book review

Momentous Discovery: “The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad”

June 7, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Sir Galahad, son of Sir Lancelot ad the Lady Elaine of Corbenic, remains shrouded in the mists of time. We knew he undertook his famous quest to find the Holy Grail (not to be confused with the Holy Grail Winery and Vineyard in Missouri) and went roaming in a “wild forest,” but that’s all we knew.

Until now.

A research team from the Society for Galahadic Study and Emulation has announced a momentous discovery. In the archives of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, they found (actually, it was one of their student interns who found it) a bust of St. Plagiarus of Tintagel (pay attention to the names). Inside the bust was a sheaf of manuscripts of accounts of Sir Galahad after he embarked upon his quest.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“The Real Horse Soldiers” by Timothy Smith

April 13, 2022 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

From April 17 to May 2 of 1863, a group of some 1,700 Union cavalry traveled from LaGrange Tennessee to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In less than three weeks, they cut a swath through central Mississippi surprising Confederate forces, Mississippi’s governor, and a number of cities and small towns along the way. Their goal: disrupt Confederate supply lines and draw attention from General Grant’s crossing of the Mississippi River right below Vicksburg.

The cavalry, under the command of Colonel Benjamin Grierson of Jacksonville, Illinois (and a music teacher in civilian life), were wildly successful. Grierson’s Raid, as it became known, was celebrated in the North and even grudgingly admired in the South. It had pulled off what few thought possible.

One might think that such an event would have been the subject of numerous books. For whatever reasons, possibly including a bias toward the eastern battle front in the Civil War, few book-length accounts are to be found. Dee Brown, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published Grierson’s Raid in 1954. It was not well received by critics, and its reputation has not improved with time. Brown often made fast and loose with his account, inventing conversations and scenes out of whole cloth. Even a non-historian like myself can read it today and see where Brown fudged, or invented, his facts.

In 1956, a writer named Harold Sinclair published a novel about the raid, The Horse Soldiers, embellishing history even more. The novel because the basis for the 1959 movie of the same name, starring John Wayne and William Holden. The movie moved the story even farther away from the historical record.

In 2018, Timothy Smith, a professor at the University of Tennessee – Martin, published The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid Through Mississippi. Proving that history books do not have to be dry and dull, Smith wrote a historically accurate account that tells the story in an engaging and fascinating way. Having read both the account by Brown and this account by Smith, the historian’s book is far superior and loses nothing in the telling.

Sixty-four-years after Dee Brown’s book, Smith had more sources to draw upon, but he used many of the same sources used by the popular writer. His account provides far more context than Brown’s, especially about Grierson’s background, the politics that was ongoing among the Union army leaders, and the importance of the raid to Grant’s ultimately successful attack on Vicksburg.

Reading about Grierson’s Raid is also personally intriguing. I had ancestors who died at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee in 1862, and other relatives who were living in the Brookhaven, Mississippi, area at the time of the raid. They experienced first-hand what I know only as history, and it expands my understand of my family’s life during the Civil War.

Smith has published numerous books about the Civil War, including several on the Battle of Shiloh, the war in Tennessee and Mississippi, and the siege of Vicksburg. He’s appeared on the History Channel and C-Span and spoken widely about the Civil War. A former park ranger for the National Park Service at Shiloh Battlefield, he is currently a professor of history and philosophy at the University of Tennessee – Martin.

The Real Horse Soldiers is a fine book. Smith not only tells a thrilling story; he also tells a historically accurate story.

“Diary of a Confederate Tarheel Soldier” by Louis Leon

March 9, 2022 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

In 1861, Louis Leon was 19, a clerk in a dry goods store in Charlotte, North Carolina. He joined the Charlotte Grays, Company C, First North Carolina Regiment to fight for the South. His brother Jacob joined up at the same time. Louis was a private, and he would remain a private through the duration of the Civil War.

Fifty-two years later, now an old man, Louis decided that if generals and other officers could publish their diaries about the civil War, he could, too. In 1913, his war-time diary was published as Diary of a Confederate Tarheel Soldier.

Rather than grand strategy and the description of great battles, Leon’s diary focused on what the vast majority of soldiers were focused upon during the war: food, marching back and forth, action during battles, the discomfort of riding a troop train, and kindnesses by local citizens (especially young ladies). As his words indicate, much of the war was tedium – waiting, marching forth only to be called back, chores around camp.

