The Shenandoah Spy - Part 7
 | Average Customer Rating: Recommend Belle has been scouting again and run into serious trouble. She steals a Union army horse and uniform and escapes, taking Turner Ashby vital intelligence about the Union cavalry unit that killed his brother. Ashby sets an ambush and slaughters them. He then orders Belle to not risk herself further in such missions but to stay and do her spying from the hotel, which is also a Union headquarters.… Product details and pricing info |
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1 Customer Review Posted
- Supplying us with even greater insights into this bygone Civil War universe...
- ...Francis Hamit's Part Seven of THE SHENANDOAH SPY commences with a brief by sordid account of a violation committed against Belle Boyd. The retelling of this unspeakable act -- committed by Union troops on this Southern belle -- is, as required, toned-down to befit the sensibilities of this more puritan period of the Republic's history. I say, it creeps up on the reader, with greater details as to the circumstances behind its perpetration discovered the deeper one increasingly penetrates into the reading of this seventh segment.
Aha. By the seventh part, it really dawns on me how *tall* Belle really was, and how this would have drastically compromised her espionage activities had it not been for her storied beauty and oft-referred to (and thankfully so, according to this here reviewers) "ample bosom" and charm. One can easily imagine the immediate alternative for someone in her position, carrying on clandestinely behind enemy lines -- framed masterfully by Hamit in his depiction of the battle at Warrentown, Virginia.
I always enjoy how the author impregnates his prose with such hints, as I often find them surfacing much later on down the road, in subsequent reads of this free-flowing educational series.
A question for the author about "van dyke" beards, and about our visiting former Irish volunteers to the then-completed Italian campaign -- Keily and Keogh -- had they learned to sport them in Italy -- was that the style of the time, or where was that style adapted from? It struck me as curious. A second query: was it such that Catholic fighting sons from all across the European continent and the British Isles flocked en masse to the aid of the Papal States in their battle for supremacy in the "boot," and how was their recruitment effected, who found them, and how did news of what was transpiring in Italy make its rounds in places as far away as Prussia, for example?
And, while I'm asking, where does the information regarding the Pope's cavorting around with some of his Swiss Guards stem from -- a curiosity that I'd noted in pen during my readthrough?
As is customary in most of Francis Hamit's works, the lines just flow. Reading is easy and looked forward to. As I've often mentioned over the course of these six previous reviews, I wonder how this work would read had I -- in an neat 8.5" X 11" stack -- ALL of these 22 chapters in advance.
Understandably, such is the nature of the Amazon Shorts program, I understand it's sequential like that...though, still, as a complete stand-alone entity? This book would be of more than passing interest to plain jane Civil War buffs.
If I can sum up the feeling thus far: Hamit provides a vista on the lives and actions of people behind the enemy lines, of false fronts of the uniform, of loyalties forged and lost, and of the corruption of rank and privilege. Grace a Dieu to Belle's diaries -- which have survived intact over the long period since the end of the conflict -- we're fortunate to gain knowledge of the utterances and the attitudes of the people who are given scant mention in the history books. It's suddenly less an ordered series of battles conducted within strict adherence to a military protocol and its related disciplines (as we're often lead to believe by the nabobs who grip tightly onto the keys of America's historial cookie jar), and more a Bonanza-type free-for-all. Sam Peckinpah would've been proud.
Now, in one place, all such sources have been culled and synthesized for the reader's benefit.
What's most important, Hamit succeeds in maintaining interest throughout...a function of his experience as a scribe, and his penetrating research methods into supplying a truer-than-true accounts of the events on the ground, in that time, in that place.
I look forward to the eigth... - 2006-06-15, 0 of 0 people found this review helpful, Rated:
