George Starbuck Books

Read "Bone Thoughts" & learn how elegant an honest poet can be,

In late summer 1862, the Confederate Army is invading the United States of America. Major Nate Starbuck has been given command of the Yellowlegs, a battalion composed of failures and cowards. Starbuck does his best to train the battalion and to lead them to the battle against the northern garrison at Harper's Ferry, and then to the bloody battlefield of Antietam where around twelve thousand men died just in some hours. Starbuck and his friends are struggling to survive, not to be killed by the enemies wearing blue uniforms and also by the enemies behind their backs.

This book is the fourth one in the Starbuck Chronicles. Like other Cornwell's books, this one is an excellent read. However, if you already read Sharpes, you would find a lot of similarities between these two series.

Despite the fact that the entire Starbuck series seems to be a rewriting of the familiar Sharpe series novels, one cannot help but like these books. This, the final addition to the series, is perhaps the one I enjoyed most. Yes, its more of the same but the battle description seems longer in this one than in the others. The theory for how McClellan came to have Lee's plans is interesting and draws in the guerrilla aspects of the war not often touched upon. Cornwell's books are not "great fiction" in the sense of telling a story with deep significance beyond the story, but they are finely spun tales that entertain and that is of value in itself. But do not expect something original in characters - these are Cornwell-templates fleshed out in slightly different situations as with his other novels.

Bernard Cornwell can really tell a story. He keeps my interest from start to finish.

'Through me the way into the suffering city.' That city (in this context of course) is Sharpsburg, the location of one of the most horrendous days in American Military history only to be rivaled in horror by the Normandy Invasion. The weight of that day is so succinctly summarized by Mr. Potter, who notes that the battle would one day be in the history books, which he finds odd, "because we came to America to escape history."
If you've read this book you already know how well Cornwell can wrap his words around a scene of battle. A battle as profound as Antietam requires more than just description of historical events, it requires an intimate retelling. Cornwell's words read as a eulogy for those soldiers that met on that day, he brings you to Burnside Bridge & the Sunken Road, he brings you right under the kepi. I found this last outing some of his most powerful writing and easily the best in the series. He hints in the ever present "Historical Notes" section that "Starbuck will march again."
Here's hoping!
PA23 Volunteer Infantry
Birney's Zouaves

I will quote from Cornwell's book, The Bloody Ground, " 'There are still yankees in the wood,'Starbuck said, pushing down the lever that rammed the revolver's chamber. ' I shot one,'Lucifer said. 'You damn fool, ' STarbuck said fondly. 'They're fighting for your freedom.' ...'but you shouldn't be fighting. Hell, these ba**rds are trying to liberate you...'" -pages 320-321
Cornwell, Benard. The Bloody Ground. Harper Collins Publishers : 1996.
First off, the yankees were not fighting to free Lucifer, Starbuck's servant, or any other black in the South. In fact, at the battle of Sharpsburg where this scene is taking place, the Emancipation Promclimation was still three months away! And even when the document was signed by Lincoln, it did not free a single slave. The Emancipation Pronmclimation was like saying that slavery can live in the U.S. but in Mexico it will be abolished. The goverment made those, "forever free" where they had no control and let those who they did control be oppressed. It was a military move, a right for the military forces of the North to conscript free and inslaved blacks in the South. I am not a lost cause revisonist. If you can state one fact contridicting mine about what I have said then go for it. But I look to historical documents, letters, and quotes for historical fact. I have quoted from a scene in Cornwell's fictional novel, The Bloody Ground. Now let me quote from history itself...
"It is stated in books and papers that Southern children read and study that all the blood shedding and destruction of property of that conflict was because the South rebelled without cause against the best government the world ever saw; that although Southern soldiers were heroes in the field, skillfully massed and led, they and their leaders were rebels and traitors who fought to overthrow the Union, and to preserve human slavery, and that their defeat was necessary for free government and the welfare of the human family.

"As a Confederate soldier and as a citizen of Virginia, I deny the charge, and denounce it as a calumny. We were not rebels; we did not fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes." -Richard Henry Lee, Confederate Colonel

"We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for independence." Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America


"If the South had only wanted to protect slavery, all they had to do was go along with the original 13th Amendment, offered in early 1861 after several states had seceded, which would have protected slavery for all time in the states where it then existed. This was not inducement enough to bring South Carolina or any others back into the fold. The States of the Confederacy, even today, could block the passage of the 13th Amendment, and certainly could have then. This is why the slaveholders wanted to stay in the Union. Their "property" was protected by the Constitution." -Charlie Lott, historian

"The assertion that the South fought for slavery is Yankee propaganda and a monstrous distortion." -Jefferson Davis

"[Defeat] means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the War, will be impressed by all influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, our maimed veterans as fit objects for their derision, it means the crushing of Southern manhood ... to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties." -Patrick Cleburne, Major General

My three stars for this book is inspired by the wonderfully illustrated battle scenes. The characters in this book are very fine and mold dramatically with the scenes and the story. Though I do not enjoy Cornwell's slander of the South, though fictional, I pray for a fifth book in the series. I believe that Major Starbuck, Captain Truslow, and General Swineyard have many more glorious and tragic stories to live in the coming months and years of the 1862-1865. I would love to see the series continue after ten years waiting for a fifth novel. If we are indeed treated to a continuation of the series, I hope that Bernard Cornwell will give a little more historical truth to the South's cause and its soldiers.

I found this title at the bookstore where I work, on a storage rack that had obviously not been disturbed for several years. It is not a book but a box, that contains what appears to be a long mimetic poem in the shape of the country church yard mentioned in the title, on several sheets of paper. My fellow employees and I decided that it was either a bizarre printing error or an absurdist manifesto. Has anyone else ever seen it? The fact that it is in print alone prevents me from dismissing it as a caffeine-induced hallucination. If you know anything about the book, or the author George Starbuck and his inntentions, post a review. As a gift for the schizophrenic in your life, or for the friend who's so arcane it hurts, I highly recommend the title.

This is really a reply to the first reviewer who asked about the poet. I haven't read the work yet, but George Starbuck was a fine poet who I knew when he taught at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop in the mid-60's. He was widely published, but for a reason I've never been able to understand, his books are all out of print (except for BONE THOUGHTS, which is being reissued). He was a wonderful teacher & poker player as well as being a great poet. His dates are 1931-1996. POETRY Magazine published these lines of his when he died:

Slowly out of the dust-bedeviled air, and off the passing blades of the gang plow, and suddenly in state, as here and now, the earth gathers the earth. The earth is fair; all that the earth demands is the earth's share; all we pervade and revel in and vow never to lose, always to hold somehow, we hold of earth, in temporary care.

A little history about the novel & especially the movie,
"Last of the Mohicans" The book tells about the history
the the war they were fighting and the why about the
horrific massacre scene on the trail from Fort William
Henry in the movie.