American Scoundrel: The Life Of The Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 1st us ed., 1st pr.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Excellent
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Few figures in American history embodied contradiction as magnificently as Daniel Edgar Sickles — congressman, adulterer, killer, and one-legged Civil War general — and Thomas Keneally's American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles chronicles this larger-than-life rogue with the precision of a historian and the narrative verve of a master storyteller. Set against the sweeping backdrop of nineteenth-century Washington and the blood-soaked battlefields of the Civil War, the biography uncovers a man who shot his wife's lover in cold blood on Lafayette Square, stood trial in one of the era's most sensational murder cases, and then brazenly commanded troops at Gettysburg — where his unauthorized advance arguably shaped the outcome of the battle and cost him his leg. Keneally, best known for Schindler's Ark, brings his signature gift for moral complexity to bear on a subject who defies easy judgment, illustrating how Sickles operated at the intersection of political ambition, personal scandal, and military audacity. The work argues that Sickles was not merely a scoundrel but a mirror held up to the contradictions of American democracy itself — a republic that could condemn a man's vices while celebrating his audacity. Rich in period detail and propelled by Keneally's urgent, cinematic prose, this biography raises a provocative question: in a nation that has always rewarded boldness, where exactly does heroism end and villainy begin?
Author: Thomas Keneally
Format: Hardback
Published: 2002, Nan A. Talese / Doubleday
Genre: Biography
Edition: 1st us ed., 1st pr.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Excellent
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Few figures in American history embodied contradiction as magnificently as Daniel Edgar Sickles — congressman, adulterer, killer, and one-legged Civil War general — and Thomas Keneally's American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles chronicles this larger-than-life rogue with the precision of a historian and the narrative verve of a master storyteller. Set against the sweeping backdrop of nineteenth-century Washington and the blood-soaked battlefields of the Civil War, the biography uncovers a man who shot his wife's lover in cold blood on Lafayette Square, stood trial in one of the era's most sensational murder cases, and then brazenly commanded troops at Gettysburg — where his unauthorized advance arguably shaped the outcome of the battle and cost him his leg. Keneally, best known for Schindler's Ark, brings his signature gift for moral complexity to bear on a subject who defies easy judgment, illustrating how Sickles operated at the intersection of political ambition, personal scandal, and military audacity. The work argues that Sickles was not merely a scoundrel but a mirror held up to the contradictions of American democracy itself — a republic that could condemn a man's vices while celebrating his audacity. Rich in period detail and propelled by Keneally's urgent, cinematic prose, this biography raises a provocative question: in a nation that has always rewarded boldness, where exactly does heroism end and villainy begin?