American by Blood

This was a great read. No wimpy goody goody stuff here, just gut wrenching realism and a look at a piece of American history without the political correct sugar coating. Don't miss this one.

What a chore to read this first novel by Huebner! War at its worst is sometimes difficult to read about and trying to imagine the horrific details if you have never been exposed to blood and death is sometimes impossible. Knowing that our younger generations have had to fight in a war sometime, some place since 1776 doesn't make us non-veterans any more undrstanding. The author tries tomake you live the fighters' emotions by shocking you with more gory detail than you can assimilate thru his style of writing. If you have read the book once, you have read it twice because you have to keep reading the page over once or twice to see who "he" is and whether it happened to Huebner(Gus), Bradley(James) or Gentle (William). These men are real people set in the novel about the slaughter of the Native American tribes ordered by our government to clear the land of these "savages" so the white people could settle down in peace on the grounds soaked with the blood of both races. Mr. Huebner writes in an unusual way; with no quotation marks and a minimum of other punctuations, you become confused as to who said or did what. I forced my way thru to the final chapters where the author spent more time "bringing you down" from an emotional high by describing the beauty of the countryside. In this country's most costly mistake, the leaders refused to believe that "red" and white could co-exist. Beautiful cultures were destroyed by men with a vengence, especially after Custer's stupidity at the LittleBighorn. If any one peoples should be finacially awarded for their mistreatment, it should be the American Tribes whose land we sit on today. When you read this novel you will wonder "why didn't the soldier just give up and go home"instead of "just following orders." This book will make you rethink our American rights. Too much gore and the writing style dropped my rating from 5 to 4 stars. There was a place called "Pennsyl-tucky" when West Virginia was part of Pennsylvania!

American by Blood is a novel based on mass murder. Told with naturalistic detail and through rough-hewn soldier dialogue, Andrew Huebner's horrific portrait of the final episodes of our nation's genocidal actions against its indigenous peoples will repel many readers searching for something redemptive about this calculated slaughter. The novel's three protagonists, one of whom, incidentally, is the author's great-great grandfather, follow similar moral paths. Their early naivete stripped by observation and repulsive participation in the butchering of defenseless Indians, the three undergo a metamorphosis of sorts, ultimately resulting in conscience/empathy which alterately manifests as compassion, identification, and/or madness.Blood courses in this angry and reproachful book. Unlike the cleansing effect abolitionist John Brown predicted and Abraham Lincoln verified as national pennance for the sin of slavery, the blood shed by Indians has no spiritual value; this racist murder is moraly indefensible and outrageous. United States soldiers summarily execute defenseless women and children, and attribute (with remarkable psychological projection) savagery to the very victims of our own cruelty and amorality. Co-existence simply is not an option. Removal -- extermination -- is the process by which a white culture validates its own manifest destiny.To read this novel and to absorb its overwhelming condemnation of our past will require resolve. But, make no mistake, Huebner's novel reminds us that real people, not some faceless policy-makers, did the killing. Our land, soaked with shame, is truly American by Blood.

Three soldiers come to the Battle of Little Big Horn a day after the masacre. Although I don't normally enjoy "war novels", the depth of the characters won me. After leaving the devastation of the battle ground, they continue to search out the Indians, unsure of why they're really doing it. Ultimately, they confront their own humanity and the question of how much a human spirit can take before being broken is posed. I couldn't put it down, and this from someone who normally likes more "romance" than stark reality.

I enjoyed this book on so many levels...the rich historical figures, the prose and style, the social context (was the aftermath of Little Big Horn America's Balkan-like "Final Solution")and most importantly as a view to man's struggles with himself. Huebner investigates what the days following Little Big Horn were like for the people on both sides of the struggle for the American west, and what that life and death struggle did to the "little people" involved. Huebner's work juxtaposes the beauty of the American West with a clear view of the carnage accompanying battle. I think he gets it right, as he loses me in page after page of beautiful and at times confrontational prose. I literally couldn't put it down, and look forward to more from this fresh voice.