NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERContinuing the series that began with A Blaze of Glory, Jeff Shaara returns to chronicle another decisive chapter in America’s long and bloody Civil War. In A Chain of Thunder, the action shifts to the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. There, in the vaunted “Gibraltar of the Confederacy,” a siege for the ages will cement the reputation of one Union general—and all … reputation of one Union general—and all but seal the fate of the rebel cause.
In May 1863, after months of hard and bitter combat, Union troops under the command of Major General Ulysses S. Grant at long last successfully cross the Mississippi River. They force the remnants of Confederate Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton’s army to retreat to Vicksburg, burning the bridges over the Big Black River in its path. But after sustaining heavy casualties in two failed assaults against the rebels, Union soldiers are losing confidence and morale is low. Grant reluctantly decides to lay siege to the city, trapping soldiers and civilians alike inside an iron ring of Federal entrenchments. Six weeks later, the starving and destitute Southerners finally surrender, yielding command of the Mississippi River to the Union forces on July 4—Independence Day—and marking a crucial turning point in the Civil War.
Drawing on comprehensive research and his own intimate knowledge of the Vicksburg Campaign, Jeff Shaara once again weaves brilliant fiction out of the ragged cloth of historical fact. From the command tents where generals plot strategy to the ruined mansions where beleaguered citizens huddle for safety, this is a panoramic portrait of men and women whose lives are forever altered by the siege. On one side stand the emerging legend Grant, his irascible second William T. Sherman, and the youthful “grunt” Private Fritz Bauer; on the other, the Confederate commanders Pemberton and Joseph Johnston, as well as nineteen-year-old Lucy Spence, a civilian doing her best to survive in the besieged city. By giving voice to their experiences at Vicksburg, A Chain of Thunder vividly evokes a battle whose outcome still reverberates more than 150 years after the cannons fell silent.
BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Jeff Shaara’s The Smoke at Dawn.
Praise for A Chain of Thunder
“[Jeff] Shaara continues to draw powerful novels from the bloody history of the Civil War. . . . The dialogue intrigues. Shaara aptly reveals the main actors: Grant, stoic, driven, not given to micromanagement; Sherman, anxious, high-strung, engaged even when doubting Grant’s strategy. . . . Worth a Civil War buff’s attention.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Searing . . . Shaara seamlessly interweaves multiple points of view, as the plot is driven by a stellar cast of real-life and fictional characters coping with the pivotal crisis. . . . [A] riveting fictional narrative.”—Booklist
“Shaara’s historical accuracy is faultless, and he tells a good story. . . . The voices of these people come across to the reader as poignantly as they did 150 years ago.”—Historical Novels Review
“The writing is picturesque and vibrant. . . . [an] engrossing tale.”—Bookreporter
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Whenever I read a Jeff Shaara novel, I am all but guaranteed I am going to get a good read. He’s a very consistent author who will give a well written, well researched novel that brings to life history in a way that a non-fiction book can’t. Sure, you can read about historical figures like Grant and Sherman, and you can read about famous battles, but he delivers it from their perspective in a humanizing way. Of course, it’s not truly from their perspective since they are long dead but I think Shaara does a good job of capturing their essence and making it feel more real. If you like history like I do, these novels are a delight to read.
A Chain of Thunder focuses on the siege of Vicksburg. By their nature, sieges aren’t quite as exciting as battles, and I would say there are better Shaara novels that I have read than this one, but it was still a strong read. What I especially liked was how he makes some of these characters come to life. I think I enjoyed the perspectives of the generals the most. Grant and Sherman are fascinating characters that he writes well, but I also really enjoyed reading from the perspective of General Pemberton. In fact, I found Pemberton to be the most compelling character in the novel. I knew nothing about him prior to reading this. He was a very flawed general who made lots of mistakes, wasn’t terribly competent, was more of an administrator than a commander, and got all kinds of flack for being a rebel general despite being from Pennsylvania. Shaara made him sympathetic despite being flawed. Even though my loyalties lie with the Federals, I felt bad for Pemberton, especially knowing it was going to end badly for him. My one criticism was that the book was overly long, and could have used some trimming, especially the parts from the perspective of Lucy Spence, which seemed a bit repetitive at times. Other than that, fans of historical fiction should enjoy this one.
Carl Alves – author of Two For Eternity
once again, the author places you in history as a fly on the wall.
I almost gave up on this book. It’s the sequel, essentially, to Blaze of Glory, and if you read that review, you know I raved about Jeff Shaara and also, if you’ve read many other reviews, you know that I love historical fiction and am especially drawn to work (fiction and non-fiction) about the Civil War. Nevertheless, I nearly added Chain of Thunder to my “did not finish” list. Had I done so, it would have been a shame, as I was at least half-way through when I was seriously considering quitting, and this is a book whose second half is much stronger than the first half.
The first half is about soldiers slogging through the mud. The food is terrible, the water is such that said soldiers can rarely see through it, the marches are long (and in Mississippi, hot), and the life of a soldier is a hell unto itself, and that’s when the enemy isn’t trying to pump him full of lead. Which he usually is. And to be completely honest, I was not interested in 490 pages on the tedium of being a soldier or the politics of generals, for that matter. I was drawn to Chain of Thunder in no small part because Shaara mentioned in the opening pages that, for the first time, he was incorporating the viewpoint of civilians. As such, Miss Lucy Spence, a spunky 19-year-old Vicksburg girl was one of the key voices of the story. Only, for the most part, she’s absent from the first 200+ pages of the book. I imagine this is because, until the Federals lay siege to the city, there’s not much for her to say or do.
Once they do lay siege she, like virtually all other Vicksburg civilians, moves into a cave that’s been hand-dug into the side of a cliff, subsists on rat and mule – when there’s food at all – and eventually works as a nurse tending the wounded and dying soldiers who are quickly turning against their commanding general, John Pemberton. (That the Pennsylvanian-turned-Southerner known derisively as “Old Pem” formally surrenders the city on the 4th of July is more than the citizens and soldiers alike can swallow.) Lucy’s story, which is simultaneously unbelievably horrifying and inspiring, is really the glue that holds Chain of Thunder together. The rest of the book, to be honest, is old hat. Sherman and Grant smoke cigars and spend a lot of time atop horses. The Confederate generals receive conflicting orders from their command structures. There’s a lot of mud and musket balls and misery. I believe this would have been a stronger book had Shaara lessened the emphasis on the conflicts leading up to Vicksburg and begun with the siege itself.
That weakness aside, this is well-written, compelling reading for those inclined to focus on the strengths: not only Lucy Spence’s story, but the anecdotes that reveal the face of war in the age of the telegraph – when the wires weren’t cut. Grant learns of Stonewall Jackson’s Chancellorsville death from a Mississippi train engineer. Pemberton cannot write Johnston for a shortage of writing paper. We’re a long, long way from the Marshall Plan. Or drones.
Perhaps the most telling detail, though, comes in the afterward, when Shaara informs the reader matter-of-factually that Independence Day was not celebrated in Vicksburg again until 1945. The baby born in the midst of the siege would have been 82 years old.
(This review was originally published at http://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2013/12/chain-of-thunder-novel-of-siege-of.html)