Roll Call to Destiny: The Soldier’s Eye View of Civil War Battles, Brent Nosworthy, Basic Books Inc., 336pp. $27.95. Release Date: March 2008.
Having sifted through mountains of firsthand accounts (many never previously published), Nosworthy pieces together his relevant findings to paint a crisp, clear picture of the Civil War frontlines, from the perspective of soldiers standing on them. Nosworthy’s subjects of interest here are infantry, artillery and cavalry. What was it like to stand behind a cannon and beat back an infantry charge? To take part in a chaotic, fast-paced cavalry raid? To confront the enemy face to face in thick, forest foliage? Nosworthy puts us in the middle of it all.
1858: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and the War they Failed to See by Bruce Chadwick, Sourcebooks, Incorporated,368pp. Pub. Date: April 2008
1858 is the prologue to the American Civil War, ending with the first shots fired on Fort Sumter in the spring of 1861. But it is less a survey of the era than a study of characters: James Buchanan as an odd-looking, maniacal disaster of a president, bent on conquering Paraguay, and John Brown as an imposing, biblical fury, determined to force America to confront the issue Buchanan was determined to ignore: slavery.
To listen to Chadwick discuss 1858 in a podcast, click here.
Washington: The Making of the American Capital, Amistad, Fergus Bordewich, $27.95, Pub. Date: May 06, 2008
Washington, D.C., is home to the most influential power brokers in the world. But how did we come to call D.C.—a place one contemporary observer called a mere swamp “producing nothing except myriads of toads and frogs (of enormous size),” a district that was strategically indefensible, captive to the politics of slavery, and a target of unbridled land speculation—our nation’s capital?
