Abraham Lincoln: The Enigmatic President

  Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln  by Edward Achorn “Every drop of blood” is a melancholy line from Lincoln’s second inaugural address. It is an appropriate title for Achorn's book. What should have been a glorious occasion was marred by the ongoing Civil War. As the subtitle states, the book focuses on Lincoln’s second inaugural and is filled with contemporary perspectives and quotations. Supposedly, Every Drop of Blood covers twenty-four hours around the inauguration, but Achorn cheats a bit, occasionally using flashbacks to put the narration in perspective. As I mentioned in previous book reviews, I like single-issue books on the Civil War era. So much happened that any attempt to cover the entire time period must be a summary, leaving much detail on the cutting room floor. Achorn fulfills the mission of single-issue history, providing trivia, facts, and insights for enthusiasts. This is a must-read for those who seek to unders...

  The story of the greatest rivalry in American History Read all about it! Read the full review here .

Writing my previous post on Fiction’s Role in History, I ran across an Inside Higher Ed article titled Why Historical Fiction Matters . The author, Steven Mintz, lost me in the third paragraph when he wrote, The fact that many of the genre’s best-known practitioners—like Howard Fast, James Michener, Margaret Mitchell, Leon Uris, Gore Vidal and Herman Wouk—wrote for a popular audience didn’t help the classification’s reputation. The sentence displayed academic elitism, as if anything popular was common and base. I'll bet Mr. Mintz likes Shakespeare without realizing that he was the equivalent of a primetime television scriptwriter. He wrote plays that would draw an audience, the bigger the better. Shakespeare had about forty people's livelihoods in his ink-stained hands. If he wrote a flop, his cast and crew didn't eat. The comment reminded me of Raymond Chandler's quote above. Read all about it!

History is something you don’t mess with. Or, at least, you shouldn’t. Something happened. Whatever it was, it was in the past and cannot be changed. People living in the present need to know what happened in the past, so historians document and teach history. If what a person communicates did not happen as told, then it is fiction. If historic events happened precisely as told, but the narrator depicts undisclosed motives, thoughts, or words of the participants, then it remains fiction. History is an attributed description of what happened; fiction is storytelling. Storytelling is powerful. Philip Pullman said, “Thou shall not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.” War and Peace , Uncle Tom's Cabin , Gone with the Wind , Animal Farm , Les Misérables , The Pillars of the Earth and many more attest to Pullman’s wisdom. Presenting history as a story leaves an enduring impression on the reader's mind. It should be the correct impression. This is why the historic...

Characterization is a crucial element of fiction. Novelists must know the people they write about, or they may behave in ways contradictory to their personality. Historians don’t generally try to get inside a subject’s head, while a novelist thrives in invading others’ privacy. A novelist makes personality and motivations central to the story.  Before I write the first word of a historical novel, I read several biographies of the major characters to get a perspective on their distinctiveness. I read positive and negative perspectives to get a grasp of who these people were. Where do you find these personal descriptions of historical figures? First, I go to history books. Historians do not normally try to portray their subject’s thoughts and feelings, but they don’t ignore personality. Good ones dutifully quote contemporary descriptions of the subject to satisfy documentation requirements. The second place I go to is to the historical figures’ own writing. A person’s writing always ...

The Demon of Unrest  A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson I generally enjoy single-issue Civil War books but started this one prepared to dislike it. I feared the subtitle disguised a dry dissertation with hyperbolic “H” words. Then in the foreword, Larson equates January 6 to the Civil War. That was a bit overwrought. I settled into the book looking forward to writing an oh-so-clever, nasty review. Not to be. The book was a good example of single-issue books on the Civil War. The Demon of Unrest is about the start of the war. There are so many Civil War-era books that to write something fresh, it is almost necessary to focus on some isolated feature. There have been Civil War books on a particular speech, an issue, technology, a battle, or a single event. Biographies and general history books must omit much detail and interesting tidbits. It was a big war with lots of players. Going deep into a subject is the bailiwick of these sin...

While a work of deftly crafted fiction, Maelstrom is based on historical events and personalities and brings the reader into the center of the what would become the American Civil War. As a novelist, James Best has an extraordinary and genuine flair for the kind of character and narrative driven storytelling style that is ideal for an historical novel. A riveting read from start to finish, Maelstrom is unreservedly recommended for the personal reading lists of readers with an interest in the Civil War era and the roles played by Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, as well as community library Historical Fiction collections. Jim Cox Midwest Book Review