Authors: David H. Jones
ISBN-13: 9780979689857, ISBN-10: 0979689856
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Staghorn Press
Date Published: September 2008
Edition: (Non-applicable)
David H. Jones is a former Navy officer and entrepreneur. He lives in Los Angeles.
Walt Whitman feared that the real war would never get in the books the true stories that depicted the courage and humanity of soldiers who fought, bled, and died in the American Civil War...
Exceptionally researched and keenly accurate to actual events, along with the personages that forged them, David H. Jones's novel spans four years in the midst of America's costliest and most commemorated war. The journey is navigated by the poet, Walt Whitman, whose documented compassion for the wounded and dying soldiers of the war takes him to Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C., and finds him at the bedside of William Prentiss, a Rebel soldier, just after fighting has ended. As fate has it, William's brother, Clifton, a Union officer, is being treated in another ward of the same hospital, and Whitman becomes the sole link not just between the two, but with the rest of their family as well.
The reader is taken seamlessly from Medfield Academy in Baltimore, where the Prentiss family makes its home, to the many battlefields where North and South collide, and even through the drawing rooms of wartime Richmond, where Hetty, Jenny, and Constance Cary are the reigning belles.
A highly dramatic and original storyline . . . meticulously researched for maximum believability. . . . A wonderful read that will appeal to history buffs on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.