New and Noteworthy---Civil War Fiction: The Hunley, The Civil War's Secret Weapon

The Hunley: The Civil War's Secret Weapon, Larry C. Kerr, Melange Books, 2012, 305 pp., $15.95.

The CSS submarine H.L. Hunley plays a small part in in the Civil War but has a larger role in history. Revealing the dangers and advantages of undersea warfare, the CSS Hunley was the first to sink an enemy warship, the USS Housatonic. The current historic record is not explicit as to whether the submarine was entirely submerged during the assault. It cost 21 sailors their lives during the experimentation and assault; the ship sank three times. Constructed at Mobile, Alabama, shipped by railroad to Charleston, South Carolina, the Hunley was lost on February 17, 1864. After decades of search, the Hunley's remains were located in 1995 and recovered in 2000. It now rests in a marine labratory in Charleston.

Kerr employes quick, conversational style dialog to move the story forward from April 1861 to February 1864. The author does not provide fanicful developments to heighten the narrative or suspense. Readers who are familar with the Hunley's story will be well satified. Those who are encountering the story for the first time will be compelled to track down the original TNT Network's 1999 creative film, The Hunley. Readers seeking toto learn more about the submarine, the heroic individuals who died with it are well served by current stewards of the ship and its museum. The Friends of the Hunley offer a very fine website. The website is a fine companion to Kerr's enjoyable, fact-based novel.

New and Noteworthy----Hell Or Richmond: Ralph Peters' Adds to Cain At Gettysburg

Hell or Richmond:  A Novel, Ralph Peters, Forge Publishing, 542 pp., maps, May 2013, $25.99

Those who thoroughly enjoyed 2012's Cain At Gettysburg will greet Hell or Richmond.

From the publisher: Between May 5 and June 3, 1864, the Union and Confederate armies suffered 88,000 casualties. Twenty-nine thousand were killed, wounded or captured in the first two days of combat. The savagery shocked a young, divided nation.

Against this backdrop of the birth of modern warfare and the painful rebirth of the United States, New York Times bestselling novelist Ralph Peters has created a breathtaking narrative that surpasses the drama and intensity of his recent critically acclaimed novel, Cain at Gettysburg.

In Hell or Richmond, thirty days of ceaseless carnage are seen through the eyes of a compelling cast, from the Union’s Harvard-valedictorian “boy general,” Francis Channing Barlow, to the brawling “dirty boots” Rebel colonel, William C. Oates. From Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee to a simple laborer destined to win the Medal of Honor, Peters brings to life an enthralling array of leaders and simple soldiers from both North and South, fleshing out history with stunning, knowledgeable realism.

From the horrific collision of armies in the Wilderness, where neither side wanted to fight, to the shocking slaughter of the grand charge at Cold Harbor, this epic novel delivers a compelling, authentic, and suspenseful portrait of Civil War combat.

Commemorating the approaching 150th anniversary of this grim encounter between valiant Americans, Ralph Peters brings to bear the lessons of his own military career, his lifelong study of this war and the men who fought it, and his skills as a bestselling, prize-winning novelist to portray horrific battles and sublime heroism as no other author has done.

Ralph Peters, New York Times bestselling author of Cain at Gettysburg, is a retired U.S. Army officer, a controversial strategist and veteran of the intelligence world, a journalist who appears frequently in the broadcast media, and a lifelong traveler with experience in over seventy countries on six continents.

In addition to works under his own name, he is also the author, under the pen name Owen Parry, of a series of award-winning Civil War mysteries.
Peters has studied the Civil War since childhood. Combining painstaking research, years of walking those fields of battle, with insight gleaned from his own military career, Ralph Peters tells this great American tale in a masterful style.

CWL: Just received a copy and will start it this weekend. Grand expectations!!

New and Noteworthy Novel: My Name Is Mary Sutter and I am Civil War Nurse and Aspiring Doctor

My Name Is Mary Sutter: A Novel, Robin Oliveira, Viking Publishing, 384 pages, $26.95,

Well versed in the scholarship of Civil War era medicine and urban life, My Name Is Mary Sutter offers a well defined historical setting with characters that have struggles common to men and women in any era. Oliveira's novel is enjoyable for readers are looking for a medical setting, a romance, and a war story with civilians playing a major role.

