Category: Reviews

Historically, the seventies in America encompassed two distinct eras that defy definition by decade. The first part was a virtual continuation of the sixties, the period that began with the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and ended with the August 9, 1974 resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. The second was marked by the awkward Bicentennial celebrations and the Carter presidency. In between was a transitional period that feels so strange and foreign to us today that we seem to shy away from recollecting it, a post-Watergate, post-Nixon age of tumult and chaos and violence that was both reminiscent of the sixties that spawned these forces and something else entirely different, a difficult to define intermediate epoch of societal anarchy and a loss of national confidence, a sharp tear in the political fabric that left an accidental President publicly stumbling and tumbling off airplane steps, in public opinion polls, and through domestic and international crises, as well. Much of the action in Rick Perlstein’s massive tome, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, occurs during this brief but critical and often overlooked transition that most significantly saw the unlikely birth of the New Right with Ronald Reagan literally in the saddle.

The Invisible Bridge opens in the final days of the Nixon Presidency. While Watergate manifests itself as that famous “cancer on the Presidency,” Nixon desperately seeks to change the subject, trumpeting the peace with Vietnam as the great victory it certainly was not, seizing upon the returning POWs as heroic emblems who almost immediately became mythologized instruments for the President’s spin, all the while inventing from whole cloth the MIAs – bodies never recovered that are fictionalized as secret prisoners we are pledged to never abandon. The public could not know this, nor did they know that there was a sharp split between the POWs themselves even before they came home, just as there was a deep palpable split in virtually every cohort of the American population. The spin was actually quite successful, but not nearly successful enough to trump Watergate and the implosion of Nixon’s Administration: there are indictments, a special prosecutor is fired, the vice-president resigns on corruption charges, the tapes are revealed, Congress is defied, the Supreme Court weighs in, and Nixon finally capitulates and resigns.

Much of it is a familiar story, but Perlstein brings a unique new perspective to it: while Nixon is engulfed in flames, the smoke is cleared and the lens is tilted to bring into view an unlikely member of the audience, Ronald Reagan, a former actor, former liberal Democrat, now Governor of California and an unlikely leader of the right. While Nixon’s popularity plummets and his support erodes on both sides of the aisle, Reagan remains an unapologetic supporter of Nixon, of the Vietnam War, of America’s right to do whatever she likes wherever she likes justified entirely upon the doctrine of American exceptionalism. As Nixon goes under, legions of rats flee the sinking ship, yet Reagan lashes himself to the mast and declares that the terrible wrongs that have been revealed by one investigation after another are not really wrongs at all. When the storm is over, Nixon has been jettisoned, but Reagan is still on deck, and he is smiling.

Most Americans have forgotten about this turbulent period, which featured not only the resignations of the sitting Vice President and President of the United States, but ongoing Congressional investigations into criminality at home and abroad, a fuel crisis that touched every American family, severe economic turmoil – Nixon had enacted wage and price controls – and violence that seemed to be everywhere, loudly manifested by scores of terrorist acts that had become almost routine. All of this along with the stark realization that we had actually lost a war shook the American psyche like never before. Hardly a decade had passed since Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” but it was as if the country had grown a full century older, and by all accounts she had not aged well. There was a kind of brief optimism as the solid if colorless Gerald Ford took the helm with the humble declaration that he was “a Ford not a Lincoln,” which was almost instantly shattered by Ford’s unexpected pardon of Nixon, leading many to suspect there had been a secret deal all along.

If the post-World War II political consensus had indeed imploded, in retrospect what we might find most surprising given today’s partisan polarization was the way that antagonists on both sides of the aisle came together to prosecute the crimes in Watergate and beyond while guarding against anarchy. The President resigned. There was a new President. Democrats and Republicans together shepherded that process to fruition. Perhaps also surprising from the vantage point of 2015 was that the Republican Party was much more broadly based with a strong liberal wing, as well as moderates and rightists. The new Vice-President, Nelson Rockefeller, was the leader of that liberal wing. Most members of both parties decried the crimes exposed by Watergate, by the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, by seemingly countless other examples that revealed that the Nixon Administration ran the country as a kind of extra-legal mafia organization. Most also cringed as it became increasingly clear that Nixon, who had privately conceded long before that the war was unwinnable, in his quixotic quest for the illusory “peace with honor” needlessly prolonged the Vietnam War and expanded it into neighboring countries, both secretly and later openly, with the resulting senseless deaths of tens of thousands of American military personnel, tens of thousands of Vietnamese north and south – and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodian civilians who were counted anonymously as “collateral damage,” if they were counted at all.

Yet, as Perlstein brilliantly demonstrates, there was no decrying or cringing by the emerging Reagan wing of the Republican Party, which stubbornly defended Nixon and Vietnam and resolutely attacked antiwar elements, investigative reporters, reformist Congressmen and Civil Rights leaders. The latter was an integral part of their continuation of the Nixon strategy to capture the once solidly Democratic south, especially the segregationist wing personified by George Wallace. Reagan, significantly, was on record for opposing the Civil Rights Act. Playing to other disaffected audiences – evangelicals, opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment, cold warriors who felt abandoned by Nixon-Kissinger policies of détente and the opening with China, as well as the nascent anti-abortion movement – Reagan preached for a return to traditional American values with a blend of myth, anecdote and unashamed prevarication.

Ford, unprepared for this attack on his right flank, saw his nomination for a legitimate full term as President put suddenly in jeopardy. He reacted by tacking to the right, dumping the liberal Rockefeller and repeatedly contradicting himself right and left, as he appeared absurdly tripping and falling on camera in between two failed assassination attempts and a string of gaffes. Perlstein takes us move by move through the uneven Ford waltz to the right and Reagan’s graceful quickstep to the twin tunes of honor and patriotism. Reagan almost pulled it off: a few more votes and the convention would have handed him the nomination instead of Ford. Looking back, it is clear that the Reagan challenge deeply damaged Ford’s electoral hopes, and of course he was to be defeated by unknown outsider Jimmy Carter, whom Perlstein depicts as a conniving manipulator who relies on a vague message to win over a dispirited electorate.

