitation of details that are completely uninteresting. Well, to be fair, if you are curious of the kind of dog that was at a particular fort or how many months pregnant the wife of one of the officers was when he died, this is exactly the book for you. Otherwise, it is a complete insult to the Northern Plains Tribes and to Red Cloud. I want to preface my review with the fact that I hold degrees in Cultural Anthropology, and I approached this book through that lens. Overall, I found the book to be heavily biased toward the white perspective. The author subscribes to the stereotypical image of Native Americans that is best suited to spaghetti Westerns, not fact-based historical accounts. The book perpetuates harmful representations that are blatantly false. The story presented in the book could have been vastly improved by approaching the story in a more balanced manner, and by in-text citations that show where the author is getting his information. In general, I do not recommend this book to anyone and suggest it be relegated to the early late 19th century, whose viewpoints it so readily adopted.
What do You think about The Heart Of Everything That Is: The Untold Story Of Red Cloud, An American Legend (2013)?
Couldn't finish, sadly. Just not my cup of tea! too many details and names...
—msrobyn
Have reviewed this work in my weekly feature, Plains Folk. Disappointing.
—Erinlearay
