ZACHARY TAYLOR: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (Biographies of U.S. Presidents)(kindle) by Hourly History

Published by Hourly History in 2025.

Hourly History specializes in histories and biographies that take a reader about an hour to read. It seems appropriate length for Zachary Taylor, the President with the third shortest time in office (just 16 months).

Taylor had a short and rather vague political career, but his military career was rather lengthy. He fought against the Shawnee under future President William Hentry Harrison on the frontier in the War of 1812 in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. 

He fought in the Black Hawk War and served in what would later become Minnesota and Wisconsin establishing and upgrading a series of forts. Later, he fought the Seminoles in Florida and served as the overall commander of American troops in the War. 

He is most famous for his service as one of the two main generals that led the invasion of Mexico in the Mexican War. Taylor crossed from Texas into Northern Mexico, fighting a series of battles, eventually winning the Battle of Buena Vista in February of 1847. That battle cemented his reputation in the American mind and catapulted him to the Presidency in 1848, despite never having voted before and not really having political opinions that alligned strongly with any political party at the time.

On a personal note - one thing Taylor did have going for him was a working knowledge of the what was the American frontier at the time, having served or lived in Texas, Arkansas, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Taylor was a slave holder but was against the expansion of slavery into the territories taken from Mexico. he knew from personal experience that the climate of those areas were completely incompatible with the plantation style of slavery he practiced at his plantation in Mississippi. 

As I already noted, Taylor took ill in the summer of 1850 and died, probably due to some sort of food poisoning or a form of cholera. This book doesn't look much into the "what ifs" of a longer Presidency for Taylor who was pro-slavery, strongly anti-seccession, and against the spread of slavery. Could he have been the political figure that worked out a great compromise that would have prevented the Civil War?

I rate this short e-book 4 stars out of 5. It's pretty good, considering how short it is. It can be found on Amazon.com here: ZACHARY TAYLOR: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END by Hourly History.

BRIONNE (audiobook) by Louis L'Amour

Originally published in 1968.
Audiobook published in 2016 by Random House Audio.
Read by Erik Singer.
Duration: 4 hours, 3 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis

Major James Brionne is a Virginian and a confidante of President Ulysses S. Grant. He helped pacify the region immediately after the war, including hanging a criminal named Allard.

The rest of the Allard family gang, bushwackers from the brutal Missouri theater of the Civil War, comes to Virginia to kill Brionne. They don't find Brionne, but they do find his wife and son at Brionne's plantation house. She takes out one of the Allard gang and then kills herself rather than be brutalized by them.

The Allard gang never finds Brionne's son, who had hidden himself in a little cave nearby.

Brionne decides he needs a massive change of scenery. He takes his son out West on a train, to a region he had explored as part of a military mission years earlier. He wants to find a place to start over with his son - Utah.

But, Briolle gets the feeling that something is not right about other passengers on the train...

My review

Parts of this book are truly exciting, such the attack on the Briolle mansion and the prairie fire. However, the idea that a family gang would travel halfway across the country for revenge and then travel most of the way back across the country in an attempt to get even seemed more than a little farfetched to me.

This story was not a bad story, but it just felt underdeveloped. If I had been L'Amour's editor way back in 1968, I would have told him to add another 2 hours worth of story to this 4 hour audiobook and flesh out more of the characters and their story arcs.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Brionne by Louis L'Amour. 

GRANT and LEE: VICTORIOUS AMERICAN and VANQUISHED VIRGINIAN by Edward H. Bonekemper III

Originally published in 2007.

Edward Bonekemper was a Civil War historian who came to the game kind of late in life - after he retired as an attorney for the federal government. 

However, he brings his skills as an attorney to this book. Imagine a regulatory attorney bringing all of his research to bear in order to win a case by simply  overwhelming the other side with binder after binder of evidence. In this case, the evidence is almost 200 pages of appendices, endnotes, and a bibliography. 

Bonekemper makes an argument in this book that Grant was undoubtedly the superior general when compared to Lee. In fact, he makes the arguments that Grant was the best general in the Civil War by far and Lee squandered his soldiers and his resources by going on the offense almost all of the time.

Being the best general does not mean Grant made no mistakes. It does not mean Grant was perfect. Bonekemper acknowledges mistakes by Grant in every campaign and gives Lee his due from time to time. 

Grant and Lee is really a dual history of these two generals, comparing their pre-war careers and then various stages of the war itself. For example, there is a chapter called May-July 1863 where the Vicksburg campaign is compared to the Chancellorsville/Gettysburg campaigns. 

A constant refrain is that Lee's biggest weakness is that he did not conserve his resources by falling back on the defensive. His argument is that Lee did not grasp the strategic fact that the North had to literally conquer the South while the South just had to stay alive until popular support collapsed in the North and the Europeans recognized the Confederate government. 

Instead of building a series of fortifications and compelling the Union forces to destroy themselves in useless attacks, Lee kept lashing out at Union forces and invaded the North twice only to lose both times and discourage European intervention after both failures.