Perlstein, a noted progressive historian and journalist, has taken it upon himself to write a history of modern American conservatism. His first contribution, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, received critical acclaim, and his second installment, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, made his reputation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his scholarship has been the subject of attacks by conservatives, but accusations against him have proved to show little merit. And while those of a less liberal bent will no doubt cringe at his inherent bias and his thesis – that as Nixon went up in flames Reagan unapologetically laid the foundation for his national rise on the ashes that remained – the facts he presents are nevertheless incontrovertible. Nixon really said and did all those terrible things that are chronicled – we have it all on tape! And Reagan really did routinely mouth the rhetoric of a fringe right-wing lunatic (Goldwater, of all people, thought him extreme!) while often spouting anecdotes that were entirely imaginary – we have the press clippings for reference!

At a somewhat intimidating 810 pages, I would suggest that The Invisible Bridge is perhaps longer than necessary, yet despite its length lacks a strong concluding chapter that puts all of the massive data it contains in proper context. Still, political junkies will love this book for its detailed analysis, and members of both parties will find fascination in this fine historical study of the creation of the New Right, which later was to force a marked realignment in American politics and is today unequivocally the dominant force in Republican Party politics.

I reviewed other Perlstein books here:

Review of: Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein

Review of: Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, by Rick Perlstein

Review of: Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980, by Rick Perlstein

Some years back, I set out to rediscover American history through the best single books I could find to cover each era. I was stymied when I reached the “War of 1812,” where the historiography was pregnant with works that primarily put emphasis upon the military contests with little context on the greater issues on both sides of the Atlantic that provoked the conflict. Noted historian Alan Taylor has done much to redress this gap with his masterful contribution, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, which offers not only a fresh but strikingly new perspective to the saga. A brilliant and widely acclaimed historian – I consider his American Colonies: The Settling of North America to be one of the finest works ever written in American history – Taylor once again brings a macro lens to the wider arena of a topic and then narrows that focus with great acumen to restore complexity and nuance to that which has long been neglected in both popular and scholarly literature.

Most Americans know very little about the “War of 1812” – it does not even qualify for a real name but has come to be called after the year of its inception. Both its causes and its conclusion remain murky; United States forces lost most of the military engagements – with the exception of the much ballyhooed Jackson victory at New Orleans that occurred once the war was essentially over – and after the termination of hostilities in 1814 in what can best be called a stalemate it came to be largely overlooked. Most students of American history view it as little more than a punctuation mark between the period of the early republic and the Age of Jacksonian Democracy. Taylor artfully resurrects the war, positions it properly in its milieu and reveals why the outcome was in fact quite significant for the future of both Canada and the United States, as well as to a lesser extent Great Britain herself.

The Civil War of 1812 opens in the period that follows the American Revolution, with the British occupying the vast territory of Canada that was a consequence of their victory in the earlier French & Indian War, and bitterly licking their wounds as a result of their loss of the upstart British colonies in North America that were now the United States of America. Ironically, it was the victory over the French in the earlier conflict that ended in 1763 that led to the unraveling of the relationship between Britain and the American colonies as the British sought to get the Americans to pay a fair share for a costly war that benefited both of them. Now, south of the Canadian border was a new nation of former colonies largely hostile to the mother country. The bad feeling was exacerbated by the fact that large numbers of “Tory” Loyalists had fled to Canada when the war went against their interests. These settled largely in the western portion of British Canada known as “Upper Canada,” an administrative division that separated this geography from the former French portion to the east then known as “Lower Canada.” Moreover, economic instability in the new republic following the Revolution brought more Americans – known as “Late Loyalists” – to settle in “Upper Canada,” attracted by handsome financial incentives but deprived of the kind of participatory democracy they had been accustomed to in the United States. There were those among the British who imagined somehow regaining the lost American colonies and sought to position Canada as both a bulwark against the former rebels as well as a staging ground for a war of re-conquest.

One of the few things most Americans know about the war from grade school is that its chief causes included British interference with merchant shipping as well as the seizing and “impressment” of American seamen. We learn from Taylor that while such provocations indeed occurred, it was in the context of a wider war for its very national survival that pitted England (and much of Europe) against Napoleon, in circumstances perhaps not so dissimilar to its twentieth century stand against Hitler. Thus, Britain had little sympathy for its arrogant former colonists in the grand scheme of things when it came to neutral shipping and even the extraordinary “recruiting” methods employed to man its navy against the French menace.

What was never emphasized in school is that much of the action of the war was an attempt by the fledgling United States to conquer and annex Canada in a series of disastrous military campaigns frequently commanded by incompetent martinets who happened to hold to the right brand of politics, leading poorly trained Americans who resisted the authority of their officers and often fled in abject terror from the potential ravages of Native Americans tribes allied with a better trained and far more disciplined professional British army. The exception on the American side was the young General Winfield Scott in the days before his heroic reputation was established, who brings order and discipline to green volunteers whether they like it or not. Alas, as the Americans learned, one great army officer is not enough. Many on the British side were convinced that the “experiment” of an American Republic would be short-lived, and that soon the British would rule again south and north of the Canadian border. As it was, the antagonists shared far more commonality than either could have imagined.

The beauty of The Civil War of 1812 – the book’s title is delightfully both emblematic and metaphorical – is that unlike most accounts of this mostly obscure conflict it does not dwell on the military engagements but rather focuses upon the socio-economic-political dimensions of the war that are so critical to an informed analysis of the conflict and its aftermath. The majority Jeffersonian Republicans, now led by President James Madison, had in the past decade largely dismantled the army and navy, as well as the Hamiltonian central banking system. Thus, they used outrage to provoke a war they were entirely unprepared for militarily or financially. The new United States was hardly old enough to have developed a national identity. Nor had much of an identity evolved for the British Canadians on the other side, many of whom had fled from America. In fact, it turns out that those who lived in proximity on both sides of the long border had much more in common with each other than with the larger identity of their respective opposing nations, which bred an ambivalence over the outcome, at least at the start, for people who most wanted to resume the ordinary trade and relations that had been the status quo ante. Much of that ambivalence, however, was crushed by the depredations visited on both civilian populations by a combination of overzealous officers and rapacious troops, British and American alike. That was one “civil war.” Another less conspicuous one was the tension between the governing class of British in Canada and the former American citizens they at once dominated and largely mistrusted. Still another was between the ever-oppressed Irish, who hated the British yet fought on both sides and often found camaraderie with each other, whether garbed in a red or a blue uniform.

