From Publishers Weekly
Thomsen is also the editor of Shadows of Blue & Gray: The Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce, which collects 27 stories along with some memoirs and reportage by the journalist, writer, literary critic and former Union Army soldier. Famous for their unflinching look at the brutality of the war, the pieces include "Two Military Executions," about the execution and revenge of a young soldier sentenced to death for striking an officer; "Bivouac of the Dead," the classic plea for the recognition of unknown Confederate soldiers in a West Virginia hillside; and "Four Days in Dixie," Bierce's account of his own imprisonment and escape from Confederates in Alabama. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In calling Stephen Crane and Walt Whitman our poets of the American Civil War, we unfairly neglect the Ohio-born Bierce, who, unlike the first two authors, actually fought for the Union army, at Chicamauga, Missionary Ridge, Bloody Shiloh, and elsewhere. If the average reader is at all aware of Bierce, it is probably from a few choice definitions from The Devil's Dictionary, the phantasmagoric story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and the author's mysterious disappearance in Mexico in 1913. However, Bierce, whose nastiness toward contemporary writers and critics came home to roost when his own reputation had to be decided, deserves to be better known. His war experience gives the 27 brief war stories in Shadows of Blue & Gray the ring of authenticity. In a sometimes turgid writing style (slaves are once described, for example, as "sons and daughters of Ham"), Bierce depicts a war that is at once horrifying, pointless, and supernatural the stuff of The Twilight Zone. The nine pieces in "Memoirs and Chronicles" and "Reminiscence and Memoria," with which editor Thomsen fittingly rounds out this volume, are as artful as the fictions. Recommended for all libraries. Despite the strengths of Thomsen's collection, Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period is a superior work, for it includes not only all of Bierce's short fiction and nonfiction about the Civil War but a detailed 25-page introduction that is invaluable in placing Bierce in historical context and thus helping to explain his stance as a realist about the war and a satirist about post-Civil War American self-congratulation and heroic myth-making. Duncan (American history, Univ. of Copenhagen) and Klooster (English, Hope Coll.) wisely organize Bierce's myriad stories, memoirs, letters, newspaper columns, and even war poems around the war's five-year duration. Instead of a curmudgeon who happened to write war stories, this volume portrays a man who joined the Union army at age 20, fought in the bloodiest battles until a Confederate bullet in the head took him out of combat, and revisited the battlefields and retrieved the experience in memory until his disappearance. Highly recommended for all libraries. Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, MO Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
Ambrose Bierce didn't just write about the Civil War, he lived through it--on the battlefields and over the graves--and in doing so gave birth to a literary chronicle of men at war previously unseen in the American literary canon. The fact that some of these stories verged on the supernatural, others on factual reporting, and others on the fine line between humor and morbidity in no way detracts from their resonance to both the history of the war between the states and the imaginative historical literature in the tradition of Washington Irving.
Shadows of Blue & Gray collects all of Bierce's Civil War stories (twenty-seven in total) with six of his memoir pieces on his own experiences on the front lines.
This collection includes such classics as "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "A Horseman in the Sky," "Parker Addison, Philosopher", and "A Bivouac of the Dead"; as well as lesser known stories and sketches such as "The Mockingbird" and "Two Military Executions" and memoirs of his experiences at Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Franklin.
About the Author
Ambrose Bierce (1942-1914?) was one of the leading men of letters in 19th-century America. Among his most important books were The Devil's Dictionary and Tales of Soldiers and Civilians.
Shadows of Blue and Gray: The Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce FROM THE PUBLISHER
Ambrose Bierce didn't just write about the Civil War, he lived through it--on the battlefields and over the graves--and in doing so gave birth to a literary chronicle of men at war previously unseen in the American literary canon. The fact that some of these stories verged on the supernatural, others on factual reporting, and others on the fine line between humor and morbidity in no way detracts from their resonance to both the history of the war between the states and the imaginative historical literature in the tradition of Washington Irving.
Shadows of Blue & Gray collects all of Bierce's Civil War stories (twenty-seven in total) with six of his memoir pieces on his own experiences on the front lines.
