NASCAR Racing: Jeff Gordon Book

Had I realized this is a book written more or less for young adults, I'd probably not have bought it at the Monocacy Battlefield gift shop as I did. However, having read it, I'm glad I did. Lew Wallace led a long and illustrious life and it never hurts, when cracking the ice on a subject, to start with the least intimidating works available.

Lew Wallace lived a number of different lives in his 77 years on this earth. Born in Indiana, he was a lawyer, a politician, a diplomat, a soldier and an author of great renown, something of a standout in a century that produced, in America anyway, a remarkable number of Rennaissance men. Author Ray Boomhower takes us through these lives with dry, simple prose and short chapters, heavily illustrated with photographs and sketches, some of the latter composed by Wallace himself (he was also quite an artist in his way). We follow Wallace from his racketing childhood to a modestly successful law practice to a rocky career in politics, to the Mexican War, where he served as a junior officer, and from there through more law-and-politics until the Civil War, during which he rose to the rank of Major General and fought at Shiloh and Monocacy. The latter battle, though small in scale and a tactical defeat, is credited by most, including U.S. Grant, with saving Washington, D.C. from capture by the Confederate army in the summer of 1864, an event that might have changed the entire course of the Civil War. When the war ended, Wallace continued to labor on his magnum opus, BEN-HUR, which became one of the best-selling books of all time and was eventually made into movies three times. The latter portion of his life was spent as an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, writing more books, and enjoying himself at a palatial home he constructed in Indiana, before dying at 77 years of age with the words, "I am ready to meet my Maker."

What struck me about Wallace's life was both the breadth of his interests and talents -- he was a brave, self-taught soldier, a remarkably astute diplomat (the Ottoman emperor considered him a close friend), a doting and faithful husband, an author of epic abilities, and a small-time inventor -- and the depth of his patriotism. He fought for the North in the Civil War not because he was a Hoosier but because the North was in favor of the Union: had the North opposed it, he would have fought for the Confederacy. And at the age of 70, he volunteered his services to the U.S. Army for a third time when the Spanish-American War broke out. The man was almost Roman in the scope of his personalities and passions. It's true that Boomhower's writing is a bit dry, but the book is not less enjoyable for this fact: I think it does an admirable job of serving as a primer to this remarkable (but not all that well-remembered) American.