All combatants spoke the same language – except for the Native Americans allied with one side or the other who saw traditional tribal loyalties jeopardized in yet another kind of mini civil war. The British, stretched thin upon an immense long border, relied upon Native American allies, but habitually found themselves unable to control the Indians, which raised issues with the rules of “civilized warfare,” at least as defined by Europeans. Many of these tribes had rules of war that permitted the torture and execution of prisoners, and sometimes women and children, as well. Hence the sometimes hyperbolic fears that drove American troops to sheer terror and retreat at even a hint that Indians might be a component of enemy forces.

Perhaps the most fascinating example of civil war revealed here was the surprising one conducted within the fragile developing American political system. As the war broke out, the largely out-of-power Federalists held the moral high ground over the Republicans, who not only put the nation in jeopardy through its reckless bellicosity against a far stronger enemy, but did so after dismantling the military and the banking system put in place by Federalist founders. Moreover, the rough politics of the 1790s that saw Republicans generally favoring the French and the Federalists favoring the British still generally defined the nascent political parties, but with Britain at war with a France led by Napoleon there was indeed much more at stake both at home and abroad. Unfortunately, this moral high ground was soon abdicated as the Federalist forces not only loudly disapproved of the war – as was their right in a democratic system of government – but actively sought to assist the enemy in a series of actions that passed sensitive information on to the British, aided the escape of prisoners, and even actively toyed with the idea of the secession of New England states and a separate peace. Thus, the Federalists strayed radically from the cherished role of loyal opposition to that of aiders-and-abettors of treason.

The war itself ended in an uncomfortable stalemate. Having defeated Napoleon, the British had no heart for continuing a conflict that offered little long-term reward, and retarded trade and economic development. Both sides more or less agreed to walk away with lines drawn as they were before the outbreak of hostilities. The Americans, who lost most battles, achieved no territorial gains and endured the humiliation of the burning of their capital city, spun it as a great victory, which it most certainly was not. Critically, however, as Taylor makes clear, the war had extremely important after effects that are perhaps only clear in retrospect. First of all, the British accepted the United States as a separate nation in a way that it had never done before, and abandoned dreams of reconquering the lost colonies. Likewise, Americans gave up the notion of annexing Canada and accepted it as its northern neighbor. Finally, and perhaps of the greatest significance for students of American history, the war doomed the Federalist Party, which had shown itself to be composed of “fifth columnists.” That left the United States as a one-party nation for the time, which would have certain underlying repercussions as sectional tensions later developed and there were no longer James Marshall Federalists — who championed a strong central government — in Virginia or elsewhere in the south.

The Civil War of 1812 is not an easy read. There is more than four hundred fifty pages of text to navigate, all of it densely packed with information, plus a hundred pages of notes, great period illustrations and select fine maps. It gets off to a slow start, I felt, and parts of it can be a bit of a slog. Yet, Taylor is an excellent writer and the narrative is quite compelling, especially as it becomes clear how many pieces of the larger mosaic are effectively explored and deftly analyzed. I would recommend this book very highly as an essential read for anyone who seeks a better understanding of a central event in American history that has long been overlooked, as an outstanding scholar unwraps the cobwebs it has long been shrouded in to untangle strands of history that still inform our national identity today.

Note: [June 2025] I was honored when the Early Settlers Society of the Western Reserve asked my permission to republish in the latest edition of their newsletter The Pioneer this book review of The Civil War of 1812, which originally appeared here on this blog back in 2015. Link for The Pioneer below; scroll down to page 5 for the reprint of the review with link to the blog: The Pioneer Spring 2025

Note: I have reviewed other works by Alan Taylor here:

Review of: American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, by Alan Taylor

Review of: The Internal Enemy: Slavery and the War in Virginia 1772-1832, by Alan Taylor

Review of: Thomas Jefferson’s Education, by Alan Taylor

Review of: American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, by Alan Taylor

Review of: American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873, by Alan Taylor

When A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks by Stewart Gordon showed up in my early reviewers program, I eagerly bid on it because the title at once conjured up for me Uluburun, the spectacular Bronze Age Mediterranean shipwreck that revealed to underwater archaeologists a long lost era of ancient international trade that contained vast numbers of artifacts of widespread provenance, including Mycenaean, Syro-Palestinian, Cypriot, Egyptian, Kassite and Assyrian. Thus, I imagined sixteen snapshots like that, each focused upon a single shipwreck that would communicate the significance of a historical period through its contents.

It turned out that was not quite the case. There are indeed sixteen chapters and each one is technically devoted to a ship, although in fact some of these are not actually shipwrecks at all. The first chapter, for instance, focuses upon the Dufuna Dugout, a remarkably preserved dugout canoe from Africa that dates back at least eight thousand years. Much of the narrative explores the history of dugouts over the following centuries, rather than the culture that produced Dufuna. The next one is also not a shipwreck, but the Khufu Barge, a ceremonial buried boat excavated near the base of the Great Pyramid in Egypt, which serves to spark a discussion of trade in the ancient world that is only peripherally related to the boat in this burial.

I was pleased to find the next chapter actually devoted to Uluburun itself, and it is arguably one of the best portions of the book – or maybe I just feel that way because it corresponds more closely with my interests. I am fairly deeply read in Uluburun, but to Gordon’s credit his treatment manages to reveal elements that were entirely new to me, such as the incredible story of the mouse trapped in a food storage jar whose DNA was extracted some 3400 hundred years later to determine its provenance in Ugarit in north coastal Syria! I often champion the marriage of history and technology: perhaps nothing better captures its essence and potential than this. Gordon goes on to describe other components of the cargo and how scientific analyses determined their respective source geographies. He also explores the surprisingly interconnected ancient world of trade among Hittites, Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Assyrians and others in the era prior to the mysterious collapse of Bronze Age civilizations circa 1150 BCE.

Regrettably, the Uluburun chapter is hardly typical of the rest of the book. While the volume does contain other wrecks with cargo, such as the Intan (circa 1000 CE), with some exceptions many of the subjects under discussion lack tangible remains and are utilized primarily as examples of ships in service at the time. The chapter that follows Uluburun, for example, is devoted to another ship burial, this one the sixth century CE Sutton Hoo in England. What becomes clear is that Gordon’s book is less a history of the world told through shipwrecks than a nautical history of select vessels that he has chosen to study and write about. The ancient world is strangely underrepresented: some two millennia separate Uluburun from Sutton Hoo. Conspicuous in its absence, for instance, is a full chapter devoted to the famous trireme that so dominated the ancient Greek world, or any of the various warships that comprised the Roman imperial fleet. (The trireme does receive some oddly placed peripheral attention in a later discussion of Barbary war galleys, but it certainly merits much more.) We have no surviving triremes, so the omission of these and other ancient boats with no physical remains would make sense if the book was limited to actual physical wrecks with artifacts, but it is not.