Lee rarely lost more soldiers than the Union forces he fought, but he did not have a constant supply of new soldiers coming to the front - and the North did. Not only did the North replace soldiers at an amazing rate, they also managed to create all new armies when needed.

I found that I basically agreed with Bonekemper. Grant was the better general. Lee was too focused on Virginia and too eager to go on the offense. He did not save his resources and did not share the ones he had with other theaters of the war.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: GRANT and LEE: VICTORIOUS AMERICAN and VANQUISHED VIRGINIAN by Edward H. Bonekemper III.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN by James Daugherty

Originally Published in 1943.
The edition I read was a re-print published by Scholastic in 1966.

While not a terribly deep dive into Lincoln, Daugherty's (1889-1974) very readable small telling of his life has some of the most poetic prose I have ever read in a biography. 

There are a couple of factual errors in the book. One example that I noted is the assertion that Robert E. Lee replaced a wounded James Longstreet at the head of what became known as the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862. It was Joseph E. Johnston. That bears very little bearing on the story of Lincoln, even though I am sure he would rather Johnston would have been in the fighting rather than Longstreet. 

Here is an example of Daugherty's excellent prose (concerning Lincoln's early days as a lawyer): 

For the long, bony, sad man who was Billy's partner, the law office became a sanctuary and a refuge and a workshop, where through the years he slowly grew and learned and thought out the dark meanings and drifts of a troubled time. (page 55)

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: ABRAHAM LINCOLN by James Daugherty.

COMMEMORATIVE HISTORY of the GEORGE ROGERS CLARK BICENTENNIAL EXHIBIT by The Indiana State Museum

Published in 1976 by the Indiana State Museum Society.

1976 was the bicentennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence and if you were not alive in 1976, you have no idea how much went into that recognition. Every store had special decorations, every town had commemorations, everyone had red, white, and blue clothing and this went on for a long time - not just on the Fourth of July in 1976.

Part of this ongoing celebration took place in museums. The Indiana State Museum had a 3 year exhibit on Indiana's role in the American Revolution. People remember the original thirteen colonies and correctly note that Indiana was not one of those colonies. None of Indiana's immediate neighbors were, either.

But, the modern states of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois were on the front line of a different kind of war zone during the American Revolution. There were no great ships, no massed armies, and precious few soldiers even wearing an actual uniform - but there were pitched battles. Commemorative History of the George Rogers Clark Bicentennial Exhibit tells one of the most dramatic parts of that story.

During the fighting, White towns and settlements were wiped out. Indian villages were burned to the ground. much of the fighting was due to the encouragement and financing of the British government. The British Lt. Governor in Detroit was ordered to finance Indian attacks on white settlements in an effort to start a wide ranging guerrilla war in the Ohio River Valley to distract the American colonies from the main fight on the Atlantic coast.

This was not hard to do since a low grade fight had been going on for more than a decade. In order to keep up their side of the fight, the Indians needed supplies to feed their families and weapons and the British could easily supply those. The supplies were shipped out of Detroit to a network of smaller forts in Illinois and Indiana.

George Rogers Clark figured that the way to shut down this fight was to take those British forts. He did some preliminary reconnaissance and found that they were lightly defended, depending mostly on the vast spaces of friendly Indian territory between them to protect them. He secured funding from Virginia Governor Patrick Henry to buy powder and supplies for 350 frontiersmen to attack two forts in Illinois near the Mississippi and Vincennes on the Wabash.

Clark got together about half the amount of men he thought he would need and launched his attack in 1778. He was so successful that Lt. Governor Hamilton personally led an expedition to retake Vincennes. From there, he planned a reconquest of the Illinois forts.

Clark decided that a bold move had to be taken before Hamilton could bring in more supplies, equipment, and men. Clark led a 180 mile march across southern Illinois in February of 1779 in order to surprise Hamilton. 

If you do not live in the midwest, you may not understand how truly miserable it can be in February. It may not snow much, but it will be very wet and very miserable - and it was in 1779. It wasn't cold enough to freeze, but it rained for days on end and the rivers came out of their banks. Imagine hiking nonstop through a sloppy mudhole in 35 degree weather with no dry land to be found for days on end with no modern clothing to keep you warm.

At one point their drummer boy had to cross a flooded area by using his drum as a flotation device while he kicked with his feet. The expedition ate all of their food because the floods drove away most of the wild game.

There was a reason that Hamilton felt secure in Vincennes - no one was crazy enough to march through this mess!

Clark's 170 man force surprised Hamilton and convinced him they were a much larger force through some trickery. Hamilton to surrender on February 25, 1779.

Clark's surprise attack cemented America's claim to what is now called the Old Northwest and was one of the factors that helped convince France to support the Colonies in the Revolutionary War. Clark described it this way: "Great things have been effected by a few men well conducted."

