Sorrow of the Earth

Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

By: Eric Vuillard, Ann Jefferson (Translator)

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Hardcover | 28 September 2016

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Fascinating, brilliant and angry: the tale of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and the tragic fate of its Native American participants.

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?

Industry Reviews

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 This remarkable book comes from an angry man, wielding his pen with great skill... This powerful story, blending the grand sweep of history with everyday detail, images with text, personal reflections with brute facts, and poetry with prose, makes us reconsider our own relationship with history La Croix A short and scintillating book Le Soir One of our finest writers Le Nouvel observateur A great book... Vuillard forges a sensitive and gripping tale from one of American history's most well-known stories: how a nation was built on a lie, transforming a massacre into a battle, inventing show business and substituting carnival for history. It is simple and moving, incisive and poetic -- Francois Busnel Lire An astonishing work... With chapters that are as brief as they are gripping Lire One of the jewels of the literary season Le Figaro Magazine

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