audiobook The Greatest Survival Stories Ever Told: Seventeen Incredible Tales by From Brand: Lyons Press in History

Description

On the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War; award-winning author Frye Gaillard reflects on the war―and the way we remember it―through letters written by his family; including his great-great grandfather and his two sons; both of whom were Confederate officers. As Gaillard explains in his introductory essay; he came of age in a Southern generation that viewed the war as a glorious lost cause. But as he read through letters collected by members of his family; he confronted a far more sobering truth. “Oh; this terrible war;” wrote his great-great-grandfather; Thomas Gaillard. “Who can measure the troubles―the affliction―it has brought upon us all?” To this real-time anguish in voices from the past; Gaillard offers a personal remembrance of the shadow of war and its place in the haunted identity of the South. “My own generation;” he writes; “was; perhaps; the last that was raised on stories of gallantry and courage . . . Oddly; mine was also the one of the first generations to view the Civil War through the lens of civil rights―to see . . . connections and flaws in Southern history that earlier generations couldn’t bear to face.”