Yet Leon was in major battles, including Gettysburg (July, 1863) and the Wilderness (May, 1864). The Wilderness was the first major effort by the newly appointed general-in-chief, Ulysses S. Grant, to take the Confederate capital at Richmond. It didn’t succeed but neither side could really claim victory. For Leon, however, the battle had a major impact: along with hundreds of others, he was taken prisoner and eventually sent to a prison in the North. His accounts of prison life are terse and sometimes funny; it doesn’t appear that he unduly suffered, like many other prisoners of both sides did at different prisons and prison camps.

Leon, being Jewish, makes note of Jewish holidays like the Day of Atonement and the occasional anti-Semitic comment, which he did not seem to take personally. His fellow soldiers didn’t seem to care about his religion or background, if he was ready and willing to fight. He was able to get letters to his parents in New York, usually through the help of a friendly Union picket. (Leon offers no explanation as to why his parents were in New York while he and his brother fought for the South, but it does make one realize how the Civile War often split families.) And he speaks of Robert E. Lee is almost saintly terms; the general was revered by his soldiers.

Diary of a Confederate Tarheel Soldier is the Civil War as seen from the bottom. Leon was a soldier who followed his orders, no matter how non-sensical. He maintained his sense of humor and his sense of stoicism, reporting the death of friends in short, factual statements. The book is an articulate look into the daily life of the soldier during the Civil War.

Top illustration: Battle of the Wilderness by Kurz and Allen, via Wikipedia.

“The Confederate Surrender at Greensboro” by Robert Dunkerly

March 2, 2022 By Glynn Young 7 Comments

I’m trying to learn what kind of experience my great-grandfather, Samuel Young, went through in the Civil War, and so I read a book which might, or might not, reflect that experience.

My great-grandfather, according to the story handed down in the family, enlisted in a Mississippi unit about 1863. I’ve found a record for an S.F. Young (right initials) in E Company, 2^nd Mississippi Cavalry. The problem is that the company was formed in a county in northeastern Mississippi, near Tupelo. My grandfather was from Pike County in southwestern Mississippi, near the border with Louisiana. The 2^nd Mississippi Cavalry became part of a corps under Lt. Gen. Richard Taylor, which surrendered in Alabama on May 4, 1865 (nearly a month after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox).

The family story put my great-grandfather farther east, with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia or Gen. Joseph Johnston’s Army of Tennessee, which surrendered two weeks after Lee at Greensboro, North Carolina. The story says that Samuel, employed as a messenger boy because of his age (18 at the end of the war), had to make his way home to Mississippi mostly on foot. When he finally arrived home, some months after the end of the war, he found his family gone. They’d moved to eastern Texas to escape Federal control (in case you might wonder, they were small farmers who owned no slaves, at least according to census records). Samuel trekked across Louisiana to Texas, where he found them in the late fall of 1865.

We know what happened afterward. Samuel married a local Mississippi girl, they had seven surviving children (the youngest of whom was my grandfather), and he died in 1920. He’s buried in a small town near Alexandria, La. He was also the youngest in his own family, and the only one of three brothers who survived the Civil War.

I was familiar with Lee’s surrender; most Americans likely think it was the event that ended the war. But Johnston’s army was still in the field in North Carolina, with Gen. William Sherman’s army after him. I didn’t know much on Johnston’s surrender two weeks after Lee’s, until I happened across a book.

The Confederate Surrender at Greensboro by Robert Dunkerly, published in 2013, is an in-depth account of the last days of the Army of Tennessee. Dunkerly draws upon some 200 individual accounts, from soldiers, officers, and civilians, to tell an immediate and compelling story of the last days of the 40,000-man army.

Johnston’s movement up from South Carolina to Raleigh, the North Carolina state capital, and then to Greensboro happened to coincide with the Confederate government’s flight from Richmond to Danville, Virginia, and then to Greensboro. Jefferson Davis and his cabinet would continue south until their eventual capture at Irwinville, Georgia. Part of Dunkerly’s story of Johnston’s surrender is also the story of the last days of the Confederate government.

The final days were anything but calm. Rumors abounded among the soldiers about surrender, about Lee’s army, and about plans to continue the war. Stragglers, deserters, and eventually soldiers paroled from Lee’s army were making their way south and began to make contact with units of Johnston’s army. Confederate government stories of provisions were looted by soldiers and civilians alike. The economy was non-existent, social order had broken down, and people were doing what they could to defend themselves, their families, and their homes. Desertion was a growing problem; many soldiers were simply leaving to go home. Johnston might have lost up to a fourth of his army to desertion.

Imagine a society in which currency is worthless, banks have failed, necessities are scarce, and bands of soldiers, deserters, and former slaves are ravaging the countryside, looking for food (and sometimes plunder). Dunkerly tells this enthralling story, with the army at its heart.

