Helpful Score: 1
A biographical fiction of P. G. T. Beauregard.
I found a 1962 copyright of this book in a second hand book store and bought it for future reading. When I got around to it some twelve months later, I fell in love with the writing and the story. Some people criticize this work for being too much like a textbook of battles. I would disagree. The author writes about a famous man who was over-shadowed by General Lee's great accomplishments in Virginia. Beauregard,a French Creole, became a popular military leader in the Mexican War sharing his assignments with Robert E. Lee, in the Engineering Division of the U.S. Army. The story of his life starts in June of 1865 when he comes home to New Orleans a penniless pauper in threadbare clothes. How can a man who has know fame and fortune and feels his destiny is to greatness face such defeat? This wonderful story covers his transition from depression and failure to one of hope. This comes through the care and concern for his health and well-being as shown to him by his landlady and her mother in the very house where he and his second wife had lived so briefly during the first year of marriage before the start of the War. Through his evenings at their supper table, he shares the stories of his life and reveals the wonderful opportunities he had to serve and lead. His childhood on a southern Louisiana plantation, his schooling at a private school in New York City and subsequent assignment to West Point, his love of his first wife and her tragic death at an early age all are described in flashbacks that are interspersed with his attempt to find suitable employment and write his memoirs. I loved the way Mrs. Keyes unfolds little tidbits rather than flooding the writer with too much information all at one. This is a novel that shows hope, love and humiliation which we all must face at times in our own personal lives. I recommend it for its romantic elements and historical facts. I learned a lot about the Civil War that I did not know and I have been a student of this period for over fifty years.
