From the New York Times bestselling author of A. Lincoln and
American Ulysses comes the dramatic and definitive biography of Joshua
Lawrence Chamberlain, the history-altering professor turned Civil War
hero.
Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state
of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at
Bowdoin College. His colleagues were shocked when he volunteered for the
Union army, but he was undeterred and later became known as one of the
North's greatest heroes: On the second day at Gettysburg, after running
out of ammunition at Little Round Top, he ordered his men to wield their
bayonets in a desperate charge down a rocky slope that routed the
Confederate attackers. Despite being wounded at Petersburg--and told by
two surgeons he would die--Chamberlain survived the war, going on to be
elected governor of Maine four times and serve as president of Bowdoin
College.
How did a stuttering young boy come to be fluent in nine languages and
even teach speech and rhetoric? How did a trained minister find his way
to the battlefield? Award-winning historian Ronald C. White delves into
these contradictions in this definitive, cradle-to-death biography of
General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, from his upbringing in rural Maine
to his tenacious, empathetic military leadership and his influential
post-war public service, exploring a question that still plagues so many
veterans: How do you make a civilian life of meaning after having
experienced the extreme highs and lows of war?
Chamberlain is familiar to millions from Michael Shaara's now-classic
novel of the Civil War, The Killer Angels, and Ken Burns's classic
miniseries The Civil War, but in On Great Fields, White captures the
complex and inspiring man behind the hero*.* Heavily illustrated and
featuring nine detailed maps, this gripping, impeccably researched
portrait illuminates one of the most admired but least known figures in
our nation's bloodiest conflict.
