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The Demon of Unrest: Abraham Lincoln & America’s Road to Civil War
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The author of The Splendid and the Vile brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War in this ''riveting reexamination of a nation in tumult'' (Los Angeles Times).On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fuelled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter.Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter – a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were ‘so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them’.At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardour at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous Secretary of State, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable – one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink – a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.
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Isaac's Storm
September 8, 1900, began innocently in Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteoroligist for the U.S Weather Bureau, failed to grasp the meaning of the deep-sea swells and winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself engulfed by a monster hurricane that destroyed the town and killed over 6,000 people in what remains the greatest natural in American history and Isaac Cline found himself the victim of a devastating personal tragedy. Using Cline's own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man's heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude. Isaac's Storm is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets the uncontrollable force of nature. "Erik Larson's accomplishment is to have made this great storm story a very human one...without ignoring the hurricane itself" -The Boston Globe-