Our friend and neighbor from the Cape has done it again!
“Inside The List” by Gregory Cowles in Sunday NY Times Book Review:
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Blue and Gray and Read All Over: The Civil War ended almost a century and a half ago. But it’s still going strong on the best-seller lists — in 2014 alone, the conflict has appeared on the graphic books list, the hardcover fiction list, the children’s picture books list and the e-books nonfiction list. (One digital best seller, Tim Rowland’s “Strange and Obscure Stories of the Civil War,” features two photo illustrations on the cover: one of a bearded lady with the caption “Sarah Emma Edmonds was a complicated girl,” the other of a battle scene with the caption “Unleashing a maelstrom of fiery hell at a pheasant.” I believe I am warming to e-books.) The latest title to join this march is S. C. Gwynne’s “Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson,” new on the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 10. Gwynne — who spent more than a year on the paperback list with his previous book, “Empire of the Summer Moon,” about the Comanche chief Quanah Parker — told The Austin American-Statesman he was especially interested in how Thomas Jackson went, in 14 months, from being an eccentric and unsuccessful college professor to leading the Rebel forces in the Shenandoah Valley campaign. “What fascinates me about Jackson is the idea of transformation,” he said. “He became the most famous man of the war.” Gwynne knows something about personal transformation. In the early 1980s he was working as a banker and dreaming of a writing career when his wife went on the game show “Tic-Tac-Dough” and won $60,000. “That money lasted for years,” he told The American-Statesman. “So I quit banking.” |
Lauren Huyett Interiors 