Dunkerly is a historian, speaker, and author actively involved in historic preservation and research. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from St. Vincent College and his master’s degree in historic preservation from Middle Tennessee State University. He’s worked at nine historical sites and published some 11 books, including Redcoats on Cape Fear: The Revolutionary War in Southeastern North Carolina. He’s currently a park ranger at Richmond National Battlefield Park.

Whether my great-grandfather was part of Lee’s army or Johnston’s, he would have been making his way home through a society in which nothing was the same, nor would be again, civil order was in shanbles, and food was what you could shoot or forage. And thousands of former soldiers were in exactly the same situation. Somehow, Samuel Young made it.

Top photograph by Scott Umstattd via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Terms of Service” by Chris Martin

February 16, 2022 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

Chris Martin works at Moody Publishers as a content marketing editor and a consultant in social media, marketing, and communications. He has a deep background in social media and digital content strategy. He perhaps best known for his blog, Terms of Service, where he writes thoughtfully and with great insight about topics as diverse as the metaverse, TikTok, Wordle, and the impact of social media on society and culture.

His new book is entitled, appropriately enough, Terms of Service: The Real Cost of Social Media. The book is a primer on social media and the internet but is also more than that – a look at how the internet shapes us and what can we do about it. And his solutions are not “let’s pass a law” type of prescriptions, but instead what individuals can do themselves.

This is not a book that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok will like. But it’s an important book, one that is both deeply thought through and easy to read.

Martin starts at the beginning with how the internet evolved, how it works now, and how it affects our lives. He examines fives ways the social internet shapes us – the belief that attention assigns value, how we trade away our privacy, how affirmation becomes more important than truth, and how we demonize – and then destroy – people we dislike.

His recommendations for dealing with this are particularly helpful, because they are relatively simple things individuals can do. (They may not be easy, particularly if you’re a social media addict, but they are simple and straightforward.) This emphasis on individual actions is far more empowering than waiting for “Congress to pass a law.” As Martin points point, it’s inevitable that governments will start regulating the social internet, but that doesn’t mean we must or should wait. And what we can do as individuals starts with something many readers may find surprising – studying history.

Terms of Service is a highly readable and intelligent look at the social internet, how it shapes our lives, and what we can do to regain control.

Top photograph by Nathan Dumlao via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“An Effort to Understand” by David Murray

March 3, 2021 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

It may be the most idealistic definition of communication I’ve ever seen: “With sincere intent and real imagination,” writes David Murray, “all human beings can understand one another.”

Murray is the editor of Vital Speeches of the Day. He’s the force behind the Professional Speechwriters Association. He leads the Executive Communications Council. He blogs, usually daily, at Writing Boots. He’s spent more than three decades in the communications business; I first met him when he was editor of Speechwriter’s Newsletter, back in the dark ages before social media, web sites, smart phonies, Amazon, and Google.

He’s also politically blue. But he’s an unusual blue, one who believes that the politically red might actually be worth talking with. And thus his new book, An Effort to Understand: Hearing One Another (and Ourselves) in a Nation Cracked in Half. It’s an optimistic book, reflecting the optimism and general good humor of its author. It’s a book about communications, comprised of short chapters ranging across the breadth of contemporary life – family, work, politics, change, culture, language, environment, leadership, friendship, and more.

What links all of these things is the idea of communication. Life works because communication works. When communication doesn’t work, things unravel. Marriages fail. Friends stop speaking to each other. People suspect each of other of the most nefarious motives, simply because of what candidate they might for. Or, as Murray might say, communications fails when we stop acting like adults.

It’s not about civility, he says; civility is not communication. Preaching to the choir and remaining safely inside our political bubbles isn’t communication, either. It’s not screaming names and labels at people to force people to back down and admit we’re right and they’re wrong.

Instead, communication is about understanding. We can have profound and fundamental disagreements about any subject or issue; the United States was founded in the context of profound and fundamental disagreements about government, people, and political philosophy, disagreements which still shape the nation today. But if we’re to hold this American experiment together, we have to make a sincere, sustained, and good-faith effort to understand each other.

No one said it’s easy, least of all Murray. Coming from the moderately conservative (red) side of the political spectrum, I took him at his word, and I read his book to understand. I knew his politics; I knew we disagreed on a number of very basic things. But I also knew he would have something worthwhile to say, and something I could learn, because Murray is first a communicator. He’s not a political partisan seeking to convert me or any other reader to his way of political thinking. He’s a communicator seeking to understand others and himself, only asking for a similar understanding in return.

The 60 short essays of An Effort to Understand will make you laugh. They will make you think. Most importantly, they will make you look beyond the red and blue labels we use to objectify and categorize people. They will help you understand.

This may be the best book on communication I’ve ever read.

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