Cannonball Read 15

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Civil War: A Narrative part III – Shelby Foote (1974)

Civil War: A Narrative part III by Shelby Foote

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The final book in the Shelby Foote narrative history series. We begin with an ill-thought Red River Texas campaign and end with the fallout and early history of Reconstruction. The title suggests we end at Appomattox Courthouse, but the book takes us well beyond there. This book still has all the same problems as the other two: lost cause bullshit at times, and a barely masked focus more on Jefferson Davis and Lee than on Lincoln. Grant is given full shrift here, but that might […]

Civil War: A Narrative vol 2 – Shelby Foote (1963)

Civil War: A Narrative vol 2 by Shelby Foote

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This is the meat. The first volume of the Shelby Foote trilogy focused pretty heavily on the politics of both Lincoln and Davis, the lead up to secession, the political make up of the country, and then the early battles. The early Southern successes at Bull Run and a few other places spoke to the enthusiasm gap of the two armies and the general competency of the Southern generals (although I do think this is more in doubt than otherwise supposed) and the unreadiness of […]

Mixed Bag Catch Up

Samarkand by Amin Maalouf

Shiloh by Shelby Foote

Blind Willow Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami

The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders

Save Me the Plums by Ruth Reichl

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Samarkand – 4/5 Stars This book immediately wonder how many novels have Omar Khayyam as a major or main characters. So in this way, being shown in careful detail and with loving care how and why Omar Khayyam is such an important person, cultural touchstone, and inspiration to such a huge part of the world is itself a gift that this novel offers. In addition to this, the sense of adventure in this novel that is created in the opening sections, and then carried over […]

Civil War: A Narrative Vol 1 – Shelby Foote (1954)

Civil War: A Narrative Vol 1 by Shelby Foote

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I guess it’s important to start with a list of what this book is and isn’t. It’s a narrative history of the US Civil War starting with the months prior to the war and moving through the first years of the war ending leading up to the release of the Emancipation Declaration. Because a lot of different things happen on a given day, there’s often multiple threads happening at the same time. It’s clearly based on primary documents (in much of what we get here) […]



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