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Conspiracy on the Western Front: From a Dark Horizon

23 Monday May 2022

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Review: From a Dark Horizon, by Luke McCallin
Berkley, 2021. 505 pp. $28

As summer parches the despoiled earth of northwestern France in 1918, young Lieutenant Gregor Reinhardt, Seventeenth Prussian Fusiliers, has fought both east and west. A blooded warrior who commands a company of men older than himself, he senses the cause is lost but fights hard because that’s what he must do, and because he’s loyal to his comrades.

Consequently, when a booby-trap explodes at a divisional staff meeting behind the lines, killing several senior officers, and a soldier he recommended for a battlefield commission is blamed for the deaths and quickly executed, Reinhardt can’t sit with this. Receiving tacit permission to investigate from a sympathetic colonel — not that he would have twiddled his thumbs otherwise — the nineteen-year-old lieutenant begins to ask questions.

No sooner has he done so than he falls into a rabbit hole of conspiracy and murder, with blood having blood to eliminate witnesses; sometimes, he’s the target. After all, he served on the Eastern Front, where he came in contact with Russian soldiers infected by defeatist, socialist ideals, and the protégé executed for the booby-trap explosion was known to be insubordinate, radical, and a malcontent. So Reinhardt’s the perfect fall guy.

Participants in the conspiracy, whose goal and breadth he can’t penetrate at first, appear to include very senior commanders, deserters, Bolsheviks, doctors treating shell-shocked soldiers, dissenters, and, pervading all, the frustration and anger at a war that continues to chew up and spit out lives, though there can be no hope of German victory. The narrative therefore makes an unusual coming-of-age story of a young man trying to live morally where few, if any, morals exist. You may also read the novel as a labyrinthine thriller or mystery, with qualities of each, which will keep you guessing until the last page. But from whatever standpoint you approach it, From a Dark Horizon is first-rate First World War fiction.

Start with Reinhardt, who, despite his experience and responsibility, is still just an adolescent, truculent and earnest, occasionally pompous when he spouts principles, a character whose actions don’t always match his good intentions. Human, in other words. Most others around him have their facets too; I particularly like his sergeant, fiercely loyal but also brutally honest, and a mercurial captain who seems wildly unpredictable and who Reinhardt thinks is on his side but can’t be sure.

McCallin also displays an impressive command of the battlefield, rest area, home front, chain of command, you name it. No detail escapes his eye, and everything feels authentic, something rare in First World War novels. Consider this passage, one of many that bring the scene alive while also conveying feeling:

There were convoys bearing food and others bearing straw and hay. There were water convoys, and convoys of medical supplies, and long trains of horses and mules being driven up as replacements for those at the front. Troops hunched forward, each man heavy with equipment, shovels and helmets or metal spikes or rolls of wire clanking on their backs. Officers rode in limousines, and huge steam-driven tractors dragged monstrous howitzers. The noise was deafening, and the air was choked with dust. Sometimes singing would intermittently drown out the neighing of the horses and the clatter of harness and the bone-deep throb of motors, but the songs were few and the men marched to a different, darker tune than they had marched to in the spring of that year.

McCallin, who follows the history faithfully, re-creates the mood of both army and home front. He conveys the weariness for sacrifice that seems to have no purpose, the grumblings of revolution, and the political maneuvering to cast blame once the war finally ends. I admire this panorama very much, both for its historical grasp and adept fictional portrayal.

These German sailors, among others, mutinied at Kiel in November 1918. The uprising, which ignited unrest around the country, led within days to the armistice (courtesy German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I like the thriller/mystery aspect as well, though several twists toward the end feel rather convenient, with fortuitous arrivals of powerful characters. One such character in particular, who seems to slide in and out of his ability to process what’s happening around him, is too helpful to the story as well. Even so, “no — and furthermore” bleeds through the pages, for whenever Reinhardt discovers the next link in the chain of conspiracy, that person typically winds up dead.

Enough bodies fall (more from foul play than combat) to staff a platoon, and the Byzantine links among them necessitate frequent recapitulations, usually in the form of Reinhardt explaining what he’s learned, and how. From a Dark Horizon, though its pages turn rapidly, can be talky at times.