To his credit, Gordon is a fine writer and much of his narrative is clearly a labor of love of all things nautical. The non-initiated, such as myself, will appreciate his detailed descriptions of how boats and their component parts function on a body of water. Also, the book is well-documented with a thick sheaf of notes at the end and plenty of illustrations, although a certain lack of maps. More than half of the volume is focused upon the last five centuries, right up to the 2012 Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster. Each chapter stands alone and while arranged chronologically do not need to be read sequentially. Some are more stimulating than others, but I suspect that is less due to Gordon’s talents than the interests of the reader. One of my favorites, for instance, was the one devoted to Lucy Walker, the steamboat that exploded and sank on the Ohio River in 1844, which fit neatly into my studies of antebellum American history.

The chief problem with the book, as I see it, is entirely thematic: it seems that each chapter would make a fine article for a magazine, but there is almost nothing that connects one to the other as part of a larger narrative. Even the title is unwieldy as an effort to unite the respective essays in a common thread, since as I have noted earlier, many of the boats are not actually shipwrecks. I suspect Gordon himself was aware of this flaw: neither the “Introduction” nor the “Conclusion” – each only about two and half pages in length – convincingly explain why these studies of the sixteen selected ships belong together in one volume. I would nevertheless recommend A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks to students of nautical history, with the caveat that the component segments arguably are of greater value than the sum of these parts.

When I am really impressed with a fiction writer, I often endeavor to read all or most of their works. Alas, William Faulkner was too dense and too prolific for me to succeed, but if I live long enough I may crack that nut. I had better luck with Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy. I’m almost there with Haruki Murakami, who has quite the long catalog.

The problem with reviewing the same author of multiple works is that it is sometimes difficult to find new ground to cover. My latest Murakami read was After the Quake, a collection of six short stories – or are these long stories? – centered around the cataclysmic Kobe earthquake in 1995. Except they are not. The characters in these six stories, all narrated from the third person, do not actually experience the earthquake directly, but are made aware of it peripherally, primarily through television news. Still, the event clearly unsettles them all and it is a pronounced sense of resonating palpable unease that binds these tales into a coherent collection. Another natural adhesive is the fact that these stories were all written in 1999-2000, so we have a snapshot of the kind of writer Murakami was during this phase of his career as well as a logical rationale for including these in a single collection. That image is sharpened because we also know by the author’s own words that he never writes short stories and novels at the same time: he either works on one or the other.

Murakami has had a long writing career that dates back to 1979, which has seen a marked evolution in style and presentation while retaining some elements present at the creation, so to speak. After the Quake originally appeared in Japanese in 2000 (and in English translation in 2002), which for Murakami fans means the time between the novels Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) and Kafka on the Shore (2002). I have read two of his other short story collections – The Elephant Vanishes and Blind Willow, Sleeping Women – which together contain a medley of forty-one stories written over the long period of 1980-2005 that are neither arranged chronologically nor thematically. Like a carelessly arranged anthology album of a rock band that has been performing in various iterations since the 1960s, there is the potential for a kind of dissonance in this kind of jumble, even if the quality of the tracks are impressive. (Side note: no such dissonance in Hemingway or Faulkner, for instance, because their respective writing styles and thematic approach remained so similar over time.) Because After the Quake was written in the same era and orbit (however peripherally) around a central event, there is a logic that enhances the ability of the review process to effectively compare and contrast the contents. At the same time, it should be underscored, each of these stories can stand on its own and does not need to appear in a volume with the others in order to succeed.

“UFO in Kushiro,” opens the collection and makes reference to the earthquake more frequently and in more detail than the others. Here it serves as a tectonic shift (pun fully intended!) of sorts for Komura – one of those dull, passive Murakami male protagonists – whose wife walks out on him while he is at work five days after the earthquake with no notice, little explanation and an irrevocable determination to never return, in circumstances similar to that in the earlier novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Komura’s sudden divorce makes for a series of unlikely events to follow for him that include smuggling an unnamed object, cavorting with a couple of edgy young women, a funny story about a bear and a bell, sexual dysfunction and existentialism. Not bad for twenty pages of text! I cannot be certain what the story means, but I enjoyed it enough to read it twice through.

“Landscape with Flatiron,” perhaps the finest story in the collection, is also manifestly existential, involving a young woman’s platonic bond (but perhaps that could change …) with an older man who collects driftwood to build masterful fires on the beach that she is powerfully drawn to for emotional succor. This is an especially rich tale pregnant with metaphor that is enhanced by Murakami’s gift for crafting female characters who often are far more developed and complex than their male counterparts. “All God’s Children Can Dance” is a strange, disquieting tale of religion, the potential for incest, the prospect of virgin birth, an unusually large penis, and a man with a missing earlobe that has been bitten off by a dog – in a strange contrast to the author’s typical use of a woman’s ear as an object of sexual fetish. It is as if Japanese literary doppelgangers of Stephen King, Rod Serling, John Irving and Edgar Allen Poe got together for a weird collaboration. I’m not sure how I feel about the story, but it is by all means worth the read.

Of the remaining stories, I very much enjoyed both “Thailand” – which contains familiar Murakami elements of jazz music and a hint of magical realism – as well as the quirky love story “Honey Pie.” I was less impressed with “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” an attempt at magical whimsy that seemed to me to fall flat whether intended as an allegory, a comedy or a psychodrama. But perhaps I just missed something.

Whether you are a diehard Murakami fan or simply curious about an author who gets a lot of press in the literary world, I would recommend this slender volume for your reading pleasure.

Some months back, I relocated an antique bookcase long ago constructed from the headboard of some ancient bed to a wall in our bedroom just opposite my own pillow. It is packed full with scores of mass market paperbacks, a now mostly obsolete format that once thrived as a means to put both great literature and pulp into the hands of a wider population in inexpensive, portable editions. So it was that I went to sleep each night staring at my own eclectic array of mass markets – classics, literature, sci-fi and, yes, some pulp – collected almost entirely during my teen years. This is how it was that I came to read Shosha by Isaac Bashevis Singer, randomly plucked from that shelf between yawns one evening.