There is no gratuitous battlefield violence but stark pictures of midwifery and battlefield surgery. At times the characters carry themselves forward but at other times the author gives them a shove into action. The hearts and hands of male doctors and female nurses are often in conflict in this 19th century setting. For this reader, the tour of Washington D.C. hospitals and a tragic fire were compelling episodes. My Name is Mary Sutter has both unique and stock characters described at times with a fine dramatic pace and at times with tedious slowness. Overall, My Name Is Mary Sutter repays the reader for the time invested. After all, Graham Greene [notable British author] described his own work as primarily 'entertainments.' My Name Is Mary Sutter achieves that.

Novel--- Nathan Bedford Forrest, Vulgar and Haunted

Devil's Dream: A Novel About Nathan Bedford Forrest, Madison Smartt Bell, Pantheon, 352 pages, $26.95.

Publishers Weekly:
After tackling the Haitian slave rebellion in a three-book series, Bell uses a smaller stage to create a captivating portrait of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. The novel plays effortlessly with time and structure, shuttling between 1845 and 1865 as Forrest marries Mary Ann Montgomery, becomes a guilt-stricken slave trader and, during the Civil War, is targeted for destruction by General Sherman.

Despite his aggressive actions on the battlefield, Forrest struggles with the demands of a complicated family: tensions between Mary Ann and Forrest's black mistress take a personal toll, while the rivalry between his sons Willy and Matthew (the illegitimate child of a long-ago affair with a slave) creates distraction. Meanwhile, his addiction to gambling and his attraction to his mistress send Forrest into a contemplation of the forces that control him.

Many of the war sequences are delivered via Henri, a Haitian wanderer who joins Forrest's troops and possesses the ability to communicate with the ghosts of those killed in battle. The unconventional structure and supernatural twist expand the narrative into an engaging examination of what it means to be free, a question that haunts Forrest through his life. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Washington Post:
Devil's Dream, Madison Smartt Bell's new novel, is a sort of biopic of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate cavalry general who was considered by his peers to be brutal, brilliant, profane, savage and virtually unstoppable in his ferocity. He is sometimes referred to as "the Wizard of the Saddle," and, at least in this work, he is one hell of a feisty redneck. He is also pompous, taciturn, burdened with a Tennessee twang that would make Minnie Pearl blush and, in the end, not very interesting.
The novel is told in fits and starts, jumping backward and forward in time. In the years before the Civil War, Forrest enjoys some prosperity as a slave trader and some domestic comfort in the company of his highborn, oddly matched wife, Mary Ann Montgomery, whom he met while pulling her carriage out of the mud. The years following the war are filled with one failure after another and, ultimately, destitution. These sudden jumps in time are disconcerting and seemingly without point so that we are left not always knowing exactly where we are.

In fact, if you know little about the Civil War, the book is a wilderness, and if you know a lot, you may be astonished at the nitpicking quality of Bell's scholarship, amazed at his warehouse of trivia, but I doubt you will be much moved or enlightened. As portrayed here, Forrest is relentlessly one-note and irritating. Even hillbilly coarseness loses its frisson after repeated usage. One unnamed character says he is "a man having no pretension to gentility -- a negro trader, a gambler . . . Forrest may be & no doubt is, the best Cav. officer in the West, but I object to a tyrannical, hotheaded vulgarian's commanding me."

Note the use of the ampersand. It is an indication of Bell's pretentious 19th-century style, which is a combination of cornpone and ever more complicated forms of swearing. When Forrest isn't talking dirty, he spouts pompous and not very original aphorisms about the nature of conflict: "War ain't got no goddamn rules," he says at one point. And soon after, "They say the world turns itself like a grindstone. Over and over. Don't never stop. Ye may whet yoreself agin it. Or let it grind ye down." I don't think Nathan Bedford Forrest, or anybody else for that matter, ever actually said those words.

The novel also has as one of its main characters a dead Haitian named Henri, who moves among the living as one of them, even though he presumably died at the ferocious battle of Chickamauga. His undead voodoo status gives him the ability to know the future. But his prescience serves no real purpose, either to the other characters or to the story. Henri claims to be the son of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture, about whom Bell published a biography in 2007.