This volume marks the last in the wartime series about Reinhardt’s exploits. But in his afterword, McCallin promises that his hero will have further adventures in the 1920s. I’m ready.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

What Freedom Is: Washington Black

01 Monday Mar 2021

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Review: Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan
Random House/Vintage, 2019. 384 pp. $17

There may be more brutal, unfeeling masters than Erasmus Wilde, owner of Faith sugar plantation in Barbados in 1830, but it’s hard to imagine. For instance, when a slave commits suicide, an overseer decapitates his corpse. Why? The slaves believe that once they die, they’ll be reunited with their people in Africa. So Wilde tells them that headless corpses wander for eternity; beware, there’s no escape. If you kill yourself, you’re a thief, stealing his property.

Such crushing logic, which warps every conceivable interaction, cows nearly all the slaves into hopeless submission; most do all they can to remain inconspicuous. Consequently, when Wilde’s brother Christopher comes to stay, eleven-year-old George Washington Black (known as Wash) is terrified to discover that he’s been chosen the newcomer’s manservant.

To his amazement, however, Christopher — who insists on being called Titch — is cut from a very different cloth, as Wash quickly learns whenever he must go to the big house and wait table. Titch has no interest in slavery, except to abolish it; and Faith’s chief attractions for him are the flora and fauna and a steep hill from which he hopes to launch a balloon for exploration.

Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1848, fourteen years after Britain outlawed slavery throughout the empire (from Robert H. Schombergk, The History of Barbados; courtesy British Library via Wikimedia Commons)

But a suspicious death forces the two to flee — and from that moment, Wash begins to imagine the life he could never have dreamed of. Whether he gets it or not, and how he reinvents himself in the process, makes as compelling a novel as you will find. Washington Black will captivate you and make you think.

Edugyan examines, from the inside, what it means to be a slave, to have no will of your own save what little is granted, and which may be taken away at any time. That sounds obvious, but I assure you, in its moment-to-moment portrayal here, that simply stated condition has deep, insidious effects that wrap around the characters like the roots of an evil, destructive plant.

Titch may dislike slavery, yet Wash wonders what, exactly, he means to his new boss. Is Wash a real person or merely the perfect size and shape ballast for the balloon? Is his a young mind Titch respects, or does the scientist teach him what he needs to become a better assistant? As with all the characters, and I do mean all, the author depicts this pair in their fullness, so that you know their internal struggles. Even Erasmus Wilde, a truly despicable man, has his angles and quirks; no cardboard villain, he. In that way, he receives his due, even as the perpetrator of great evil.

To write a good novel about a victim is harder than it looks. (Writing any good novel is harder than it looks, but that’s another story.) Self-pity would undermine the narrative and warp the reader’s connection to Wash, while earnestness, the flip side of that coin, would demean this tale. Not here. Wash hates his enemies with a razor fierceness, no righteousness, bravado, or breast-beating allowed, just earned hostility. Whatever self-pity creeps in momentarily overtakes him in a different context — love, which is only natural and quite real. Everyone in love acts entitled once in a while, at least.

Also important, Wash never stops striving and loving, no matter what blows he takes. Suffering by itself holds only a tenuous connection for readers; but caring for someone else despite suffering always wins. If Wash becomes remarkably adept at certain pursuits, perhaps stretching credulity, his path remains difficult, often perilous, his adventures allowing for (if not demanding) a character somewhat larger than life.

Throughout, he’s a spectacular observer, the prose being another pleasure of the book, as with his first look at Bridge Town, the capital of Barbados:

Swells of dust boiled up off the roads. Horses trotted past, heads low in the heat, flies swarming. We clattered past a sailor on a street corner blowing through some bizarre knot of pipes, while beside him a second danced along to his own fiddle, his fingers flying like shadows over the strings. We stopped in the sudden traffic; through the carriage oozed the stink of overripe fruit carted in from the port, and of immense slabs of tuna starting to turn in the heat. At a passing market stall I glimpsed their fishy eyes, fissured with blood as they gawked on beds of cool leaves.

Sometimes, in the early going when Wash is still a young boy, the voice slips — the narrative makes observations seemingly too knowledgeable for a lad, even one looking back from later years. But that’s a minor blemish on a superb novel, and I highly recommend Washington Black.