Singer, who was born in Warsaw when it was a part of Russia (Poland ceased to be a nation during its long partition from 1795-1918), left Europe on the eve of the rise of Hitler and spent most of his long life in the United States, where he established a reputation in the Yiddish literary movement based upon his themes of Jewish mysticism, morality, philosophy and vegetarianism that eventually earned him a Nobel Prize. Like much of his work, Shosha was originally written in Yiddish.

Shosha is an odd book, by any measure. Written later in life when Singer was in his seventies, the perhaps semi-autobiographical novel looks back through the eyes of its protagonist, fledgling writer Aaron Greidinger, at the Jewish ghetto of his childhood in one corner of the Russian empire where he befriends the eponymous Shosha, as well as the independent Poland of his young manhood defined by the ever-widening shadow of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. When Aaron – known by the affectionate nickname Tsutsik – is reunited with Shosha many years later he is a young man on the make, struggling to earn a living as a writer, moving in literary circles where conversations frequently turn to Spinoza, Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as the orthodox rabbinical tradition he has largely abandoned. Tsutsik, who lives on the margins barely scraping by, nevertheless has one Dickensian event of good fortune after another. Rich men want to sponsor him. Almost every woman wants to bed him – and he eagerly obliges them. Shosha, on the other hand, in the intervening years has endured some kind of catastrophic malady termed a “sleeping sickness” that has left her short and stunted with a body barely developed beyond that of a child. In fact, she is frequently mistaken for a child. She also seems to be at least mildly mentally challenged. Nevertheless, when Tsutsik finds her again, he immediately commences an obsessive love affair with Shosha that is incomprehensible to everyone he knows. And, I might add, to the reader, as well.

I assumed the timeless innocence of the character Shosha to be a an allegory to the lost world of the Warsaw of Tsutsik’s – and Singer’s – childhood, before the Great War, and perhaps a symbol of the fragility of the reborn yet hardly mature new nation of Poland, doomed to fall once more before the onslaught of Nazi tanks. But there is clearly more to it than that as Tsutsik’s romantic love for Shosha deepens and they become betrothed. While Shosha is biologically a grown woman, there remains something creepily Lolita-like about her as an object of sexual lust, especially as it is repeatedly made clear in the narrative that others perceive her as the child she appears to be. My discomfort grew exponentially in the graphic description of the wedding night scene, replete with bloody sheets, in which Tsutsik effectively rapes the terrified, resisting Shosha. This sense of violation is further exacerbated a few pages later, when a peevish Shosha confesses that she wants more of that marriage bed, as soon as possible. Perhaps I am more sensitive than I used to be, but none of this sat well with me at all. In fact, I could not shake a sense of disgust at being forced to serve as audience to a kind of literary voyeuristic pedophilia that was at best gratuitous, at worst repulsive.

Through all of this, I anticipated some sort of dramatic denouement, which was not to be. Suddenly, and without explanation, the narrative ends. It then picks up again in a disjointed “Epilogue” that finds Tsutsik thirteen years later, an established New York author visiting the new nation of Israel, which serves as an uneven vehicle for relating the fate of all of the significant characters from the novel: “anticlimactic” does not even begin to describe it.

I have never read Singer before, nor have I read other works from his Yiddish literary tradition, so I am possibly not qualified to properly judge the merit of this novel. It is clear that Singer was an extremely gifted writer working within a highly-developed intellectual milieu. Portions of the narrative devoted to existential explorations of philosophy, religion, politics and morality are well worth the read. Still, the episodes with the girl-child Shosha that come to dominate the book are deeply disturbing, whatever the author’s intent. If Shosha is indeed a metaphor for innocence, we cannot help but cringe at her defilement by the novelist as protagonist. Would I ever read Singer again? I can’t say. Would I recommend Shosha to others? Not so much.

Some 250 million years ago, the great supercontinent of Pangea formed, on the eve of a great extinction that bookmarked both the close of the Permian period and the Paleozoic era; the future belonged to the first dinosaurs. To the east of Pangea was a vast sea known as Tethys. When the forces of plate tectonics broke Pangea up into massive component land masses, Tethys formed a great equatorial sea between the northern Laurasia and the southern Gondwanaland, expanding east-west ocean circulation that saw the birth of modern marine life. By five million years ago, Tethys was no more; all that remains of her today is the Mediterranean Sea. In Vanished Ocean: How Tethys Reshaped the World, author Dorrik Stow – a renowned geologist and oceanographer who specializes in deep ocean research – not only traces the long lifecycle of Tethys but utilizes this structure as a framework to probe plate tectonics, evolution, extinction events, oceanic conveyor belts, geology, climate change, of origin of fossil fuels, and much, much more!

Vanished Ocean is a brilliant work and clearly a labor of love for Stow, whose elegant writing style turns complex scientific concepts into an immensely readable narrative that is comprehensible for the most part to the general reader with at least some familiarity with earth science principles. This is enhanced by a number of tables, illustrations and maps, as well as an ample “glossary of terms,” neatly accented by appropriate snippets of Pablo Neruda verse at the face of each chapter. It is clear from his passion that for Stow the processes of the earth and the evolution of both the organic and inorganic that it hosts represent a kind of poetry in motion, and his enthusiasm is eminently contagious for the reader, even in the occasional moments when the concepts are so complex that a paragraph may need to be re-read more than once. Still, if you know something about plate tectonics and evolution, there is nothing here that is not accessible. It is a real treat to listen to Stow relate the story – along with anecdotes of his life and travels that clearly reveal that even after a lifetime of research he remains as delightfully full of wonder as an eight year old child as the processes of the planet – much of these echoes of a far distant era — are exposed.

There is controversy here, as well. Stow does not buy into the accepted catastrophic theory of dinosaur extinction, which a scientific consensus today attributes to a massive asteroid collision 65 million years ago at the Chicxulub Crater beneath Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula in what is geologically referred to as the “KT Boundary Event” that marks the end of both the Cretaceous Period and the Mesozoic Era. Stow argues with great conviction that given the frequency of mass extinction events over the long geologic history of the earth, there are plenty of ingredients in place – such as climate change and the continental drift of plate tectonics – to account for such an extinction without introducing an extra-planetary event. I lack the expertise to parse Stow’s dissent. On the other hand, Stow is a distinguished scientist – not some talking head with a political axe to grind – and his opposing views are worthy of respect even if these defy the current accepted theory.

