Jennie's Reviews > Empire of the Summer Moon

This book is not about Quanah Parker, his mother, or the Comanche. It's really about How the White Man Conquered the Savage, Primitive, Warmongering Barbarians.

My complaints about this book are many, but I'll try to keep it simple.

Mainly, it's because a "history" written in 2010 contains things like this:

There were no witnesses to this great coming together of Stone Age hunters and horses, nothing to record what happened when they met, or what there was in the soul of the Comanche that understood the horse so much better than everyone else did. Whatever it was, whatever sort of accidental brilliance, whatever the particular, subliminal bond between warrior and horse, it must have thrilled these dark-skinned pariahs from the Wind River country.

Throughout the book, "Indians" are described as savage, primitive, and "low-barbarian." Oh - and Indian.

I found it disingenuous of Gwynne to describe in detail the massacre of Cynthia Ann Parker's family and her capture, then acknowledge his description as "needlessly bloody." He describes most of the Comanche raids in those "needlessly bloody" details, including what seems like every rape, scalping, and disembowelment, but white men's raids on "Indian" villages (the Sand Creek Massacre being the one notable exception) get a brief tally of this many killed/this many captured.

Gwynne's writing style is just annoying, filled with "What happened next was one of the greatest/worst/most...." or "No one knows why...." This isn't a story being told around a cowboy campfire. Give me some facts and let me decide, thank you very much.

Then there's this description of Quanah:

He was also strikingly handsome: fully dark-skinned Comanche but with a classical, straight northern European nose, high cheekbones, and piercing light gray eyes that were as luminous and transparent as his mother's. He somehow looked completely Indian without looking Asiatic, and could have served as a model of how white people thought a noble savage ought to look....

"Indian" voices appear once in a while, as if Gwynne suddenly remembered the part that comes after the colon in the book title. Most of this book is told in a very, very strongly white voice.

I'll leave you with this, perhaps the "best" quote from this book, and then I'm going to quietly toss it in the Goodwill pile, after which I will dance the dance of joy that I never have to look at this again:

...Rachel became entirely Comanche. She shed her pioneer clothing for Indian buckskins, and, though she does not comment on it, would have been as filthy and bug-ridden as any of the Comanches, who were notable even among Indians for their lack of hygiene.

So there you go. Enjoy.