Michael Blake
Academy Award Winner
Best-selling Author
Dances With Wolves
Marching To Valhalla - A Novel of Custer's Last Days
In Marching To Valhalla, Michael Blake turns his storyteller's eye on George Armstrong Custer, West Pointer, youngest Union general of the Civil War, horseman, passionate lover, explorer, ardent husband, and, most famously, Indian hunter.
In Blake's pages, Custer emerges as a dashing, driven soldier, suspicious of his friends, respectful of his enemies, and ever unable to feel quite alive in the civilian world.
Composed in the form of Custer's journal, Marching To Valhalla is an impeccable merging of fact and fiction, a powerful evocation of our bloody past, and a tribute to the endurance of a human heart facing adversity and disaster.
A masterpiece of Michael Blake's novel is a tragic romance that reveals a Custer never before imagined, and lets us finally contemplate the twisting, uncharted paths to glory and doom.
Michael started his 'research' for the novel believing, like many others, that Custer was a villain and a megalomaniac. During the cause of reading numerous books on the subject, Blake realized that his feelings had changed and that he was in fact holding Custer in very high regard.
"It's very curious that the vast majority of Americans reject him (Custer) today, because he had grit, straightforward-
ness ... and disdain for authority, qualities we associate with Americanism," Michael stated in an interview. "In truth, Custer was a great American hero, and like Dances With Wolves, I only wrote the truth as I found it."
Custer and his dog
" A tour de force that sympathetically brings one of American history's more intriguing heroes vividly to life on the eve of his destruction."
-- Kirkus Reviews
"A startling novel ... (the) narrative seems rigorously authentic in its period detail, down to the flowery nature of Custer's prose. Blake's facinating tale may not convince readers that its hero was a paragon of humanity, but it likely will persuade many that, for all his faults, Custer was a warrior..."
-- Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"Michael Blake's a master, and his imagery flows like warm, golden honey. His words ambush us and hold us captive. But secretly we hope he'll never let us go."
-- Kristy Dark , Ojai Valley Times
"Blake gives us a convincing and well- rounded portrait of Custer the man..."
-- Library Journal
"A historically well grounded portrayal."
-- Booklist
First published by Villard Books, 1996
Second Hard Cover Edition, Hrymfaxe 2002
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