100 Books Like A Chain of Thunder

Here’s another book-to-movie entrant on the list. This book follows the exploits of a Confederate soldier who makes his way home to the mountains of North Carolina. It’s like the Odyssey—he has a series of memorable encounters and run-ins along his journey, and things are not as they seem when he eventually returns home. I love the novel's tension and the artfully crafted characters.

This book paints a vivid picture of the symbiotic relationship between 19th-century Southern slave masters and the people they enslaved. It also underscores the fact that for oppressed Black people, allies and enemies came in all colors.

The protagonist, Hiram Walker, is a child prodigy whose intellect and ambition make him poorly suited for a life of servitude. Significantly, Coates speaks to the obligation to “reach back” which those who have achieved a measure of physical, spiritual, or intellectual freedom owe to those who are still enslaved.

Harriet Tubman plays an important role in his narrative because she embodies that ideal.

I found Erik Larson’s book to be a dramatic page-turner, a gripping historical narrative I could not put down. Most readers may know how the story ends, with the 1861 shelling and surrender of Fort Sumter, the federal fortress in Charleston harbor, that propelled the nation into four years of Civil War.

But from this book, I learned of so many twists and turns that led to this watershed event that is often lost in other accounts. This is so much more than a military history of the fraught months between the 1860 presidential election and the climatic surrender of Sumter five months later. I learned much also from the finely crafted portraits of the protagonists, and of the conflict’s origins deeply rooted in slavery.

I love that the author introduced me to Robert Smalls, whose story has rarely been told. An enslaved man in South Carolina, he stole a Confederate ship and sailed to freedom, later becoming a member of the US Congress.

I was angry that I had never known about Smalls, and this book has turned me into an evangelist for him. The author’s choice to tell his story in the first person was a risky move, but it paid off beautifully, allowing me to enter deeply into the life of a truly great man.

This author is the master of alternative history. I love where he takes me. I enjoy his humanization of characters often seen as wooden or stone.

He examines the “what-ifs?” of the historical record. I find the twists and turns remarkable. Small events could so easily have altered major social, political, and cultural evolutions. Imagine a South victorious in our civil war. Imagine if there were no Lincoln assassination. Imagine Robert E. Lee as the newly elected President of the Confederacy with a platform of ending slavery.

As a historian, I am well aware that the smallest alterations in the fabric of time can have huge consequences. I love how Turtledove presents these possibilities to me.

What I loved most about this book was the voice. Woodrell did a fantastic job presenting the period Biblical lyricism through the narrator, Jake Roedel, a reluctant Confederate soldier.

The scene is the largely overlooked Kansas-Missouri front of the US Civil War, where bloody vendettas were just as much of the fighting as were skirmishes between the blue and the gray. We ride with the young men, boys really, as they raid and pillage, hide and survive, and there’s nothing romantic about the loss and pointless savagery. 

When recommending Geraldine Brooks’ multi-layered and intricately crafted March, another book must always be mentioned. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. March is the Pulitzer Prize-winning historical fiction rooted in Alcott’s classic novel that’s been read and loved for centuries. The March of the title is Jo March’s father in Little Women. In real life, his name was Amos Bronson Alcott. And he was the father of Louisa May Alcott. Brooks tells March’s fictitious story masterfully and with great historical acumen. Her depictions of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are truly historic. Geraldine Brooks is not a historian. Her husband Tony Horwitz was. In Brooks’ case it seems that to fall in love with a historian is to fall in love with history as well. March is the beautiful proof.

The war’s greatest military historian takes on its greatest military figure in Bruce Catton’s spirited two-volume classic: Grant Moves South and Grant Takes Command. Written decades ago, these paired volumes remain the finest historical account of Grant’s triumphant Civil War career. In the opening volume, we meet the recently minted brigadier in September 1861 as he prepares to join his army at desolate Cairo, Illinois, having just recovered from a succession of crushing personal failures. In the concluding volume, we leave him at Petersburg Virginia in April 1865, after he demolishes R. E. Lee’s army in the climactic battle of the war. Wannabe revisionists think Catton is outdated. Don’t believe them.

As a teenager Alexander, to become The Great, is given to one of his father’s warriors – Telamon – to go on a life-threatening winter wolf hunt. A risk of building character and spirit his father is willing to take.  Later in life, during Alexander’s conquest, Telemon never wishes to rise above a colonel’s rank. He wants to remain in the midst of the fighting.  

When Alexander finally departs India to end his conquests Telamon leaves him to go off with a group of monks. When Alexander asks why that choice Telamon responds, “I schooled you as a boy Alexander, to be superior to fear and anger. You vanquished hardship and hunger and cold and fatigue. But you have not learned to master your victories. These hold you. You are their slave.” What more can a man learn from a book?

As for my liking this book, Pressfield is one of my favorite authors and this… show more.

I love this book because it presents the story of a man in a very complex situation. He lives in the area of the Ukrainian Donbas region that is occupied by Russians who took over the area by force. So, his freedom is limited.

The time period in the book is just before the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. He is a beekeeper and lives a very simple life. I like that the book takes you into his mind as he makes his way through the period covered by the story. Things that first seem good, after thinking, may be bad, and vice versa.

I felt that his thinking accurately relates to the process of how people think. It is a very gentle story, but so compelling that I wanted to apportion reading the book so that I could digest, understand and most of all enjoy the story.