I will not pretend to have absorbed all of the complicated concepts of Vanished Ocean, but it was a most enjoyable read and I may one day even read it again in order to better comprehend the immense range of the material that Stow has packed into what is after all, a rather small volume given the enormity of its content. I would highly recommend this book both to scientists and non-scientists alike.

As the sesquicentennial fades, I sought to abandon binge-reading Civil War books and to move on to the postwar era of Reconstruction and Redemption. Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War, by Elizabeth R. Varon, randomly plucked from the shelves of a local bookstore, turned out to be an excellent choice for the transition.

Varon, professor of history at the University of Virginia and author of several previous books on the Civil War and the antebellum period, effectively asserts that Appomattox was a seminal event that has assumed a mythological place in both the history and the historiography of the war – so much so that its myth frequently but quietly intrudes and distorts historical accounts. How many times have we heard the story of Lee gallantly proffering his ceremonial sword to Grant, who graciously refuses it? It never happened, yet that singular imagery persists in historical memory so stubbornly that it has been repeated even in scholarly retellings. The story of the fictional sword is yet however only a metaphor in some ways for far more pernicious elements of the myth of Appomattox that even historians often have to struggle to shake off.

Varon argues convincingly that within minutes of the historic surrender, the military constituent of the “Lost Cause” myth was conceived. It is worth pausing here to reflect on the “Lost Cause,” born in the postwar era, which has both political and military components, and continues to resonate to this day. The political piece holds that the doctrine of states’ rights was the primary motivation for secession and discounts slavery as the central core of the rebellion. The authors of this well-constructed prevarication after the war were often the same prominent figures who were the primary architects of what was proudly advertised as a “slave republic” on the eve of hostilities, which is best made manifest by juxtaposing what they wrote in 1860 and in the years following the Confederacy’s defeat. This aspect of the “Lost Cause” myth has repeatedly been effectively rebutted by a consensus of scholars, but it remains alive and well and has seen an unfortunate resurgence in recent years as an element of contemporary right-wing ideology.

Varon focuses instead upon the birth of the perhaps less nefarious but yet equally misleading military component of the “Lost Cause” myth, which imagines the heroic defeat of the noble and valiant rebels, led by vastly superior generals, who nevertheless finally succumb to the overwhelming men and materiel of their more vulgar and less competent northern adversaries. No less invented than the fiction of its political complement, the military portion has proved a more difficult theme to rebut, largely because on the face of it the north did indeed possess greater manpower and resources than its southern counterparts. Still, the Confederacy did not need to win – only not to lose – in order to achieve its independence and prevail. It had several million slaves to serve as support behind the lines, freeing up more white men to serve as soldiers. It had the benefit of fighting on its own territory; on the two occasions when Lee left that comfort zone to go north – Antietam and Gettysburg – he was soundly beaten. Finally, while Lee can rightly be considered the greatest field general of the war, the south had as many or more bad generals as the north: Bragg, Polk, Pemberton, countless others. To Lincoln’s chagrin, all eyes tended to be in the eastern theater where the north had a true dearth of talent in McClellan, Burnside and Hooker, but the union was consistently triumphant in the west with the likes of Grant, Sherman and Thomas, and when Grant – whom historian Gary Gallagher rightly calls the “best soldier of the war” – came east he finished the job.

In Appomattox, Varon identifies the moment of creation of this military part of the “Lost Cause” myth with the deliberate understatement of the troops under Lee’s command at the time of surrender and its enshrinement in Lee’s “Farewell Address” known officially as General Order #9, which opens with: “After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” Varon carefully deconstructs Lee’s words and the efforts of those around him to report an ever-shrinking band of tatterdemalions overcome solely by superior numbers. Early reports that Lee has a mere 8,500 men under arms are soon put to the lie when the much coveted written parole Grant had issued so that the former Confederates could venture home unmolested are claimed by an additional twenty thousand rebels! Yes, Lee was indeed still outnumbered, but this was a reality because of the many losses inflicted by Grant’s army on Lee’s in the past eleven months. Lee had not won a significant battlefield victory in nearly two years – since Chancellorsville in May 1863 – and had not been on the offensive since his great loss at Gettysburg in July shortly thereafter. Grant’s “Overland Campaign” of 1864 – often criticized then and now for the huge sacrifices of men to suit the strategic objective and the origin of the unfair “Grant-the-Butcher” myth – had choked off Lee’s options and forced him to the siege at Petersburg, which could only end as it did with the fall of both Petersburg and Richmond. Lee had been squarely beaten by Grant, and there was much more to it than an excess of supply wagons and greater numbers of boots on the ground.

Varon spends a good deal of time on the magnanimous terms offered by Grant with Lincoln’s blessing to Lee’s army in capitulation, which Lee himself had hardly anticipated. Rather than the harsh punishments Confederates had braced for, the generous terms of the surrender treated the defeated foe with respect, issued blanket paroles, and even (although it was not specified in writing) permitted soldiers to keep their horses. Grant also provided some 25,000 rations to the hungry Confederates. (Given the number of rations, it was obviously clear at the outset that Lee had more than the 8,500 men it was disingenuously claimed.) Before too long, early “Lost Causers” were claiming Grant’s magnanimity was spawned less by generosity and much more by his sense of shame at having bested such a noble and gracious foe. Nonsense, of course, but it made for great myth-making.

We often tend to forget how rapidly the northern celebration of Appomattox on April 9^th was drowned out by the horror of Lincoln’s assassination only six days later. Calls by some for punishing the rebels – largely muted by the festivities of victory — grew more strident following Lincoln’s martyrdom by a known southern sympathizer. Still, reason ruled in the north and even in deep mourning calls for revenge were shunted aside; an official commitment to mercy upon the conquered prevailed.