Henri seems to be free of the redneck twang, speaking both English and French with a simplicity and an eloquence that are denied every other character except Forrest's wife and his son by a black slave, who speaks as though he had attended Choate and Harvard. I just wish that in the heat of battle, about which Bell writes with passion but an absolute lack of variety, I hadn't had to keep running to the Oxford English Dictionary to look up "widdershins," "osnaburg" and "barracoon," words that stop us dead in our tracks and make us feel like we're playing Scrabble with Yosemite Sam. It is also hard to imagine writing about Forrest -- whose relationships with blacks ran from the horribly brutal to the intensely sexual, even loving -- without mentioning his postwar involvement with the Ku Klux Klan, but Bell manages to do it. Devil's Dream which takes its name from an old fiddler's jig, is like a 300-page transcript of a loudmouth swearing while he shoots some guy in the face. It purports to be a portrait of a man who once played an important part in the most awful episode that has ever gripped this country.

As Bell tells us, by war's end one in every 10 able-bodied Union men was dead, one in every four in the South. Such a towering player in that cataclysmic tragedy as Forrest deserves better. William Tecumseh Sherman said, "War is hell." Madison Smartt Bell's new novel is no fun, either. ---Copyright 2010, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Book Cover Image and Text: Amazon.com
Middle Image: Baltimore Sun
Bottom Image: Son of the South

Forthcoming Novel---John Bell Hood After The War

A Separate Country, Robert Hicks, Grand Central/Hanchette Publishing, September 2009, 432 pages, $25.95.

Set in New Orleans in the years after the Civil War, A Separate Country is based on the incredible life of John Bell Hood, arguably one of the most controversial generals of the Confederate Army--and one of its most tragic figures. Robert E. Lee promoted him to major general after the Battle of Antietam. But the Civil War would mark him forever. At Gettysburg, he lost the use of his left arm. At the Battle of Chickamauga, his right leg was amputated. Starting fresh after the war, he married Anna Marie Hennen and fathered 11 children with her, including three sets of twins. But fate had other plans. Crippled by his war wounds and defeat, ravaged by financial misfortune, Hood had one last foe to battle: Yellow Fever. A Separate Country is the heartrending story of a decent and good man who struggled with his inability to admit his failures-and the story of those who taught him to love, and to be loved, and transformed him.

Robert Hicks has been active in the music industry in Nashville for twenty years as both a music publisher and artist manager. The driving force behind the perservation and restoration of the historic Carnton plantation in Tennessee, he stumbled upon the extraordinary role that Carrie McGavock played during and after the Battle of Franklin. He is the author of The Widow of the South. The author states that nearly 80 images of New Orleans created during the mid-nineteenth century offered him inspiration for the novel. In particular Hicks found compelling, the paintings of Edgar Degas, who worked in New Orleans during 1872 and 1873

Image and Text Source: Amazon.com and publisher's materials.

CWL---Novel: Two Brothers, One North, One South

Two Brothers, One North, One South, David Jones, Staghorn Press, 320pp., 2007, $24.95.

With a diligent handling of the primary sources and a creative approach, David Jones has crafted a fine story of Maryland brothers who are Civil War soldiers, one in blue the other in gray. With settings in Baltimore, Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C, and Virginia's battlefields, the author describes historic events from 1861 to 1865. The story is propelled forward by Walt Whitman who comforted soldiers at the Armory Square Hospital and where, in his post-war recollections, he states that he found two brothers in two different wards: Clifton Prentiss a brevet Union Colonel and William Prentiss, an enlisted Confederate soldier.

In Jones' novel, Whitman frequently visits the severly wounded William Prentiss and sits through his passing, and then gathers his two civilian brothers and his wounded brother, who was in the same hospital, together a few days after William's death. In the course of the story, John and Melville tell the civilian side of the war, Clifton the Union side of the war and Whitman the Confederate side of the war as it was told to him by William.

