“The First Detective”: A swashbuckling cop

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:01:00 +0000

The daring costumed escapes and bedsheet-rope prison breaks of the old romances weren't merely creaky plot devices; they were also the objective correlatives of the lost politics of early modern Europe. Not yet susceptible to legislative amelioration, rules and customs that seemed both indefensible and unassailable had to be vaulted over like collapsing bridges or tunneled under like manor walls. Not only fictional musketeers but such illustrious figures as the young Casanova and the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent their early years making narrow escapes from overlapping orthodoxies, swimming moats to marriages of convenience and digging their way out of prisons of privilege by dressing in drag or posing as noblemen's sons. If one ran afoul of the local clergy or some aristocratic cuckold, there were always new bishops and magistrates to charm in the next diocese or département.

“The Killing of Crazy Horse”: Unraveling the myth of Crazy Horse

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 16:03:00 +0000

Making narrative out of a life like that of Crazy Horse presents the biographer with a daunting set of challenges. Shrouded in the mythology of the West and the mystery of his indomitability, Crazy Horse is a shadowy figure, whose exploits took place almost entirely on the inaccessible side of the Sioux Wars' bloody line through history. It's for these reasons, and the Wild West timbre of his name to 20th-century ears, that he became a kind of brand, a 19th-century Che Guevara of the North American plains. And yet among the Sioux, his presence is keenly felt: There are still a few alive old enough to remember seeing and speaking with those old enough to have laid eyes on Crazy Horse.

Salon.com > Matthew Battles

“The First Detective”: A swashbuckling cop

“The Killing of Crazy Horse”: Unraveling the myth of Crazy Horse