Varon neatly chronicles how all of that mercy and magnanimity was manipulated by legions of former Confederates who sought to restore their respective antebellum power bases and rule the roost once more, even if their precious “peculiar institution” had to be abandoned along the way. With Lincoln dead – whose vision of reconstruction seems to have included both benevolence towards the defeated and provisions to protect their former slave property – the politics of the victorious north became polarized in a vicious clash between the new President, Andrew Johnson, who favored leniency for the secessionists but had little concern for the millions of newly freed but disenfranchised blacks, and the Congressional majority of Radical Republicans who advocated punishing the former rebels severely and demanding full and immediate citizenship rights for African-Americans. The closest to a great moderate of Lincoln’s stripe was Grant, and both sides sought to claim him for their own.

As all of this played out to shrill invective that eventually led to Johnson’s impeachment and narrow acquittal, the old guard of ex-Confederates quietly took control of southern political institutions, and the myth-making began in earnest: an outnumbered band of the chivalrous, dedicated to a Constitution that promised rights to the states, sought against all odds to create an independent nation devoted to the values that the republic was originally founded upon. Finally defeated due to overwhelming odds, they sought nothing more than to peacefully reassert their role in the United States as now loyal citizens. Conspicuous in its absence in this narrative was mention of the human chattel that their slave republic was founded upon, or reference to the millions of freedmen who found themselves in a vague purgatory of disenfranchisement, neither slave nor citizen. The seeds of another myth, of a greatly exaggerated oppressive era of reconstruction, took root at this time, as well. The reality was that Johnson’s leniency turned into a kind of appeasement: African-Americans were sidestepped and even as early as the summer of 1865 in Richmond were subject to oppressive “black laws” that were reminiscent of the old “negro laws” of slave days; and soon after former Confederate elites regained political power in a coup of restoration that surprised many by its swiftness on both sides. It was only to get worse: the true horror of “Redemption” for African-Americans in the former Confederacy was still some years away.

Grant was largely disappointed in Lee, whom Grant had hoped would assume a leading role in a genuine peace of reconciliation, but Lee was held in such esteem even in the north that he was asked to testify before Congress, where he lobbied for the unconditional restoration of rights to southern elites. Blacks would remain … well . . . invisible. Soon, the surrender at Appomattox came to be viewed by many in the north – including Grant – as a “golden moment” that was squandered in a rush towards reunion at any price. By 1866, already it was seen that the north had won a long costly war yet had very quickly lost the peace. Johnson had vetoed the “Civil Rights Bill” in Congress. Unrepentant Confederate elites served as unapologetic architects of newly restored southern political institutions. Myths of the war, of an outsized gallant Lee and his noble army, of a brutal Grant, of the “Lost Cause,” of a proud but defeated south only seeking a helping hand as they gratefully rejoined the union – myths that effectively erased the visages of millions of African-Americans, slave and free – all of these were born and thrived in the months that followed Appomattox, and sadly, a good deal of these persist to this day.

Varon’s Appomattox is an excellent work, although somewhat hampered by a structure that at times reads like a long research paper. Extremely well documented with abundant notes, occasionally the narrative relies too much on quotations from notable historians in the abundant catalog of historiography on this era rather than a focus upon the primary sources that while considered are yet less frequently cited. Still, I would highly recommend this book for those seeking to comprehend more fully how the memory of the Civil War continues to resound in this nation a century and a half after that tumultuous and still somewhat unresolved day at Appomattox.

 

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, is a novel I probably never would have picked up had it not come to me as a gift from my daughter Sara, whom I am ever hounding to read the many books I send her way. So it was with a certain sense of obligation that I took this heavy volume out to my deck on a recent sunny Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and turned to chapter one. It was dusk on the next day with an emptying bottle of beer in the fading crepuscular light when I finished it. In between, I did little else but read this book, a complex work of literary fiction that runs well over five hundred pages yet is so compelling and so well-written that it seems impossible to let it go. I cannot recall the last time a book of this merit and intricacy has gripped me with such force, literally from cover-to-cover. No wonder that All the Light We Cannot See was the winner of both the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2015 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, as well as other prestigious awards.

Doerr, an otherwise little-known author, has written a dazzling multifaceted masterpiece that cannot adequately be described or deconstructed in a review format. The premise of the storyline sounds simple and perhaps so sentimental that it might make the potential reader turn away: the lives of a blind teenaged French girl and a brilliant young orphaned German soldier intersect in unlikely circumstances during the tumultuous liberation of World War II German-occupied France. But there is virtually nothing simple or sentimental in this multilayered narrative that in a microcosm manages to trace the growth of fascism in Depression-era Germany, explores the art of the locksmith, the science of electromagnetic waves, the evolution of mollusks, the construction of a radio from spare parts, the literature of Jules Verne (in Braille!), the methods of a small-town French Resistance cell, the architecture of a medieval city, the perils of combat on the Russian front – and even includes as its central character a legendary and priceless diamond that could possibly bestow upon its owner both a unique blessing and a terrible curse.

There is so much to extol about this extraordinary book! What appears to be an obvious metaphor in the title turns out to be a wide panoply of allegory embedded in the narrative structure of the tale, but – in a testament to the craft of the writer – much of it is hardly evident until the closing stages of the work. All of the characters are exceedingly well-drawn with a sophisticated dimensionality not weighed down by unnecessary detail. And the prose – well this is the shining glory of it all because Doerr writes so well that the complicated architecture of the novel never slows down the pace, so paragraphs and chapters can be gulped down by the reader as if it was pulp, which it most certainly is not. In this and in many ways I am reminded of Hemingway, although the author’s voice could not be more different in its expression. Hemingway too used complex literary techniques like the objective correlative, but these were often only palpable for the reader on reflection and never slowed the narrative down. Like Hemingway, there is not a single extraneous bit of information in the entire novel: Doerr imparts only and exactly what you need to know, about the characters, about the place and time, about the plot. Thus Doerr takes apart and rebuilds a radio the way Hemingway would a rifle, not only to add veracity to the tale but because it is essential to the story.

This novel truly is almost perfect. The only fault I could find is with the protagonist’s agoraphobic great-uncle, who strikes me as perhaps just a bit too old to be a veteran of the Great War in his youth as portrayed. But this is such a minor quibble that it is perhaps hardly worth mentioning, except by way of illustrating that only in such nitpicks can we locate flaws, and even these are so minor as to barely warrant attention. I highly recommend this superlative novel to every audience.