Disclaimer: I bought my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, an online retailer that shares its receipts with independent bookstores.

Tormented Souls: The White Feather Killer

30 Monday Nov 2020

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Review: The White Feather Killer, by R. N. Morris
Severn, 2019. 284 pp. $29

Like many young men in London in summer 1914, Felix Simpkins feels the tug to serve king and country by enlisting in the crusade against the Germans. It would be the only individual act Felix can think of, the sole rebellious gesture against his emasculating mother (and typically self-defeating), but he can’t quite bring himself to, which flattens his self-esteem even further and risks public shame. For in these mad days when the populace has become intoxicated by jingoism and xenophobia, women of patriotic temperament press white feathers, a sign of cowardice, into the hands of physically fit men not in uniform.

Edgar J. Kealey’s 1915 recruiting poster contrasts the feminine softness within the window and the hard masculinity outside–and manipulates men and women both (courtesy British Library)

Meanwhile, Detective Chief Inspector Silas Quinn of Scotland Yard feels unsettled too, for other reasons. He’s just returned from psychological sick leave, which has further damaged his reputation among police officers of all ranks, many of whom resent him for his brilliance as a detective, his independent methods, and his insistence on truth rather than convenience. Apparently, the resentment goes right to the top, for Quinn has been relieved from command of a special crimes unit and been relegated to a pen-pushing job in which no one need pay attention to him, except to note his lapses.

Military security now requires keen focus on enemies within. Guilt no longer matters. If a crime takes place, arrest someone of German lineage, connections, or alleged sympathies. Justice will be served, and the public, placated. Naturally, this directive rubs Quinn the wrong way. And when he hears that a minister’s daughter has been killed shortly after a patriotic meeting at her father’s church — at which women collected white feathers to hand out — he itches to solve the case. But he’s forbidden to; and the men who’ve supplanted him are watching, waiting for him to step out of line.

Morris excels at characterization, historical atmosphere, the requisite “no — and furthermore,” and the craft of whodunit, with which he keeps you guessing until the end. So many scenes in his novel start out one way and shoot off unexpectedly in another, the essence of tension, because something touches a nerve in his legion of fragile people. Some readers may find these tortured souls off-putting, and I admit, the near-universal willingness to abuse others creates a bleak mood. But the rewards here are many, not least an unvarnished portrayal of police work in 1914, and a similar depiction of a great metropolis straining at its bounds. The famous English credo of decency and fair play seldom applies; that’s an ideal, existing mostly in Quinn’s mind and nowhere else. But with one notable exception, Morris lets his flawed people strive for connection, which shows their fullness and lets you feel for them.

Exhibit A here is Quinn, who’s difficult in his way, though not cruel. He’d like to unburden himself if he could, and his impulses are decent and generous, but he can’t always express them. A psychologically minded detective among colleagues for whom perception and deduction are blunt instruments, he comes across to them as cocksure, even arrogant, yet inside, he’s anything but. Whether it’s his halting overtures to a pretty police secretary or his reluctance to return to the house of a former landlady who realizes he needs care, Quinn makes an unusual male detective, vulnerable and cerebral at once.

The White Feather Killer also conveys London in war fever, whether it’s spy mania or naked anxiety about the adventure that has just begun:

The world had suddenly become a dangerous and uncertain place. A drastic shift in perspective had brought Death into the foreground; the dim figure on the horizon, drifting in and out of sight, had become an insistent, looming presence, so close its stinking, clammy breath could be felt on the back of the neck. Sons and brothers, husbands and fathers, in answering the call to the colours, had brought this dark stranger into the family.

Morris allows himself deeper, more rounded descriptions and motivations than many mystery writers, yet you never feel disconnected or impatient with the narrative. Quite the contrary; I wish more mystery writers trusted themselves (and their readers) to write like this. My only complaint centers on Coddington, Quinn’s nemesis within the police; he’s the notable exception to the generosity granted the other characters. The psychological portrait remains blurry, so I don’t know much about Coddington, except that he’s unreasonably jealous and pigheaded.

