Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "About three hours' fast driving west from Chicago, the straggling small towns of the city's umbra give out, and the great rolling plains begin..." (more)
Key Phrases: black hills, orientation center, South Dakota, Pine Ridge, Stone Mountain (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The land, people, and history framing Mount Rushmore, situated in the Black Hills in South Dakota, not far from where Custer died, prove to be every bit as complex and fundamentally crazy-American as the presidents memorialized there. Larner finds that Sioux and Euro-Americans live out the Rushmore experience in predictably different yet unpredictably specific ways. Larner's jump-around meditations on Manifest Destiny and its discontents move from 1970s American Indian Movement activism to 1920s Ku Klux Klan backroom campaigning to 1870s gold-rushing. Unhindered by narrative linearity, Larner situates Crazy Horse the never-photographed mystic warrior and Gutzon Borglum the fantastical public sculptor as the ultimate stars of a multiethnic ensemble of the powerful, victimized, and honestly ambivalent and ties it all together with great ideological discipline and briskly paced prose. Appreciative readers of contemporary political-travel journalism can only hope Larner forgoes a career in academia his publisher identifies him as a graduate student in international relations and instead follows the freelancer's quest. An auspicious debut; recommended for libraries of all types. Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll., PA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

We all know Mount Rushmore: the mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota into which a visionary artist, working by himself, carved the faces of four American presidents as a tribute to American democracy. As with most familiar stories, this one is a mixture of truth and legend. Gutzon Borglum, Rushmore's creator, was indeed a noted sculptor; he was also (briefly) a highly placed member of the Ku Klux Klan. But he did not work alone: a large crew of artisans did the actual face carving, working from a model Borglum created. And Mount Rushmore is a tribute to one version of American democracy; Borglum was a proponent of manifest destiny, an expansionist doctrine that called for the eradication of the American Indian (the Black Hills themselves were appropriated from the Lakota). In fact, Mount Rushmore, in many ways, was intended as a beacon of white superiority shining out from lands once owned by Indians. This eye-opening book will appeal to readers interested in American history as well as those concerned about the treatment of ethnic minorities. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Nation Books (February 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560253460
• ISBN-13: 978-1560253464
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,005,224 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Audacious, insightful, full of vitality, May 13, 2002

By	UC Berkeley graduate student (Berkeley, CA United States) - See all my reviews

Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered is sensational. Ambitious, provocative, and beautifully written, I stayed up late into the night reading this book, unable to put it down. Larner not only explores the meaning of Mt. Rushmore, but uses its history as a lens to reflect upon American values and experience. He elegantly weaves together past and present, taking us from the mid 1800s (when battles, negotiations, and a gold rush culminated in the US' conquest of the Black Hills territory in South Dakota), through the early 1900s (when the youthful nation was ripe for a monument celebrating the American spirit) to the present. Meticulously researched, Larner spent several years combing through archives and conducting interviews. He combines the serious scholar's rigor with the novelist's eye for detail. He has a good ear for dialog, a keen sense of irony, and quite a cast of characters - including gunfighters, fortune seekers, frontiersfolk, self-made men, Presidents, yellow journalists, captains of industry, the KKK, military legends like Custer and Sherman, Indian leaders such as Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, modern day civil libertarians, contemporary Indian rights advocates, as well as the colorful and complicated sculptor who dreamed up Mt. Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum. If there's one thing that historians and social scientists have agreed upon over the last 20 years, it's that you have to understand multiple perspectives to be accurate and fair. As a graduate student, it is his success on this front that I find most impressive. He respects his subjects, developed a rapport with many of them, yet was able to remain distant enough to draw critical assessments. As a result, the book is unusually objective and subtle. He reveals unsavory facts from our history which are neither honorable nor befitting of a democracy - Americans broke a signed treaty when they took the Black Hills without the Indian's consent; the belief in white supremacy justified a series of brutal policies well into the 1900s (e.g., children were ripped away from their parents and forcefully sent to boarding schools, women were sterilized, rations were withheld); Mt. Rushmore itself was intended by its creator, paradoxically, as a monument to both democracy and white superiority; the legacy of conquest still has tragic consequences for many Indians; Indians continue to have to fight against second class status. But at the same time, he reminds us of the things we can be proud of - Americans' ingenuity, energy, entrepreneurialism, our values such as liberty and equality. A story he tells at the end of the book about the awkward handling of a controversial painting in the South Dakota governor's office suggests that many people still cling to yesterday's unquestioning style of patriotism. This book demonstrates loud and clear that the old patriotism is open to challenge. Honesty and justice demand that the nation recognize and respect its diverse perspectives of the American experience . Keep your eyes on Jesse Larner. I'm predicting we'll be hearing lots more from him.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars lively history, December 5, 2002

By	N. Thompson (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Larner's lively history lesson isn't about the rock. It is about the world and visions that shaped it. He takes us through the history of the Black Hills examining the migrations, treaties and personal agendas reflected in the eyes of the faces on Mount Rushmore. While he challenges the superficial messages of the work, he is no reactionary liberal out to bash the government. Larner no more romanticizes the conflicts between the Indians that preceded the westward expansion than he does the visions of those who came after it. And why would he? The complexities of these relationships are far more interesting from an in depth even handed view.
Larner's extensive research breathes with a genuine fascination of his subjects. His personal passion is further evinced by his apparent extended stay in the Rapid City area. By weaving between research oriented historical chapters and his personal adventures, he develops a style that brings history to life for the rest of us. More books like this in history class and I might have changed my major.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Putting an Icon in Context, September 20, 2002

By A Customer

This is a very American book, on an archetypically American topic, written from a classic American stance: smart, perceptive, original and funny. And very serious.

Long ago, when I was growing up in New York City, Mt. Rushmore was right up there with I Am An American Day celebrations: an all-American symbol with just the slightest edge of vulgarity to it. But no one - ever - told me that Mt. Rushmore was built on stolen Indian land, by a promoter whose muscular White America
rhetoric went a fair bit beyond the 19th century norm.

One of the book's most interesting aspects is the linkage it develops between Mt. Rushmore's history and present-day Indian/white relationships - both interpersonal and political. The mountain, in effect, becomes a canvas on which the entire history of `development' across America's West is displayed.

For most people, this book will present material they have thought of as `familiar' in a new and much more meaningful context. Moreover, Larner's mix of historical research and perceptive reports of personal encounters makes for a very readable text. The book is written in a unique and warm voice; and that voice asks questions that haven't been raised previously.