I have reviewed other novels by Anthony Doerr here:

Review of: About Grace, by Anthony Doerr

Review of: Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr

Death of a River Guide is the fourth novel that I have read by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan, who ranks – along with Cormac McCarthy and Haruki Murakami – as one of my top three living authors of literary fiction. I am not alone in my admiration: Flanagan has won a number of prominent awards for his work, and his most recent tour de force, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was the recipient of the prestigious Man Booker Prize. [My review of The Narrow Road to the Deep North is here: http://regarp.com/2015/02/02/review-of-the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-north-by-richard-flanagan/]

My first encounter with Flanagan was a serendipitous stumble upon Gould’s Book of Fish, truly one of the finest works of literature of the new millennium in my opinion, which boasts a distinctive brand of magical realism that perhaps can be said to sail in the same sea of this genre with a Murakami or a Gabriel Garcia Marquez yet remains a unique vessel of unmatched craft. Gould’s has the distinction of being the only novel that I have ever read through and then – after the final paragraph on the final page – turned back to page one and started all over, reading it straight through for a second time!

Death of a River Guide may not qualify as the same brand of masterpiece as Gould’s, but yet it handily earns superlatives in its own right, especially because it was Flanagan’s first novel. It is truly so rare as to be remarkable for a first novel to contain such kinds of complexity, characterization, narrative structure and commanding prose. I do not typically cite other critics in my own reviews, but in this case the blurb on the jacket cover – “The sort of stunt Faulkner and Ambrose Bierce together might have concocted …” (Raleigh News & Observer) – is worth reiterating because it is both telling and spot on the mark. Like Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, for instance, Death of a River Guide time hops effortlessly, although here the very dimension of time is far more epic. Like Bierce, there is imagination, irony and sometimes horror. I might also add to that the comedic mockery of a Kurt Vonnegut and the biting sarcasm of a Mark Twain. Yet, none of it is derivative. Readers of Gould’s will no doubt detect the roots of the magical realism that come to define the latter work, the echoes of passion and tragedy that form surprising links between individuals in disparate times and places who otherwise might appear unrelated yet in fact share human experiences – often heartbreaking – that despite their distances resonate profoundly among them.

It has long been alleged that during the drowning process the victim sees their life “flash before their eyes,” and this imaginary mechanism is the foundation of the narrative structure in Death of a River Guide, which also employs the more familiar literary device of the “journey motif,” as the protagonist, hapless river guide Aljaz Cossini – who has known far more misfortune than not in his life to that point – finds a rare moment of courage and purpose rewarded with the awful calamity of finding his head trapped between rocks beneath the violent waters of a rushing river, awaiting certain death yet granted dramatic yet disjointed visions that showcase his own history and the lives of those who preceded him, both immediate antecedents and far distant ancestors, which reverberate with the palpable atavism of sometimes unlikely forerunners not only of kinship but of geography and spiritual commonality.

Make no mistake, this novel contains great complexity on multiple levels, and as such while the prose is quite engaging this is by no means an easy read. As in Faulkner’s Sartoris-Sutpen novels, critical details of similar but related characters over several generations are subtly revealed throughout the narrative, so I found myself more than once thumbing back through the pages wondering if I had missed a key particular that in fact had not yet been disclosed. But it is truly worth the effort. In the final chapter, I pondered whether the tale had not perhaps gone on too long after all, if I was about to happen upon some jagged flaw that would reduce the fine estimation I had for the novel thus far. Then, reading the second to the last paragraph on the penultimate page, my eyes suddenly and quite unexpectedly filled with tears. And it was not cheap. And it was not sentimental. Flanagan can do that … and he does. Death of a River Guide is a truly great novel. Don’t miss it.

I may possibly have been the last Civil War enthusiast yet to read The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara, a historical novel I have heard repeatedly referenced by historians, battlefield guides, reenactors and Civil War buffs of virtually every stripe. Now I can officially proclaim that I have read it too! But what took me so long?

I was actually reared on historical fiction – Michener, Clavell, Vidal – and I read voraciously in this arena, which had a profound effect upon my intellectual development with regard to both history and literature. Later, as I determined to become a historian, I deliberately eschewed this genre. Why? Because quality historical fiction tends to deeply ingrain its impressions in the synapses: to this day I have to vigorously resist identifying as authentically biographical the characters of Burr and Lincoln that Gore Vidal so brilliantly conceived in those marvelous eponymous historical novels.

The Killer Angels was actually pressed upon me by a friend who had often nagged me to read it. Finally, he mailed me a copy, which thus enforced a sense of guilt and obligation upon me. I still did not turn to it immediately, but I did take it along with me on a recent trip. My Master’s Degree in History was conferred at a ceremony held in National Harbor, Maryland, and it seemed fitting that my next stop post-commencement should be in the realm of the multiple Civil War battlefields at Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was in that vicinity, overlooking a tranquil pond on the deck of a rented 1830s-era log cabin in Spotsylvania, with a cup of coffee in the early morning sun just prior to a battlefield tour, that I began The Killer Angels. And I could not stop reading it.

As promised by its many fans, it is an outstanding read on a variety of levels, not least in its talent for recreating the time and circumstances, effortlessly placing the reader in that milieu to walk with the characters on those crucial days that saw what was the largest land battle in North America. A complex yet engaging storyline that never grows dull, perhaps its greatest strength is in its skilled characterizations that truly bring colorful animation to a long-dead cast of otherwise monochromatic figures. The grand scale of Gettysburg is resurrected, as well as what this battle would mean for each side in a clash that while hardly deciding the war nevertheless placed a pronounced exclamation mark in the course of how its narrative would be writ ever afterward.

Although the characters were exceedingly well drawn, I did not need to fear that I would confuse fiction for biography here, since I have previously read more than a little about central players such as Lee, Longstreet and Chamberlain. I have visited the battlefield, once with a guide in my car and on foot, and again on a walking tour with the legendary Ed Bearss. I had not believed that a novel set on those grounds on those days would hold much value for me, but in this I was mistaken: Shaara’s deliberately understated prose that deftly wove history with literature made me “feel” the events there as I never thought possible. I was indeed stirred in a way I never could have anticipated.

In the end, I do not regret waiting this long to read this fine novel. While I am thankful that I had a firm historical foundation in place prior to entertaining the drama, I am yet even more grateful then for that drama. If it turns out that I was not truly the absolute last person to read this book, I would urge those who have taken my place to pick up a copy: you truly will not regret it.