The White Feather Killer delivers a terrific story with fully realized characters and an authentic historical background, depicted with precise care. Bravo.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Revenge Tragedy: After the War

06 Monday Jan 2020

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Review: After the War, by Hervé Le Corre
Translated from the French by Sam Taylor
Europa, 2019. 533 pp. $19

A man sits, tied up, being tortured to divulge who killed a certain figure from the Bordeaux crime world. This figure, like most of his brethren during the late 1950s — like the police beating him up — collaborated with the Germans during the recent world war and profited from it. In fact, few profited as handsomely as Albert Darlac, the commissaire de police, and the man leading the interrogation. Jewels, art, and furniture taken from dispossessed Jews made him rich, and without a trace of compunction or remorse, he can say that his department would cease to exist if such activities disqualified a man from serving the law.

Maurice Poupon, member of the Legion of Honor and illustrious politician in the Gaullist government, 1967. As a Bordeaux police official during World War II, he had arranged for the deportation of more than 1600 Jews; during the Algerian War for independence, he allegedly tortured rebel prisoners (courtesy Archives municipales de Toulouse via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Meanwhile, Daniel, a twenty-year-old garage mechanic who lost his parents at Auschwitz, has terrible trouble understanding the ache inside him. His adoptive parents, former Resistance members who rescued him from a rooftop the day his biological parents were arrested, have protected him and given him a warm home. Their daughter, Irène, also adopted, is the only person to whom Daniel can show any vulnerability. But Daniel fears that this happy life — happy, considering his circumstances — will soon end. He’s due to receive his draft notice and fight in Algeria, in a colonial war his friends and family staunchly oppose.

Darlac and Daniel, victim and perpetrator, don’t meet for quite a while. The contrasts between them provide the context and the moral theme of this extraordinary, exceedingly violent narrative. Darlac scorns everything remotely resembling compassion or kindness as weakness that deserves to be crushed. As one old-time acquaintance says, “Other people die and you’re the one that smells like a rotting carcass.” Daniel, however, wishes he could make himself more accessible emotionally — not that he entirely realizes this, a superb stroke of characterization — and often hides inside movie images, which he’s constantly imagining in his daily life. But you know that once he reaches Algeria, his struggles to become fully human will only get more desperate.

Connecting the two, a figure from their pasts has come to Bordeaux to settle old scores. How Darlac reacts in particular provides much of the story, and a searing one it is. Any author can follow Raymond Chandler’s advice and have a man with a gun enter the scene to prevent tension from flagging. Le Corre has plenty of men with guns, but he doesn’t have to worry about the tension. It’s not just that stuff happens, because if it were only that, a hyperactive plot would do as well. No; he grounds every scene so thoroughly in the physical that you can’t help feeling that his narrative is happening all around you, and that you’re involved by turning the pages. Whether it’s the Bordeaux docks or the Algerian desert, Le Corre knows every inch of his territory, and how it feels to be there, so you do too.

But even that wouldn’t work if he didn’t also put you firmly in his narrators’ heads, as with this introduction to Daniel, which also happens to portray the port of Bordeaux:

He stops suddenly in front of the gates of the port, his bicycle between his legs, and remains there, stunned. With his balaclava and his sheepskin coat with the collar turned up and the mittens on his hands gripping the handle bars, only his eyes are visible. He observes the blaring traffic of cars and trucks, intoxicated by the din they make, grinding his teeth as axles groan and bodies shake over the large cobblestones… He feels the dull rumble in his legs as a train trundles slowly past endless rows of warehouses, accompanied on foot by a man swinging a lantern in his hand. The city buzzes and trembles in his flesh.

Many people will find After the War a bloody business — and so it is, because the title’s ironic. Wars merge, so that there’s no apparent space between one and the next, no aftermath, because even if the calendar says that a few years have passed, in men’s minds, they haven’t. Darlac is also a complete monster, so he’s hard to take. But it was that kind of monster who made the French portion of the Holocaust possible, a fact conveniently ignored in France. Rather, I’m more troubled by the way female characters seem to exist largely in a man’s perception, not necessarily as sex objects, though in Darlac’s case, that’s all they are, but without readily definable aspirations of their own. They’re invariably the kindest characters, but they’re not fully rendered, not like the men.