This collection includes such classics as "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "A Horseman in the Sky," "Parker Addison, Philosopher", and "A Bivouac of the Dead"; as well as lesser known stories and sketches such as "The Mockingbird" and "Two Military Executions" and memoirs of his experiences at Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Franklin.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Thomsen is also the editor of Shadows of Blue & Gray: The Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce, which collects 27 stories along with some memoirs and reportage by the journalist, writer, literary critic and former Union Army soldier. Famous for their unflinching look at the brutality of the war, the pieces include "Two Military Executions," about the execution and revenge of a young soldier sentenced to death for striking an officer; "Bivouac of the Dead," the classic plea for the recognition of unknown Confederate soldiers in a West Virginia hillside; and "Four Days in Dixie," Bierce's account of his own imprisonment and escape from Confederates in Alabama. ( Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
In calling Stephen Crane and Walt Whitman our poets of the American Civil War, we unfairly neglect the Ohio-born Bierce, who, unlike the first two authors, actually fought for the Union army, at Chicamauga, Missionary Ridge, Bloody Shiloh, and elsewhere. If the average reader is at all aware of Bierce, it is probably from a few choice definitions from The Devil's Dictionary, the phantasmagoric story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and the author's mysterious disappearance in Mexico in 1913. However, Bierce, whose nastiness toward contemporary writers and critics came home to roost when his own reputation had to be decided, deserves to be better known. His war experience gives the 27 brief war stories in Shadows of Blue & Gray the ring of authenticity. In a sometimes turgid writing style (slaves are once described, for example, as "sons and daughters of Ham"), Bierce depicts a war that is at once horrifying, pointless, and supernatural the stuff of The Twilight Zone. The nine pieces in "Memoirs and Chronicles" and "Reminiscence and Memoria," with which editor Thomsen fittingly rounds out this volume, are as artful as the fictions. Recommended for all libraries. Despite the strengths of Thomsen's collection, Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period is a superior work, for it includes not only all of Bierce's short fiction and nonfiction about the Civil War but a detailed 25-page introduction that is invaluable in placing Bierce in historical context and thus helping to explain his stance as a realist about the war and a satirist about post-Civil War American self-congratulation and heroic myth-making. Duncan (American history, Univ. of Copenhagen) and Klooster (English, Hope Coll.) wisely organize Bierce's myriad stories, memoirs, letters, newspaper columns, and even war poems around the war's five-year duration. Instead of a curmudgeon who happened to write war stories, this volume portrays a man who joined the Union army at age 20, fought in the bloodiest battles until a Confederate bullet in the head took him out of combat, and revisited the battlefields and retrieved the experience in memory until his disappearance. Highly recommended for all libraries. Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, MO Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A tidy and well-ordered volume that collects nearly 40 Civil War short stories, memoirs, and reminiscences by the celebrated 19th-century writer. Known today primarily as a satirist (on the strength of his Devil's Dictionary), Bierce (1842-1914?) wrote some of the earliest and best realist fiction in the US. The product of a stern and God-fearing Ohio home, he enlisted with the Indiana Volunteers in 1861 and saw action in some of the fiercest battles of the war. Afterwards he settled into life as a journalist and editor and made a considerable success at both. (He was also a well-regarded poet whose work is much neglected today.) Although some of the pieces here (especially "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge") have retained their popularity down the years, most are long-forgotten resurrections, and some (like "A Sole Survivor," about the fates of several of Bierce's army comrades, all of whom died) were literally discovered in the corner of a library basement, uncatalogued and unknown. The war was perfect material for Bierce, who describes scenes of action with a reporter's sharp sense of circumstance and an O. Henry-like weakness for the climactic twist: "A Horseman in the Sky," for example, describes in great detail a sniper's shooting of an enemy officer, revealing only at the end that the target was the rifleman's father. Ironically, "Owl Creek," the best-known of all Bierce's works, stands out here as the least typical: The elaborate fantasy of a condemned man who dreams his escape in the final seconds before his hanging, the story has little of the stark, unvarnished bluntness ("The object at his feet resolved itself into a dead horse, and at a right angle across the animal's necklay a dead man, face upward in the moonlight") that makes so many of the stories read like dispatches from the field. A rich collection of fine writing saved from obscurity: Commendable rescue work.
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