This book has a lot of photographs of items displayed in the exhibit. It also includes the illustrations commissioned for them. I found the illustrations to be helpful and interesting, although a bit retro. The strength of this small book does not lie in the pictures, however. The text is the real strength of the book. The story of the entire campaign is told in well-paced bite-sized bits. 

I rate this history 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Commemorative History of the George Rogers Clark Bicentennial Exhibit.

A completely horrible scan of this small book can be found here: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED139709. The text is legible, and that's about all that can be said for it.

UNCOMMON VALOR: A STORY of RACE, PATRIOTISM, and GLORY in the FINAL BATTLES of the CIVIL WAR by Melvin Claxton and Mark Puls

Published in 2005 by John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

The Emancipation Proclamation was effective on January 1, 1863 - it included a provision that former slaves were to "be received into the armed service of the United States". The Union Army was a little slow to enact this provision, but by 1864 there were plenty of African American Union soldiers ready to go into the field. Uncommon Valor follows one of those units during the Petersburg campaign of 1864-1865.

This history primarily follows Christian Fleetwood, an African American Baltimore clerk. Fleetwood was born free, but living in a slave state was a constant reminder of his second class status. He had been considering joining the army for a long while, trying to determine if it would be a blow for freedom, or just choosing to support one oppressive regime in order to fight an even more oppressive regime. If that was the case, he might as well sit it out and let both sides clobber one another.

Sgt. Major Christian Fleetwood (1840-1914)
in the year 1900. 

After eight months of indecision, Fleetwood joined up. Using Fleetwood's autobiography, the authors tell the story of his training, his concerns about unequal pay, and his frustrations with inconsequential assignments. He was frustrated with their lack of action - he was sure it was because the higher-ups feared that they would not fight well. 

Eventually, though, they were given more and more assignments, including probes into the outer defenses of the capital of the Confederacy itself. 

In the summer of 1864, General Grant determined that he would push Lee's army continuously until he destroyed it or Lee surrendered. Lee had to defend Richmond at all costs, so it was starting to become a static line, almost like a World War I line of trenches. 

Grant ordered a quick attack on Petersburg, a large train junction town more than 20 miles south of Richmond. The theory was that if the Union took Petersburg and stop the trains bringing in supplies, it could quickly starve out Lee's army. 

Fleetwood wanted action - now he had it. He would serve in multiple engagements and eventually earn the Congressional Medal of Honor for his part in the Battle of New Market Heights.

All of these battles and maneuvers are pretty well-described, but maps, even poor ones, would have been helpful. I am always a fan of lots of maps in my Civil War histories - it just helps the reader understand things so much better.

Besides the maps, this book really needed a section that discussed what the main people mentioned in the book did after the war. It didn't need a lot of detail, but something would have been nice.

I rate this history 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: UNCOMMON VALOR: A STORY of RACE, PATRIOTISM, and GLORY in the FINAL BATTLES of the CIVIL WAR by Melvin Claxton and Mark Puls.

BEARSKIN: A NOVEL (audiobook) by James A. McLaughlin

Published in 2018 by HarperAudio.
Read by MacLeod Andrews.
Duration: 9 hours, 49 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Bearskin features Rice Moore as the caretaker of a piece of Appalachian Virginia wilderness for a foundation. His job includes is walking the property, cataloging what he finds, remodeling the house on the property, and keeping poachers out. 

He's also hiding. A few years back he was caught smuggling drugs across the border from Mexico and ended up serving time in a Mexican prison. In the prison, Moore killed a man who was highly connected to a Mexican cartel and now he has taken on an assumed identity in the middle of nowhere in Virginia. 

When someone starts killing bears on the foundation property just to harvest organs to sell in Asia, Rice knows that he has to do something, even if it risks blowing his cover...

My Review:

This book sounds interesting and exciting. I found it underwhelming in so many ways. 

The book started out with tons of description. That's not unusual, especially early on. The book continued that way every time Moore entered a new scene - even if he has been in that setting a dozen times already. It just bogged things down to describe the same things over and over again in hyper-detail.

There were so many threads of a plot that started and were never acted upon. I understand that there are red herrings in stories, but these felt more like the author was exploring some ideas and then just walked away from them.  I don't want to provide spoilers, but at least half of the book is dedicated to plot lines that have no resolution.

The ending was just that - an ending. Three was no resolution to the main plot points. The book just ended with so many unresolved threads. A lot like real life, but not very satisfying in a novel. It's like the author just got tired of the whole thing and said, "Screw it!" and sent the manuscript off to the publisher. 

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Bearskin: A Novel by James McLaughlin.

THE KINGDOM, the POWER, and THE GLORY: AMERICAN EVANGELICALS in an AGE of EXTREMISM (audiobook) by Tim Alberta

Published by HarperAudio in December of 2023.
Read by the author, Tim Alberta.
Duration: 18 hours, 16 minutes.
Unabridged.

