On Great Fields The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
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? Chamberlain is familiar to millions from Michael Shaara’s now-classic novel of the Civil War, The Killer Angels , and Ken Burns’s timeless miniseries The Civil War, but in this book , 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.