A Rising Thunder: From Lincoln's Election to the Battle of Bull Run: An Eyewitness History

Being a devotee of "eyewitness" accounts I have long been drawn to Civil War memoirs including letters home and diaries. Most give a snapshot of a time or place or a number of interrelated snapshots leaving it to the reader to connect the accounts to others in an attempt to synthesize a picture of the whole or enough of the whole to be meaningful. Luckily for me and many others I hope, the author, Richard Wheeler took an interest in Civil War history and began writing about it in a way that provides what I think of as a 3 dimensional view. Wheeler takes the accounts of people who were there and joins them in a way that provides a chronicle of a time segment vital to our understanding of the Civil War. In "A Rising Thunder: From Lincoln's Election to the Battle of Bull Run: An Eyewitness History" the title spells out the time segment to which this book is devoted and emphasizes the eyewitness approach. What sets this history apart from others, is the care with which Wheeler sews together the personal accounts into a seamless fabric which then seems to pull you in, making you feel that you are there. Much better than Walter Cronkite's "You Are There" sketches and more like stepping through the looking glass into another reality Wheeler has produced a "page turner" that makes a living present out of what we know to be history long dead. In the pages of "A Rising Thunder" we discover how people really behaved and what they felt as our disunited republic swept toward the war that would finally create the United States of America and set the stage for this country to beome the great nation of the 20th century and beyond.