Tim Alberta is a writer for The Atlantic and also an Evangelical. He grew up in the faith, but is very troubled by the tendency towards Christian Nationalism. He was inspired to write this book after an incident at his father's funeral at the church he grew up in. 

Alberta embarked on a cross-country exploration of the intersection of Evangelicals and politics at Christian Nationalism - and how this combination is changing Evangelicals and they way they are perceived.

Alberta does not come at this as an outsider. As I already noted, he grew up in the church - and still belongs to a church. To me, this is important. I read another book with a similar theme (The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism) that just didn't hit the right tone and answer the right questions because the author was coming from the outside. She didn't know the ins and outs and didn't truly understand the people she was writing about.

Russell Moore recently wrote a book (Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America) that addresses problems among American Evangelicals from the inside, but it's not really a book about politics. The closest book to Alberta's is the excellent Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. The two books don't really cover the same territory, but they certainly run in parallel lines and they do not present a pretty picture of contemporary Christianity.

The author, Tim Alberta

Alberta looks at the struggles of his home church, Liberty University and its rise to prominence by promoting politics instead of Christianity, Brian Zahnd's church's struggle when he went out of his way to reject Christian Nationalism, the Southern Baptist Convention's struggles with sexual abuse charges and, of course, the ever-present influence of Trump and Trumpism.

I found this book to be a fascinating look into this dangerous mix of Christianity and politics. I blasted through this 18 hour audiobook in just a few days and I wish it was twice as long.

I highly recommend this book.

5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THE KINGDOM, the POWER, and THE GLORY: AMERICAN EVANGELICALS in an AGE of EXTREMISM by Tim Alberta.

McCLELLAN and FAILURE: A STUDY of CIVIL WAR FEAR, INCOMPETENCE and WORSE by Edward H. Bonekemper, III

 

Originally published in 2007.
Published in 2010 by McFarland and Company, Inc.

If you are a student of the Civil War, George B. McClellan is a conundrum at best.

After the Frist Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) in July of 1861, the poorly trained Union Army had fled back to Washington, D.C. They were basically a semi-organized mob awaiting someone to take the lead.

Lincoln looked around and felt that the leadership team that lost at Bull Run was not going to provide a credible lead general so he looked around the Eastern Theater for anyone else with the aura of success.

George B. McClellan had a bit of success in Western Virginia and wrote a lot of reports that made him seem an even better General than he was so Lincoln looked to him to retrain and refit the Army of the Potomac (the main Union Army in the East.)

Statue of McClellan outside of the
city hall in Philadelphia. It was 
dedicated in 1894.  I have no idea
why they felt he deserved this honor.

When I have talked with students about McClellan, I like to compare him to a nervous guy who restores cars. He finds a junker with lots of potential, restores it, and then is afraid to take it out and drive it (the entire purpose of a car) because it might get wrecked again. His men loved him for that - they didn't want to go out and fight and die in a pointless battle. But it was up to McClellan to find a way to take the fight to the enemy and the purpose of an army is to fight, to kill people and blow up things, not to drill and drill and drill while the enemy sits just a few miles away in the middle of the war. 

McClellan took over 8 months to rebuild the army before he took it out to fight. It was the largest army of the entire Civil War and was magnificently well-supplied.  His predecessor had only been in charge of the same army for about 6 weeks when he took to the field. 

Bonekemper documents McClellan's excuses, his time wasted on political lobbying, writing political advice to the President, and his constant inflation of the size of Confederate armies. Bonekemper also makes a strong case that McClellan didn't want to push too hard against the Confederacy because he was pro-slavery and that he let another Union Army be defeated at the Second Battle of Bull Run in August of 1862 out of jealousy.

Once again - the most important general in the U.S. Army refused to engage the enemy because he sympathized with their war aims and he let an entire Union army be defeated when he was ordered to provide assistance because he was angry that the other army had an independent command.

Did McClellan make up for that by being a brilliant field general? No. His own men (generals and even privates) noted that he led from far behind the lines and rarely directed the men once the fighting started.

His last battle of any size was Antietam. Have you ever seen a karate movie where the group of bad guys engage the good guy by taking turns so he can defeat them all one at a time? That's how McClellan engaged with Robert E. Lee's much smaller Army of Norther Virginia - one brigade at a time and Lee basically fought them all to a draw - one brigade at a time.

In a modern army, McClellan may have had found a place dealing with logistics and training - procuring supplies and recruiting soldiers, training them and sending them to the front. But, that was not how things worked in the Civil War.

Of course, Bonekemper lays all of this in detail with the original sources and quotes. A lot of historians give McClellan a pass of sorts. To be honest, I don't know why. This book makes it clear that they shouldn't - he was among the worst of the Union generals.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: McCLELLAN and FAILURE: A STUDY of CIVIL WAR FEAR, INCOMPETENCE and WORSE by Edward H. Bonekemper, III.

