Smoke, Sound & Fury: The Civil War Memoirs of Major-General Lew Wallace, U.S. Volunteers

Remembered today as the author of Ben-Hur, Lew Wallace was first an Indiana lawyer whose leadership and talent for action won him fame in the Civil War. Brash, handsome and charismatic, he quickly rose from colonel of a volunteer regiment to major-general of a division. A popular hero in wester Virginia and the capture of Fort Donelson, he later saw his military carreer nearly runied at Shiloh, where a series of disastrous miscommunications delayed his divisions's arrival of the field. Drawn from Lew Wallace: An Autobiography,published posthumously in 1906, this book offers the sights and sounds of the Civil War filtered through the memory of a keen-eyed romantic. Wallace emerges here in all of his compelling complexity.