Today’s Goat, the West Point cadet finishing at the bottom of his class, is temporary celebrity among his classmates. But in the 19th century, he was something of a cult figure. Custer’s contemporaries at the Academy believed that the same spirit of adventure that led him to carouse at local taverns motivated his dramatic cavalry attacks in the Civil War and afterwards. And the same willingness to accept punishment from Academy authorities also sent George Pickett into the teeth of the Union guns at Gettsyburg. The story James S. Robbins tells goes from the beginnings of West Point through the carnage of the Civil War to the grassy bluffs over the Little Big Horn. The Goats he profiles tell us much about the soul of the American solider, his daring, imagination and desire to prove himself against high odds.
Free shipping on all orders over $40
Last in Their Class
Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point
Also Purchase as e-Book
Publication Details
Hardcover / 500 pages
ISBN: 159403141X
AVAILABLE: 3/9/2006
- Media: Request a Review Copy
- Academia: Request an Exam Copy
About the Author
James S. Robbins is Deputy Editor of Rare and a member of USA Today’s board of contributors. He is the author of This Time We Win: Rethinking the Tet Offensive and Last in Their Class: Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point.
Praise
Related Titles
Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968 is the sequel to the immensely influential and controversial Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Like its predecessor, this book overturns the conventional wisdom using a treasure trove of new sources, many of them from the North Vietnamese side. Rejecting the standard depiction of U.S. military intervention as a hopeless folly, it shows America’s war to have been a strategic necessity that could have ended victoriously had President Lyndon Johnson heeded the advice of his generals.
In The Statesman as Thinker, Daniel J. Mahoney provides thoughtful and elegant portraits of statesmen who struggled to preserve freedom during times of crisis.
Well known as a political commentator and the author of sixteen novels, William F. Buckley Jr. was also a superb chronicler of travel. Getting About gathers more than one hundred of his articles about journeys by boat, train, or plane, representing a lifetime of adventure around the world—from Annapolis to Zurich, from the Azores to the Virgin Islands.
In this warm and intimate memoir Judge Wilkinson delivers a chilling message. The 1960s inflicted enormous damage on our country; even at this very hour we see the decade’s imprint in so much of what we say and do. The chapters reveal the harm done to the true meaning of education, to our capacity for lasting personal commitments, to our respect for the rule of law, to our sense of rootedness and home, to our desire for service, to our capacity for national unity, and to our need for the sustenance of faith. Judge Wilkinson seeks not to lecture but to share, in the most personal sense, what life was like in the 1960s and to describe the influence of those frighteningly eventful years upon the present day.
This book is about the partnership of God and Mammon in the New World—about how Americans have made money and lost money, and about how they have thought about that obsessive and peculiarly American subject. Money is the basic American thing, the life’s blood of the country.
A Gift of Freedom shows how John M. Olin’s “venture capital fund for the conservative movement” helped develop one of the leading forces in American politics and culture.