STORM OVER the LAND: A PROFILE of the CIVIL WAR by Carl Sandburg

 

Originally published in 1942 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.

I read a 2009 re-print published by Konecky and Konecky.

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

In 1940, the famed poet, journalist and author Carl Sandburg won a Pulitzer Prize for his four volume biography Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (published in 1939.)

In 1942, his publishers came to him and asked him to re-work the biography into a history of the Civil War in response to America's recent entry into World War II. 

The result is a pretty solid history of the Civil War from basically the Union point of view. 

Carl Sandburg is best known as a poet and that shines though with some of his prose. From time to time, he comes up with a different and interesting way of telling the story of the war. 

The most obvious weakness to this history is the story of African-Americans in the war - the free, the enslaved, the recently freed, the soldiers and others. He mentions them, but does not look at them very hard. To be fair to Sandburg, this book was published 81 years ago and he covered the topic about as well as any mainstream history would have.

I rate this history 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: STORM OVER the LAND: A PROFILE of the CIVIL WAR by Carl Sandburg.

THE LAST SAXON KING: A JUMP in TIME NOVEL, BOOK ONE (audiobook) by Andrew Varga

 

Published by Imbrifex Books in March of 2023.
Read by Mark Sanderlin.
Duration: 8 hours, 49 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Dan Renfrew is a self-described homeschooled nerd and his life has been turned upside down. He watched his father get stabbed by a stranger who invaded their house and he has no idea if he is even alive. 

Now, thanks to a magical device, Dan is in Medieval England and caught up in an army on the move. He learns that his father is a "time jumper" - men tasked to fix glitches in time and make sure the timeline plays out the way it is supposed to.

The year is 1066 - just a few days before King Harold Godwinson meets and defeats one of the last Viking invasions of England at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Even more importantly, King Harold will be forced to meet the forces of William, the Duke of Normandy in just a few days and will be defeated at the Battle of Hastings.

But, something is wrong and even though Dan has almost no idea what to do, he has to make sure that history isn't manipulated by sinister forces that can also travel in time...

My review:

Harold Godwinson from the Bayeux Tapestry

I liked this book quite a bit. The history is gritty and full of gore thanks to Dan being plunked in the middle of (arguably) the two most important battles of the  English medieval era. Limbs get hacked off, blood sprays in people's faces and intestines spill out onto the ground. None of this glorified in the book - in fact, Dan is horrified over and over again at the brutality of it all. 

The addition of the evil "time jumpers" adds a level of danger and intensity to the experience, especially when the reader finds out more about them in the last part of the book. And, it turns out that Dan is not the only good "time jumper" back in 1066, which lets the reader learn more about what is going on bit by bit as Dan learns.

The epilogue at the end of the story fleshes out the history that Dan just went through a bit more to give the reader some additional context. 

Since this book is the start of a series, the most important questions is "Would you read book 2 in the series?"

The answer is yes, I think this series looks like it could be quite strong. 

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE LAST SAXON KING: A JUMP in TIME NOVEL, BOOK ONE by Andrew Varga.

DEEP SLEEP (Devin Gray Book 1) (audiobook) by Steven Konkoly

 

Published in February of 2022 by Brilliance Audio.
Read by Seth Podowitz.
Duration: 10 hours, 18 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Devin Gray is a retired military operator working for a high-end private security contractor. He is on assignment that goes a little sideways in the D.C. metro area and he is sent away to let things cool off.

While packing up to go, he is contacted about his mother. She is estranged from the rest of the family because she is always off researching a conspiracy theory, which is kind of ironic because she works in a government intelligence agency that looks for conspiracies. She is dead after some short of shoot out in Tennessee and everyone is keeping it quiet.

Gray discovers a note from his mother to him with instructions. It turns out to lead to her evidence that proves the conspiracy and he finds it to be plausible enough to reach out to others. Once they start digging, they find more than it is worse than they ever imagined...

My review: 

I was excited about this book. I really enjoyed the first two book of an his unfinished Rogue State series (link to review of the first book here: Fractured State.) That series is full of non-stop and, frankly, ridiculous action - but it is fun and demands your attention.

This book had a complicated conspiracy that you know in your head is simply too complicated to work, but your gut says, "Oh crap! This could really happen!" I had no problem with the premise of the book.

I had problems with the pacing of the book and the proliferation of characters. Konkoly decided to make characters out of some of the bad guys in an effort to confuse the reader at first. It worked and it was kind of a good choice except that he keeps on adding character after character after character and this audiobook reader got confused as to who exactly was who. I just decided to ignore character names and label them "good guy" and "bad guy" in my head. That totally defeated the purpose of creating a named character with lines and a personality, but I couldn't keep up. When one of them goes down in a gun fight, I didn't care a whole lot - I just kept a little running tally in my head to see if any of the good guys were going to survive.

For an action story, this book has an awful lot of sitting around and talking. Sitting around and talking in a restaurant, in a car, in a secret hideout, in another car, in an SUV, in a rented house, in another SUV, in a hotel, in a mansion, in a helicopter, in another hotel.

