About this item
Ralph Peters Darkness at Chancellorsville is a novel of one of the most dramatic battles in American history, from the New York Times bestselling, three-time Boyd Award-winning author of the Battle Hymn Cycle.. Centered upon one of the most surprising and dramatic battles in American history, Darkness at Chancellorsville recreates what began as a brilliant, triumphant campaign for the Union - only to end in disaster for the North. Famed Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson bring off an against-all-odds surprise victory, humiliating a Yankee force three times the size of their own, while the Northern army is torn by rivalries, anti-immigrant prejudice and selfish ambition.. This historically accurate epic captures the high drama, human complexity and existential threat that nearly tore the United States in two, featuring a broad range of fascinating - and real - characters, in blue and gray, who sum to an untold story about a battle that has attained mythic proportions. And, in the end, the Confederate triumph proved a Pyrrhic victory, since it lured Lee to embark on what would become the wars turning point - the Gettysburg Campaign (featured in Cain At Gettysburg) .. At the Publishers request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
About the Author
Ralph Peters is a prize-winning, bestselling novelist and the author of innovative works on strategy and security. A retired U.S. Army officer and former enlisted soldier, his unusual career took him from Moscow to Mandalay and from the Middle East to Latin America. After leaving the military, he also worked as a columnist, a popular media commentator and a "strategic scout" in the developing world. Early works, such as "Red Army" and "The War in 2020," had contemporary military themes, but after leaving uniformed service he concentrated largely on the American Civil War. Under the pen-name "Owen Parry," he wrote six award-winning mystery novels set during the Civil War, as well as two collections of Christmas tales for adults. Then, under his own name, he embarked upon what became the five-book Battle Hymn Cycle, works he describes as "dramatized history, but, above all, accurate, honest history." The books take the reader from Gettysburg to Appomattox, capturing the brutal reality and high drama of the war in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. The first three volumes in the cycle, "Cain at Gettysburg," "Hell or Richmond," and "Valley of the Shadow," each won the American Library Association's Boyd Award, and volumes in the critically acclaimed series have won various other prizes. A prequel to the cycle, "Darkness at Chancellorsville," will appear in May, 2019. A secret until recently, Peters quietly wrote a novel about playing rock music in the late 1960s, which he published under the pen-name "Robert Paston." In recent years, he was inducted into the U.S. Army's Officer Candidate School Hall of Fame and received the Goodpaster Award as an outstanding American soldier-scholar. After more than two decades in the military and a further two decades of media work and research, he now concentrates on writing and pursues his long-time hobbies of travel, languages, classic literature, history and fitness.