Jones faithfully pays attention to the war's social aspects. Friends of the Prentiss family, Hetty, Jenny, and Constance Cary are themselves divided by the war, their friendships and their loves during the war. At one pont on the veranda of Jefferson Davis' White House, the ladies discuss the role of women. The women past through joy and grief at weddings and funerals that held at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond. The Prentiss family's free black servant, Elijah, leaves his wife and children to become a sergeant in the 7th U.S. Colored Regiment and the war, as viewed by blacks, is discussed around the unit's campfires.

The Prentiss brothers are reunited during a Federal assault on the Army of Northern Virginia in the Petersburg trenches. Each is founded within yards of the other; here in the story Jones is not recklessly melodramatic. He has the soldiers act like soldiers and not as Victorian era, post-war sentimentalists. With a writing style that is direct and to the point, Jones handles the myriad of characters well. No one character sees everything nor understands everything. It is in the meeting of the four storytellers that the full story is revealed.

There are times though that some characters speak as encyclopedia entries, listing and detailing lives that are tangential to the main story. It is interesting that Union General Benjamin Butler attended the 1860 Democratic conventions (there were three) and voted for the nomination of Jefferson Davis over 50 times, but it doesn't contribute to the main characters development or background story. At times a reader may feel that these characters did not exist outside the story because the events they expierence are so much greater than themselves.

An advanced placement U.S. history high school student who loves the Civil War could enjoy this novel as well as most Civil War buffs. Two Brothers does not read like Killer Angels though. Sharra's style, which is similar to Hemingway's newspaperman's writing style, is unlike Jones' more extensive descriptions of individual actions and behaviors. The author's diligence in staying close to the sources and also carefully layering the stories reminds CWL of John Dos Passos' hallmark USA Trilogy: 1919, The Big Money, and the 42nd Parallel. Like Dos Passos, Jones has achieved writing an intriguing tale of the nation and several individuals' stories while allowing the individuals to tell them.

CWL---Civil War Novels

Novels with a Southern setting and occurring during the Civil War era take up several shelves in CWL's personal library.

The novels on the following shortlist are all are very good with Howard Bahr's three novels being CWL's personal favorites.

All the novels are in print in paperback, with the best prices for new and used copies being at Amazon.com


Confederates, Thomas Keneally
Thomas Kenally, Australian writer (Schinlder's List), uses his heritage to a come to grips with the rural South, slave holding, and honor. Campaigning soldiers are treated realistically, so, well, men will be men. The setting is the Shenandoah Valley and the Confederates are in the Stonewall Brigade. First published in 1980 by Harper Collins, the book has never been out of print and is currently published in paperback by the University of Georgia.

The Long Roll and Cease Firing by Mary Johnston, daughter of Confederate general Joseph Johnston. First published in 1911 and 1913, these two novels are in print by Johns Hopkins University Press. Johnston's heritage supplies her with remarkable details of the Confederate soldier's life; her work is realistic and not over wrought with magnolias. The setting is the Shenandoah Valley and the soldiers are in the Stonewall Brigade.

Jacob's Ladder by Donald McCaig. Imagine a collaboration between Shelby Foote and Margaret Mitchell and you get some idea of the historical irony and passion of this work. The story begins in 1934 with a WPA writer interviewing 90-year-old Marguerite Omohundru.In the course of the story a dark secret of a prominent Virginia family is revealed, pro-Union Virginians are discovered in this Confederate family's attic and not all Confederates are loyal, brave and true. First published in 1998 by W.W. Norton, it still in print with Penguin Press.

The Black Flower, The Year of Jubilo, and The Judas Field by Howard Bahr. The Black Flower, first published in 1997, won several literary awards and Bahr has followed every three years with two other wonderfully descriptive novels that are true to the subtleties of human nature and the horrors of fighting. These are not combat novels in which regiments move like game pieces. These stories are about men with guns fighting for the men beside them and their communities in northern Mississippi and western/middle Tennessee. The battles of Franklin and Nashville are featured as well as the rural communities located between the armies. The unabridged audio books are as pleasurable to listen to as the print novels are too read.

Novel: Locust Alley, Suspense in Wartime Richmond

Locust Alley, Don Evans, Wordsmith and Penn, 262 pp. 2000.

