Never Call Retreat: Lee and Grant: The Final Victory
The former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and his historian coauthor conclude their best-selling trilogy offering an alternate history of the Civil War. As was true of its predecessors, this is a swiftly paced and authentically grounded novel; this installment covers the end of the terrible North-South strife. In the previous volumes in the trilogy,Gettysburg(2003) andGrantComes East(2004), the authors invented an alternative to how the Battle of Gettysburg was fought and won (in their version, the South won that battle) and offered a plausible consequence of the Confederate victory: namely, an advance on Washington, D.C. Now, the authors move up Lee's actual April 1865 surrender to August 1863 and, in the process, create quite realistic and creative actions and movements for each side leading up to the war's blessed end--with Lee realizing the futility of further Southern persistence. Again, as in the previous volumes in the trilogy, the authors' research is impeccable, and their presentation brings events down to a personal level, and, as in any good alternate vision of history, the reader is left believing it could really have happened this way.Brad HooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved