THE BLACK FLOWER: A Novel of the Civil War - Hardcover

Howard Bahr

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 187785350X ISBN 13: 9781877853500

Publisher: Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1997

Synopsis

The Black Flower A Novel of the Civil War

By Howard Bahr Fourth Printing

This powerful story of a young rifleman's agony during the Battle of FRanklin in 1864 ranks with the foremost novels of the Civil War. It has already won praise for it's originality and power in the New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Southern Living and many other journals. The black flower symbolizes the rifleman's sense of doom in the misdst of Union cannons firing upon John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee. That army literally dissappears in a hail of rifle and cannon fire from the Union entrenchments. Bushrod Carter's senses record the Confederate charge and it's deadly consequences with the clarity of Michael Shaara's Killer Angels and the poetry of Stephen Vincent Benet's epic "John Brown's Body"

About this title

Review:

Howard Bahr compresses this moving Civil War novel into 48 hours--two short days filled with grim deaths and the prelude, at least, to a love story. First issued by a small Baltimore press in 1997,The Black Flower was nominated for four major awards, including one from the Academy of Arts and Letters, but failed to garner the attention paid to Cold Mountain. Civil War buffs will rejoice in Bahr's vivid retelling of the November 1864 Battle of Franklin, Tennessee. More to the point, The Black Flower transcends its historical fiction niche and deserves a wider audience. Confederate rifleman Bushrod Carter, the novel's protagonist, is wounded during the battle and taken to a nearby house. In this makeshift hospital, he and two childhood friends huddle together, "shivering with cold and exhaustion, ignoring the ghostly shapes still shuffling through the coiling smoke around them, calling the names of men who would never answer." Bahr has poured 20 years of research into his novel, but this haunting portrayal of suffering and death is the product not merely of historical diligence but also an impressive literary imagination. --Eugenia Trinkle

About the Author:

Howard Bahr, a writer from Oxford, Mississippi, teached English at Motlow State Community College in Tullahoma, Tennessee.

About this edition

• Publisher: Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 187785350X
• ISBN 13: 9781877853500
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 267