Nevertheless, if you like noir, After the War is as noir as it gets, a first-rate thriller by an author who understands how to put it all together.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Love, Theft, Hate: The Sisters of Summit Avenue

18 Monday Nov 2019

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Review: The Sisters of Summit Avenue, by Lynn Cullen
Gallery, 2019. 312 pp. $27

Coming of age in 1920s Indiana with barely a penny to their names and kindly but incompetent parents, sisters June and Ruth are fiercely attached but deadly competitive. Elder June, the popular girl, the beauty, the one with artistic talent, wants to escape their drab existence, to make something of herself. Bookish Ruth, deemed less capable, less everything, wants the attention she believes she’s never received. Accordingly, throughout their lives together, whatever June gets, Ruth wants. Shortly before Ruth’s eighteenth birthday, she settles on June’s fiancé, John, as her next goal.

But though Ruth marries John and settles down on his family farm, by 1934, she’s up against it. A heretofore rare form of encephalitis that has swept the country in the 1930s has left John mostly comatose. Their farm is failing, Ruth struggles to raise four kids, and her mother, who lives with them, is too lost in dreams of a past that never existed to have much to offer.

Marjorie Husted, the actress who portrayed Betty Crocker on the radio, ca. 1944 (courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, “Fight Food Waste in the Home,” Office for Emergency Management, Office of War Information; via Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, June has married a successful doctor, a cheerful, controlling narcissist, Richard Whiteleather (now, there’s a name) and lives in a mansion in St. Paul, Minnesota. June has jewels, fashionable dresses, and a country-club membership, but she remains insecure about her origins, and she’s childless, which breaks her heart. She has a job with the flour company, answering the tons of letters lonely, frustrated, harried women write to Betty Crocker — an advertising logo, not a real person — and working up the recipes and pamphlets distributed in her name. You can guess what Ruth thinks of her sister’s job:

In between giving out recipes, Betty tipped off her followers on how to win a husband and keep him, not only by taking the proverbial shortcut through his stomach, but by keeping themselves attractive and interesting. Betty, with her on-air interviews with bachelors about what they looked for in a wife and her ten-cent booklets full of man-pleasing recipes, implied that men were like dumb beasts running free on the plains, unaware that they were being stalked, until, bang! they were shot down by “Apricot Topsy-Turvy” or “Peeps and Squeals Sandwiches,” served by a perky huntress in an apron. She wondered how her sister could live with herself, contributing to this nonsense. Of course, Sister June had always been a big game hunter.

Not only does Ruth resent June for earning money through artifice, while she herself struggles to farm (presumably raising the wheat that makes the flour), she hates it all the more that June sends her every penny she earns. Ruth, who stole John from June, has to watch while crippling illness steals him back. June, who suffers from Richard’s self-centeredness, envies Ruth’s ability to have children by the man they both love, even though he’s now lost to the world.

The family dynamic reveals so much by itself, you understand their world, no explanation required. Combine weak parents, rivalry for attention, ambivalent attachment, and thwarted desires, and you see why, for example, either sister would want John, a kind person but a man incapable of asserting himself.

However, I wish Cullen didn’t tell feelings so often when they really matter; she’s more than capable of showing them. I also wish she’d built the novel more coherently, especially in the first third, when the narrative leaps back and forth from decade to decade in three different narrator’s heads. There’s a lot of back story to cover, and no doubt Cullen settled on this narrative form after trying others, but it takes a while for the central event to occur, a visit to Ruth’s farm by June and Richard, which leads to confrontations everyone has been avoiding forever.

Still, Cullen’s keen, subtle sense of human psychology wins the day, and you can see how family resentments and foolishly kept secrets have cascaded through the years. As a storyteller, she knows how to employ emotional “no — and furthermore,” in which internal narrative, triggered by mundane events, ratchets up the tension. This requires no manipulation or contrivance: It’s character-driven narrative at its best.

That is, until the end, which I find implausible. Partly, that’s because Cullen has done such a fine job pushing her characters into tight corners that redemption is no longer an option. I don’t want to give anything away, of course, but to take one minor example, consider that Richard, the egotistical doctor, might not be so pliable a character as that. Such people don’t change easily; and, further, there’s a wonderful scene in which June’s mother-in-law freely talks about her son’s unbounded greed for what he wants. Mother knows best, I think.

