Sorrow of the Earth
Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business
by Éric Vuillard
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Pub Date Oct 31 2017 | Archive Date Aug 13 2017
Description
Buffalo Bill was the prince of show business. His spectacular Wild West shows were performed to packed houses across the world, holding audiences spellbound with their grand re-enactments of tales from the American frontier. For Bill gave the crowds something they'd never seen before: real-life Indians.
This astonishing work of historical re-imagining tells the story of the Native Americans swallowed up by Buffalo Bill's great entertainment machine. Of chief Sitting Bull, paraded in theatres to boos and catcalls for fifty dollars a week. Of a baby Lakota girl, found under her mother's frozen body, adopted and displayed on the stage. Of the last few survivors of Wounded Knee, hired to act out the horrific massacre of their tribe as entertainment. And of Buffalo Bill Cody himself, hamming it to the last, even as it consumed him.
Told with beauty, compassion and anger, Sorrow of the Earth shows us tragedy turned into a circus act, history into sham, truth into a spectacle more powerful than reality itself. Could any of us turn away?
Advance Praise
"A swift and engrossing postmodern interrogation of the brutal cost of manufacturing myth... an attempt to see a fraction of the story of native North America more honestly than that story has been seen in decades and centuries past." -- New Statesman
"Perhaps the shortest and most intense book on the Wild West ever published." -- Times Literary Supplement
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781782272212 |
| PRICE | $19.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 192 |
Featured Reviews
Reviewer 238609
Sorrow of the Earth is a short read about Bill's Wild West show and the Native Americans impacted by it. This book explains the horrors of enacting some of the most brutal massacres of Native Americans in Bill's Wild West show. It tells us how Bill used a dead native child as a show piece to attract people. While this book waa hard to read at times as it depicted the tragedy of this show I think everyone should read it to learn it's history.
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