So many of these conversations were repeats of other conversations. The conspiracy is discovered and then explained to another person. That person explains it to a small group. That group explains and discusses with another group and by that point I felt like I could have stepped in and gave the explanation myself.

So, to sum up - too many characters makes the story hard to follow. Too much repeat conversations stretched the story out for no real reason.

On a pet peeve note: Konkoly is from Indianapolis and lives in Indianapolis. So do I. I was pleased to see part of the book took place in an Indianapolis suburb that he described perfectly (Carmel.) However, the audiobook reader mispronounced it. It is pronounced the way many people mispronounce the candy "caramel." He pronounced it like the California city "Carmel by the Sea." This was not important to the story and people who do not live in Indiana would have no idea but considering that the author lives here...

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. I will not be moving on to book two in this series. This book can be found on Amazon.com here:  DEEP SLEEP (Devin Gray Book 1) (audiobook) by Steven Konkoly.

THE PRESIDENTS' WAR: SIX AMERICAN PRESIDENTS and the CIVIL WAR THAT DIVIDED THEM by Chris DeRose

 

Published in 2014 by Lyons Press.

This is my 142nd Civil War-related review. When I heard about this book, I found myself wondering how no one else thought to write this book before.

Former presidents have their own political power and impact current events. Nowadays, you can see this with Jimmy Carter's modeling of volunteerism and his attempts to be a peace mediator in the 1980s and 1990s, Bill Clinton's maneuvering to remain relevant, George W. Bush's refusal to endorse or approve of anything done by Donald Trump, the calls that the Biden Administration is really just the third Obama Administration and, obviously, the 45th President's refusal to admit he lost the 2020 election.

DeRose starts with a rundown of the political careers of each politician involved: John Tyler, Martin Van Buren, James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and Abraham Lincoln. 

Then, he discusses how they reacted to Lincoln's candidacy, the break up of the Democrat Party in 1860, Lincoln's election and the Secession Crisis. 

John Tyler, the 10th President (1790-1862)

To a man, they were all critical of Lincoln's handling of the Secession Crisis. John Tyler surprised me, though. Tyler was from Virginia and owned slaves and had a working slave labor plantation so he was never going to be supportive of Lincoln who was philosophically against slavery but only against expanded it into new territories and/or states as a matter of policy. 

Tyler left the presidency politically unpopular and seemed to have relished in the attention he received during the Secession Crisis. Suddenly, people were seeking his opinion on the most important issue of his lifetime. Tyler came to D.C. and led a peace conference hosted by Virginia in the Willard Hotel. 

Nothing came from the conference. Tyler operated as a proxy for the Confederacy, in my opinion, and his proposals were ridiculous. Tyler was elected to the Confederate Conference and served in the Provisional Confederate Congress until his death. He remains the only President that ever served in a government at war with the United States. 

I was amused by the constant thread of James Buchanan's post-presidency - he was going to write a book to explain his actions during the Secession Crisis. He claimed over and over again that he would be vindicated once everyone knew all of the facts and ... he never was. It was almost like a running gag throughout the book. Even today, he is universally acknowledged to be the one of the worst presidents of all of the presidents. 

The book continues on with reactions from each of the surviving presidents to the events of the war such as Antietam, the Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg, the fall of Atlanta, Lee's surrender and, finally, the assassination of Lincoln. 

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE PRESIDENTS' WAR: SIX AMERICAN PRESIDENTS and the CIVIL WAR THAT DIVIDED THEM by Chris DeRose.

OUR FIRST CIVIL WAR: PATRIOTS and LOYALISTS in the AMERICAN REVOLUTION (audiobook) by H.W. Brand

 

Published by Random House Audio in November of 2021.
Read by Steve Hendrickson.
Duration: 16 hours, 31 minutes.
Unabridged.

When I read the title of this audiobook, OUR FIRST CIVIL WAR: PATRIOTS and LOYALISTS in the AMERICAN REVOLUTION, I was sure that I was going to be listening to an in-depth look at how the population of the young United States dealt with its neighbors and family that disagreed about the question of independence. The most famous example is Benjamin Franklin and his son William Franklin. William Franklin was the last royal governor of New Jersey and their relationship never recovered from the shock of the Revolutionary War. 

This book deals with more of these issues than most histories of the Revolutionary War era, but that is not particularly hard to do - most of them mention the Franklin family situation and use it as a stand-in for all families. But, it does not go in-depth into this concept of Loyalists vs. Patriots. For example, I learned more about this topic from this Wikipedia page than I did from this book. I should not learn more about the topic from 11 pages of text on a Wikipedia page then I did in a 16+ hour audiobook.

So what is this book, if not an in-depth study of how the American Revolution fractured families, cities and populations?

