Book of the Week #22

Our War: Days and Events in the Fight for the Union by Mike Pride (Concord, NH: Monitor Publishing Co., 2012)

Since we are observing Memorial Day today, which originated in the years following the Civil War, I thought this was an appropriate book to feature this week.
"On the morning of April 15, 1861, friends roused Edward E. Sturtevant, the night watchman in Concord, New Hampshire, so that he could become the first man in the state to volunteer to fight for the Union. Thousands of men followed him into uniform during the next four years as the Civil War touched every heart and home. In Our War, Mike Pride used letters, diaries, and contemporary newspaper accounts to shape fifty stories of death, love, bravery, and survival. One story leads to another, and the war unfolds as New Hampshire men and women lived it, from the heady days of 1861 to the costly victory of 1865. This innovative approach allows the people of the Civil War generation to answer the big questions in their own words: Why did they go to war? How did the war play out on the home front? How did they view the shift in the war's cause from preserving the Union to freeing the slaves? Why did men fight on despite poor leadership, ghastly carnage, and epidemic swamp fevers? A few familiar names show up in Our War, but nearly all its characters are ordinary people trying to survive extraordinary times. In these pages they live again a century and a half later to capture the essence of their war, and ours." --Book jacket

On Sunday, June 9, 2013 at 1pm Mike Pride will be at MainStreet BookEnds of Warner, along with Mark Travis, to talk about their Civil War books.

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