“Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era” by Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant

It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, you know. You’re reading a book, and you sense that what you have in your hands is a game-changer. 

This happened as I read the authors’ introduction to Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era. Co-authors Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant studied what many had long believed to be an exaggeration at best and mythical propaganda at worst – the number of underaged boys who fought in the Civil War – and discovered something startingly different. The result is a work that changes our understanding of the Civil War, arguably the most powerful event in the history of the United States.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

The Music of the Civil War

If there are any songs the modern ear would associate with the Civil War, it would be one of three: “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe, “Dixie,” and Ashokan Farewell. The first two were actually composed and sung during the Civil War. “Ashokan Farewell,” however, was composed in 1982 by Jay Ungar and his wife Molly Mason. Its plaintive music sounds like it should have been a Civil War song, but it was actually used as the soundtrack for the 1990 PBS television miniseries The Civil War by Ken Burns.  

I spent some time looking at the music and songs of the Civil War, and quickly learned that “plaintive” music was not on the agenda of either the Union or the Confederacy. Instead, the music was military marches, rousing fight songs, and music to remind the soldiers (on both sides) what they were fighting for. “Plaintive” only arrived long afterward, as people began to understand what the war had actually cost. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph: The Union 8th Regimental Band during the Civil War.

“Burke’s Revenge” by William Brown

Bob Burke, retired from the U.S. Army’s elite Delta Force, is now living near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. His home is called “Sherwood Forest,” and the estate comes complete with its own band of “merry men” – computer geeks, retired Special Ops soldiers like himself, his pregnant wife Linda and her daughter Elle. He remains chairman of a telecommunications company in Chicago, but he has put good people in charge of running its day-to-day operations. Life should be relatively quiet and serene.

Except this is Bob Burke, and “quiet” and “serenity” are two words that don’t associate with him. At a small college in nearby Fayetteville, a sociology professor named Henry Shaw and just returned from a trip to the Middle East. What no one but the FBI suspects is that Shaw has set up an ISIS cell, with members from both students in the college and soldiers at Fort Bragg. Shaw has become a Muslim, and is going to bring jihad to Fort Bragg.

To say that Burke’s Revenge, William Brown’s third Bob Burke suspense/thriller novel, is packed with action is to be guilty of gross understatement. From desert towns in Syria to the sleepy environs of Fayetteville, Brown stages more car bombings, killings, and explosions than a half-dozen similar novels combined. And the action bleeds authenticity, with descriptions of guns, knives, airplanes, and explosives so vivid and real that you know this is an author who knows what he’s writing about.

William Brown

Brown, the author of seven previous novels, has established himself as a master of military suspense, whether it’s World War II or the contemporary war against ISIS. He knows his military and how it operates, and he knows its politics, and how it operates. And he puts the knowledge of both to good use.

The more they understand, the more Burke and the people he’s working with realize that Shaw, and deadly as he is, may be just a side show. Three members of ISIS from the Middle East are also on the ground in the Fayetteville area, and what they are planning is worse than any car bomb or building explosion that Shaw dreams up. (I should point out that Shaw is a totally despicable villain, without any redeeming qualities, and it may cause me to look at sociology professors in an entirely different light.)

Burke’s Revenge snaps and crackles with action and excitement. It’s a wildly entertaining read.

Related - My reviews of Brown’s previous books:

Burke’s War 

Amongst My Enemies

Winner Lose All

The Undertaker

Aim True, My Brothers

Thursday at Noon

Burke’s Gamble

Top photograph of Fort Bragg by Jonas N. Jordan, U.S. Army Corp of Engineers Digital Visual Library via Wikimedia.

The Poems the Soldiers Read in World War I

We know what the most famous poem to come out of World War I was, “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae. But what poems did the soldiers themselves read?

The answer is both surprising and not surprising. If you know British military history, the answer is not surprising. But the answer is surprising for the sheer volume of poetry that was created in and about the war. At one point, the Times of London was receiving 100 poems a day for possible publication. It seemed that everyone was writing poetry – officers and soldiers in the field, families back home, government officials, retired military people, doctors and nurses, and even well established authors like Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling.

Today we associate the poetry of World War I with a relatively small number of poets, some 10 to 15, who fought and wrote poems. Many of them, like Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas and Isaac Rosenberg, died in the conflict. Others, like Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, survived and eventually died of old age.

And while many of these poets were publishing while they were still alive, and being read in the trenches, there was one volume of poetry that was the most popular. It was A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman.

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

Photograph of View from the Shropshire Hills via Virtual Shropshire.