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) and William Franklin (1730-1813)

It's a very good political history of the Revolutionary Era that focuses especially on Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and, to a lesser extent, John Adams. The text hums right along and it was a very good listen. This is one of the few Revolutionary War histories that I've read that actually discusses the dilemma that slaves faced in the war and the offer of freedom that the British military offered for males slaves that were willing to leave their families and volunteer. He looked at the stories of two slaves - one who fought for the British and one who ending up fighting for both sides.

All of that being said, I am going to deduct one point from what would have been a 5 star review. This book does not adequately address what the title promises.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: OUR FIRST CIVIL WAR: PATRIOTS and LOYALISTS in the AMERICAN REVOLUTION (audiobook) by H.W. Brand.

HOW the WORD IS PASSED: A RECKONING with the HISTORY of SLAVERY ACROSS AMERICA (audiobook) by Clint Smith

 

Published by Little, Brown and Company.
Read by the author, Clint Smith.
Duration: 10 hours, 6 minutes.
Unabridged.

Clint Smith decided to explore several key historical sites that have ties to American slavery and how the consequences of American slavery has echoed down throughout American history.

He is looking for constant threads in American history from the perspective of African Americans. He visits Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, New Orleans, Angola Prison, a plantation in Louisiana that emphasizes the lives of the majority of the people that lived and worked there (the slaves and the Jim Crow era labor that was trapped there), a Confederate grave yard, the place were Juneteenth happened in Texas, New York City (a slave stronghold in the North for a surprisingly long time) and finally a fortress used as a slave market in Africa.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and Sally Hemings (c. 1773-1835)

This is a difficult book in many ways. Smith intentionally digs into difficult questions and is an excellent interviewer. His first location is Monticello and his interviews and observations are just about perfect. He explores the contradictions that should fill every discussion of Jefferson. There is a powerful discussion about Sally Hemings, how slavery has been dealt with on the Monticello tours and how the refusal to acknowledge this complicated past reflects the history we want to hear rather than the history that actually happened.

Monticello provided a strong start and the rest of the book was not quite as strong but still provided plenty to think about. This is a topic that America seems to want to avoid at all costs. This is evidenced by all of the furor over the 1619 Project and the abject fear that someone might be teaching something similar to Critical Race Theory in America somewhere. 

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: HOW the WORD IS PASSED: A RECKONING with the HISTORY of SLAVERY ACROSS AMERICA (audiobook) by Clint Smith.

This book would go well with these books that I have read in the last year: 

ROBERT E. LEE and ME: A SOUTHERNER'S RECKONING with the MYTH of the LOST CAUSE by Ty Seidule and DOWN ALONG with THAT DEVIL'S BONES: A RECKONING with MONUMENTS, MEMORY, and the LEGACY of WHITE SUPREMACY by Connor Towne O'Neill.

A VOYAGE LONG and STRANGE: REDISCOVERING the NEW WORLD (audiobook) by Tony Horwitz

 

Published in 2008 by Random House Audio.
Read by John H. Mayer.
Duration: 17 hours, 16 minutes.
Unabridged.

In A Voyage Long and Strange Tony Horwitz set out to fill in a big gap in his understanding of American history. He vaguely knew that the Vikings arrived in the New World and did something or other and he knew about Columbus' voyage in 1492 and he knew about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock and the First Thanksgiving in 1621, but what happened in between? Also, what about the people that were already here?

Horwitz decided to find out what he didn't know and this book is a combined travelogue and history lesson. He starts with the small failed Viking settlement in Newfoundland, Canada, moves on to the Dominican Republic to learn about Columbus and comes to the United States to look at the first Spanish explorers and settlements in New Mexico and Florida. He also looks at the epic and eventually tragic expeditions of exploration that the Spanish sent out. Finally, he turns toward the early English attempts to explore and build colonies. 

A reconstruction of what a Viking longhouse in
Newfoundland may have looked like.

Typically, Horwitz starts out a section of his book by looking at the geographical area he is visiting as it is nowadays. He finds a variety of different locals to interview and lets them supplement the history he presents. Many times those local experts get very philosophical about how the past has influenced their homes.

Horwitz's roundabout way of discussing the history is almost always interesting - usually extremely interesting. However, the section on the Dominican Republic and a museum he visited there was too long and too repetitive. But, he bounces back from that and does a splendid job from that point forward.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: 

A VOYAGE LONG and STRANGE: REDISCOVERING the NEW WORLD by Tony Horwitz.

CONFEDERATE GENERALS of the CIVIL WAR (Collective Biographies series) by Carl R. Green and William R. Sanford

 

Published in 1998 by Enslow Publishers, Inc.

Part of a series of 8 books, Confederate Generals of the Civil War was intended to be a classroom or school media center supplement for students to use as a resource. It is not a large book - 112 pages including a glossary, some charts comparing the the Union and the Confederacy, 2 maps and a timeline of the Civil War.

There are 10 biographies, arranged in alphabetical order. Each biography is 8-9 pages, including a photograph of the general and a related picture (photo of a battlefield, drawing of a battle scene, etc.). 