If you can love ninety percent of a novel and slap your head in consternation at the remaining ten percent, that’s how I feel about The Sisters of Summit Avenue. Read it for the terrific character studies; but I think the author, who has done brilliantly portraying messy lives, may have tried to tidy up too much.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Lonely Hearts: Courting Mr. Lincoln

06 Monday May 2019

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Review: Courting Mr. Lincoln, by Louis Bayard
Algonquin, 2019. 379 pp. $28

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of ambitions in politics must be in want of a wife.”

No, that’s not how this richly imagined novel about Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd begins, but it could have. For Bayard’s tale recalls Jane Austen in its wit, keenly observed social conventions, and chief object, finding love amid the teacups and calling cards, the glances and tacit declarations of acceptance or rejection. But this is Austen with broader humor, because Lincoln arrives in Springfield, Illinois, blissfully unaware of said social conventions, and the way he learns, and his reaction to his studies, is often hilarious.

Then, too, the narrative has a sharper, more serious tone, because the mud-plagued streets of Springfield have nothing like the gentility that Elizabeth Bennet & Co. would recognize, and some of the mud is metaphorical, flung by politicians at one another. The two principals here are lonely, tortured people, for whom marriage, as every reader surely knows, will bring many heartrending trials. And the chief obstacle to their betrothal isn’t Mary’s snobby, married sister Elizabeth, with whom she lives, but the psychological pain with which Lincoln lives.

With that inescapable, tragic overlay, Bayard does a remarkable job of evoking the lightness in both lovers; her wit and intelligence, his qualities that other men lack. As his close friend Joshua Speed puts it, Lincoln says what he believes and believes what he says. This characteristic is so startling that other men beg for his opinion on every matter under the sun. Be it known also that when Mary first meets him, he reminds her of a spindly pine tree, so a little moral strength helps.

Joshua and Mary are the two point-of-view characters, not Lincoln. That choice offers three crucial advantages, which Bayard deftly exploits. First, Lincoln’s intense feelings of unworthiness, which often prompt a deep withdrawal into himself, remain suggested but properly enigmatic, so the reader shares Speed’s and Mary’s frustration that he’s unreachable. Second, Speed has undertaken to school Lincoln in etiquette and social graces; since they both live above Speed’s dry-goods store (with two other men), they’re often together. Though aware that a more refined Lincoln will make him fitter for female company — partly the purpose, for he’ll need a wife if he’s to advance in politics — Speed resents his friend’s success with Mary. Jealous of Lincoln for getting the belle of Springfield, and of the belle for intruding on a perfectly good bachelor friendship, Speed has mixed motives throughout.

That unusual window allows the narrative to explore and comment on the bounds of friendship and courtship in a deep, thought-provoking way. Friendship is much easier to test, define, and judge, whereas marriage is a speculative option, at best. It’s also apparent that Speed is courting Lincoln too, for his own purposes — hence the title. Yet none of that prevents Lincoln’s preparation for social respectability from reaching high comedy, especially when the merchant tries to teach the backwoods lawyer how to waltz.

But if dancing befuddles the long-limbed Lincoln, friendship can be just as awkward:

They had taken their time warming to each other. Joshua at first blamed the difference in their upbringings, but he came to see that it ran deeper, that his own reticence was in the nature of a host unwilling to presume too much on his guest, whereas Lincoln’s was soul deep. It didn’t matter how innocent the question Joshua lobbed his way. How do you take your coffee? Would you care for some hardtack? Would you like Charlotte to wash your linen? Lincoln enfolded himself around each query, then disgorged the briefest and least revealing of replies. Always with the faint air of regret, as if he had been tricked into abandoning his Fifth Amendment protections.

If Courting Mr. Lincoln has a notable flaw, it’s the repetition, the alternating perspective of Mary and Speed going over the same events. To be sure, they offer very different views of them. But even though I understood the literary convention, which Bayard invokes without calling attention to it — the characters wouldn’t, would they? — the narrative still surprised me. I wound up thinking, Wait a minute; I read this before.

But that’s no reason to fault a superb love story, which I highly recommend. And though each of us likely imbues Lincoln with the virtues we wish to see in him, I came away from this portrayal marveling at how our most thoughtful, compassionate president, mortified at hurting anyone or anything, oversaw our country during its deadliest, most divisive conflict.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, where this review appeared in shorter, different form.