In this novel, all the parts are in place and the machine works pretty well. Wartime Richmond is captured in period detail: streets and building locations, interiors of hotels, prisons, and government offices, meals, clothes, smells, animals, etc. Characters are distinctive and memorable; the appearance of Lee and Stuart are a little distracting but they stay within character. The motives for crimes in question are well hidden but a bit outlandish; yet 'suspension of disbelief' is accepted because the background stories and the period detail works so well in the hands of a good writer. I bought this book for the historic location and was not disappointed. Also, as a mystery reader, I finished the last page thinking that I wouldn't mind seeing another with the same main character.

Novel: Stonewall's Gold, Entertaining for adults, young and old

Stonewall's Gold: A Novel of the Civil War, Robert J. Mrazek, St. Martin's Press, 240pp, 2000.

In the Shennandoah Valley in the final winter of the war, this novel plays both necessary storytelling chords: plausible mystery/adventure and accurracy in historical setting/period detail. The characters are believable within their contexts and take actions commensurate with their abilities. A reader may quibble with the young adult's adventures but their motivations are made clear and their journey is in the realm of the possible. I initially avoided this novel because of the title and Jackson does not, as I recollect, make any appearance in the book, though one of his Valley battles do. The front cover blurb about Cold Mountain is undeserved; I dismissed the comment when I saw the name of the who author made the comparison. But when McPherson and Krick gave it a nod, I bought it, enjoyed it passed it along to my children as well as my wife.

Novel: Faded Coat of Blue, Satisfying Period Detail

Faded Coat of Blue, William Parry, William Morrow Publishing, 338pp, 1999.

Probably one of the most historically accurate dectective novels to arrive in 1999/2000. 'Faded Coat of Blue' has well developed characters, acting consistently within their historical settings. The murder setting and initial investigation is quite good and well paced; but introduction of McClellan and the motivation of the killers is a bit outlandish. Though McClellan is well done his interference in the case a bit implausible. The investigation by Abel Jones is on the mark but the introduction of the hero to Lincoln at the end of the book is a bit of a stretch. The character of Abel Jones is very strong and a personal favorite of mine. The descriptions of Washington D.C. during wartime rings true, much like 'Locust Alley' does with wartime Richmond, VA.

Novel: Play for a Kingdom: A Difficult Task Well Performed

Play for a Kingdom, Thomas Dyja, Harcourt, 432 pp, 1997,

Can you u imagine the surprise? To find a novel that sets baseball in the context of the American Civil War? My first response: This is the legacy of Ken Burn's special on Baseball. Then after reading the dust jacket, a second response: What?! Union vs. Confederacy in nine innings between The Wilderness and Spotsylvania?! That's not possible!

I thought about it for a few weeks and I recalled a marvelous novel by Tim O'Brien, 'Going After Cacciato' which is set in the Viet Nam War, in which realism begets extended metaphor. So I gave 'Play for a Kingdom' a chance and I am glad I did. I allowed the author a certain degree of inexactitude in details; I weighted character develompent heavily and looked for a bigger story than soldier life in that great war. Thomas Dyja comes close to pulling off a great story; 'Play for a Kingdom' is not another 'Killer Angels' and it is not the sweat soaked realism of Shelby Foote's 'Shiloh.' Neither is it as wonderfully meticulous as Slotkin's 'The Crater;' it doesn't have the romance and adventure of Keneally's 'Confederates.' 'Play for a Kingdom' asks the reader to trust the characters and follow them.

The reader, familar with the American Civil War, would not expect much suspense near the end of the book; we know how it turns out. But these characters pull off some legitimate surprises in terms of dignity, humanity and authority. There are some very good scenes in 'Play for a Kingdom': the Union's march into the forest, the finding of the first baseball field, many of the battle scenes which are not panoramas, but close encounter and hand-to-hand. There are many good parts to Dyja's Civil War tale; there are enough good parts to recommend it to the casual fiction reader and the Civil War enthusiast.

Yes, I am aware of some mistakes (Company L) and some improbabilities (passing secrets, in Latin, between the skirmish lines, etc.) But its fiction damnit; I'll allow a certain degree of latitude for error and inaccurate presentation if the characters hold up and they do. So on a rainy or snowy weekend, uncork a liter of wine or a fifth of Southern Comfort, take your shoes off and be prepared not to get out of your easy chair for a weekend.