The biographies themselves are pretty neutral, although it does take some mild stands on a few controversial items. It states in a matter of fact manner that Robert E. Lee was anti-slavery (It was definitely more complicated than that). It puts a lot of blame for Pickett's Charge on Longstreet, not on Lee. And, it gets sappily sentimental in the last paragraph of Pickett's biography. I would rate it as very mildly slanted towards the old "Lost Cause" theory of the war (the three areas I mentioned are all at the heart of the theory), but not fatally so. 

The featured generals are:

Nathan Bedford Forrest;

William Joseph Hardee;

A.P. Hill;

John Bell Hood;

"Stonewall" Jackson;

Confederate General George Pickett
(1825-1875)

Joseph Johnston;

Robert E. Lee;

James Longstreet;

George Pickett;
J.E.B. Stuart

Other books in the series include a collection of biographies of Union Generals, "Women in America's Wars" and "American Heroes of Exploration and Flight".

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. The biographies are just not all that interesting out of context. This book can be found on Amazon.com here:CONFEDERATE GENERALS of the CIVIL WAR (Collective Biographies series) by Carl R. Green and William R. Sanford.

ROBERT E. LEE and ME: A SOUTHERNER'S RECKONING with the MYTH of the LOST CAUSE by Ty Seidule

 

Published in 2021 by Macmillan Audio.

Read by the author, Ty Seidule.

Duration: 10 Hours, 45 minutes.
Unabridged

I have been studying the Civil War since I was in college 35+ years ago. My thoughts on Robert E. Lee have evolved over the years. I used to be a lightweight proponent of the Lost Cause theory of the Civil War. I never was comfortable with the concept of slaves being content with slavery, but I certainly believed that the Southern officers were generally a noble and heroic lot when compared to the Union officers and the most noble and heroic officer of them all was Robert E. Lee. 

My thoughts the war and Lee have changed as I have read more and gotten older and perhaps a bit wiser. This book will be the 131st book I have reviewed that has been tagged "Civil War" and the 42nd book tagged "Robert E. Lee". I have widened my readings to include more of the Antebellum Period and more of the Reconstruction Era. Reading the Declarations of Causes of Seceding States (documents designed to be much like the United States' Declaration of Independence in 1776) gave me additional insight. I like to think I have picked up a more informed perspective.

Ty Seidule

This mirrors the shift in perspective that the author of Robert E. Lee and Me went through, although his was certainly more dramatic. He grew up in the South and Robert E. Lee was his hero. It was only when he was a history professor at West Point that he started to think about Robert E. Lee and what he actually did.

Seidule doesn't come at this topic as an outsider. He is a retired Brigadier General who served with the 82nd Airborne and as a member of the 81st Armor Regiment. He is a career Army man, something he notes over and over again. But, being a career Army man doesn't mean that he supports everything the Army has ever done - it means that he wants to support what the Army does right and fix what it does wrong and honoring Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee is certainly wrong.

Seidule notes that moves to honor Confederate leaders tended to follow Civil Rights advances, as a pushback against them. Despite being a former head of West Point, Lee was practically purged from the facility after the Civil War. But, when black students started being appointed to West Point, Southerners began to push for naming things after Robert E. Lee, mirroring a phenomenon in the larger American culture. 

But, Seidule goes farther and looks at Robert E. Lee as an officer of the U.S. Army. He notes that with every promotion, an officer takes an oath. Lee took this oath many times, including a little more than 3 weeks before the resigned to join the Confederacy (he was promoted to colonel on March 28 and resigned on April 20). Seidule has no tolerance for oathbreaking. He now finds it ironic that he proudly took his first oath at Washington and Lee University next to a memorial to Robert E. Lee.

There is a frequently made argument that Lee resigned to defend his state and that most officers did. Seidule dug through the Army records and discovered there were fifteen colonels from states that seceded in the U.S. Army before the Civil War (remember - the Army was much, much smaller back then). Twelve of the fifteen remained with the Union. Of those fifteen colonels, eight were from Virginia. Only one colonel from Virginia resigned to join the Confederacy - Robert E. Lee. 

Seidule's book looks at the entire "Lost Cause of the Confederacy" phenomenon that excused the Confederacy from any wrong-doing, downplays the central role of slavery in the conflict and similarly downplays the evils of slavery itself.

I leave this review with a comment for Union General George H. Thomas, a Virginian who stayed with the Union, provided an early Union victory, saved the Union Army from certain destruction at Chickamagua, participated in capture of Atlanta and literally destroyed a Confederate Army at Franklin, Tennessee:

[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed. This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property—justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people—was not exacted from them.

— George Henry Thomas, November 1868

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. Highly Recommended. 

It can be found on Amazon.com here: ROBERT E. LEE and ME: A SOUTHERNER'S RECKONING with the MYTH of the LOST CAUSE by Ty Seidule.