Title: Dawn’s Gray Steel: A Novel About Shiloh: April Fifth Through Eighth 1862
Author: Daniel F. Korn
Publisher: Dan Korn; 1st edition
ASIN: B097PM36VD
Pages: 212
Genre: Historical Fiction
Reviewed by: David Allen
Hollywood Book Reviews
When I was a kid I was fascinated by Civil War trading cards. Each pack came with a flat oblong of pink chewing gum and six color cards. Each card was a gory feast for the eyes: glorious and inglorious battle scenes; mounted Union troops upsetting genteel Southern drawing rooms; men spit roasted on pikes. Fascination with the American Civil War – and with civil wars in general – is as strong as ever, and this gutsy well-written novel of the battle of Shiloh, Tennessee raises the bar ever higher.
Civil war fascination is rampant these days. For example, prize-winning novelist Paul Auster just published a very long one on Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage. America’s present political divide helps us relate to the anguish of Civil War: “brother pitted against brother, father against son.”
Shiloh was one of the earliest major battles of the Civil War. Shiloh was a horrific struggle between two huge fighting forces around the Shiloh Meeting House on a Sunday morning in April, 1862. In the author’s words, “Shiloh hallmarks of sheer tenacity, dramatic blunders, and bloody ferocity…[are] one of the bloodiest displays of armed conflict ever to take place on the American continent.” To the author’s credit, his book is the next best thing to [not] being there.
Dawn’s Gray Steel heroically – and artfully – bear witness to all this. Through the canny, and sometimes purblind, eyes of Union and Confederate commanders, readers experience up close and personal the grit, action, and violence of this homegrown theater of war. Dawn’s Gray Steel is a time machine that works. Open this book and rub elbows with the likes of Ulysses S. Grant, Major General Braxton Bragg, and Brigadier General William Tecumseh Sherman. (Sherman never to be seen without his over chewed semiliquid cheroot.)
The author’s back story is equally cool. As a boy, Daniel F. Korn was fascinated by the heroes and stories of our nation’s history, the first being Davy Crockett. As a college student he read and fell in love with Michael Shaara’s immortal Civil War novel ‘The Killer Angels.’ That book inspired Korn to write his own. Dan teaches high school students Honors U.S. History and Civil War, and shares a love for Revolutionary War reenacting with his son, Mike.
Dawn’s Gray Steel is a window on America, past and present. Blue versus gray? Or blue versus red?