Fires of Pride, The

Concluding his Civil War saga begun in The Sands of Pride, William Trotter takes up the stories of his stunning array of characters—Union and Confederate, fictional and historic—in the closing days of July 1863. The South has lost at Gettysburg, the tide of history has shifted, and the fortunes of the Rebel side have begun, inexorably, to decline. Interwoven lives carry readers to the apocalyptic Union assault on Fort Fisher (the "Alamo of the Confederacy") in early January 1865—the largest amphibious operation in U. S. Navy history until the invasion of Guadalcanal in 1942. Featuring the brief but glorious career of the mighty ironclad ram, the CSS Hatteras, which finally emerged to challenge the Union Navy, The Fires of Pride is a richly textured, sweepingly dramatic epic, a towering work that combines deep scholarship with an intensely human understanding of the men and women of the period. Taken together, The Sands of Pride and The Fires of Pride constitute a mighty work of Civil War fiction worthy to stand on the same shelf with Gone with the Wind and The Killer Angels.