Men of Fire

Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Nathan Bedford Forrest both hated to lose. In the battle for Fort Donelson, Tennessee, in February 1892, they fought not only each other but their own fellow generals, back-and-forth warfare, and miserable conditions. Tom Weiner's narration reflects the accuracy and detail of Hurst's research. Weiner has a newscaster's timbre and delivery. He pauses before quotations and gets into the character of whoever is speaking--Southerner, Midwesterner, country boy, officer. Listening is like getting messages from the past. History buffs should love this chronicle of the lesser-known western war. The victorious Grant became president; Forrest went on to help found the Ku Klux Klan. J.B.G. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

June 18, 2007
The bloody February 1862 Union victory at Fort Donelson on Tennessee’s Cumberland River is remembered as the Union’s first big success—and as the battle in which Ulysses S. Grant held firm for Confederate unconditional surrender. Former journalist Hurst (Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography
) attempts to make the case that Grant’s western theater victory at Donelson indelibly shaped his military career, as well as that of Confederate Lt. Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest, and that the battle turned the tide of the Civil War unalterably in the North’s favor. Writing forcefully and engagingly, Hurst does a thorough job of reconstructing the military aspects of the battle and never shies away from illuminating the war’s horror. His focus is on Grant, the Confederate generals who faced him (John Floyd, Gideon Pillow, Simon Buckner and Bushrod Johnson) and the ever-aggressive Forrest, best known for his battlefield viciousness and his postwar role in creating the Ku Klux Klan. It’s a stretch, though, to postulate that the 1862 victory at Donelson propelled the Union to victory more than three years later. Certainly, as Hurst says, western theater action often is overlooked in assessing the Civil War. But one can’t ignore the impact on the war’s outcome of the massive battles of Antietam, Gettysburg, Wilderness and Cold Harbor that came after Donelson.