Play for a Kingdom - Softcover

Play for a Kingdom

Paperback. Zustand: Good. 426 pages. spine faded, writing on front cover and ffep ds corny: a Union company from Brooklyn encounters an Alabama company while on p icket duty after the Battle of the Wilderness (May, 1864) and proceeds to challe nge them to a series of baseball games before all hell breaks loose in Spottsylv ania. The first-time novelist, however, has surprises up his sleeve, and the viv idly described sporting matches set up a series of betrayals and double crosses which test the camaraderie of the Union soldiers, calling their commitment to th e war effort into question.Dyja has a gifted understanding of the powerle ssness one faces in combat. War in this novel is not tragic merely because it ki lls and maims good men; it is dispiriting because it robs them of their identiti es. He handles the multiple points of view of his Brooklyn protagonists superbly , differentiating them by class, social standing, and ethnicity, and aptly shows how the war frays their senses of themselves. Commanders become followers, Iris h racists hide amongst black gravediggers, and staunch abolitionists measure the ir belief in liberty against their gut instincts concerning the corruptibility o f human nature. If the sectional crisis of the first half of the 19th century wa s settled on the fields of battle, the class struggle of the second half was for ged in the streets of Brooklyn--making Dyja's company all the more fascinating f or the way they illustrate the transition. Although the novel's climax abandons historical materialism for genre convention, the tense mixture of espionage, bet rayal, and vivid battle scenes in Play for a Kingdom should please discriminatin g fans of Civil War fiction. --John M. Anderson. Artikel-Nr. 5585b

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