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Bright Starry Banner : A Novel of the Civil War
Bright Starry Banner A Novel of the Civil War Author:Alden R. Carter December 30, 1862, outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee: the forty-three thousand men of General William Starke Roscecrans_s Army of the Cumberland faced the thirty-eight thousand Confederate soldiers of General Braxton Bragg_s Army of Tennessee. It had been a dismal month for the Union. In the east, the Army of the Potomac suffered a terrible defeat... more » at Fredericksburg, Virginia; in the west, Grant failed yet again to breach the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Emancipation Proclamation was to go into effect on New Year_s Day, but after the disasters of December, Lincoln_s decree seemed less the assertion of a great moral imperative than a desperate attempt to shore up a crumbling cause. Rosecrans was to engage Bragg and win. That evening, the bands of both armies played, while the eighty thousand soldiers joined in singing "Home Sweet Home." At dawn, they would set about killing each other. At the Battle of Stones River, thousands fall in three days of savage fighting across the fields and woods of middle Tennessee. The carnage awakes the best in some men_courage, sacrifice, and honor; the worst in others_cruelty, cowardice, and depravity. In arenas dubbed "the Slaughter Pen" and "Hell_s Half Acre," Blue and Gray collide. A meticulous and sweeping re-creation of this pivotal confrontation, Bright Starry Banner does for the Civil War what A Bridge Too Far did for WWII. Alden R. Carter_s nine novels and twenty nonfiction titles have won numerous honors, including six ALA Best Book awards.« less