NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Nathan Bedford Forrest was the only soldier to rise from the
rank of private to general during the U.S. Civil War. At once “a
soft-spoken gentleman of marked placidity and an overbearing bully
of homicidal wrath,” Forrest is best remembered for the combination
of brilliant military leadership and flamboyant bravery that drove
his Confederate cavalry troops from victory to victory on the
battlefield. His subordinates feared him (he shot those who turned
tail), as did his enemies (he rarely lost a fight). General Sherman
once said that Forrest must be “hunted down and killed if it costs
10,000 lives and bankrupts the [national] treasury.” Detractors
point out that Forrest never has been exonerated from the Fort
Pillow massacre, in which many Union soldiers, most of them black,
were slaughtered after attempting to surrender. Following the war,
he went on to found the Ku Klux Klan. Late in life, however,
Forrest disavowed racial hatred and called for black political
advancement. Author Jack Hurst has written the essential biography
of a complex and compelling man who was arguably the Civil War’s
most remarkable soldier. (Movie trivia: ‘s mother named her son after this
general.)

　　Amid the aristocratic ranks of the Confederate cavalry, Nathan
Bedford Forrest was untutored, all but unlettered, and regarded as
no more than a guerrilla. His tactic was the headlong charge,
mounted with such swiftness and ferocity that General Sherman
called him a “devil” who should “be hunted down and killed if it
costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the treasury.” And in a war in
which officers prided themselves on their decorum, Forrest
habitually issued surrender-or-die ultimatums to the enemy and
often intimidated his own superiors. After being in command at the
notorious Fort Pillow Massacre, he went on to haunt the South as
the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

　　Now this epic figure is restored to human dimensions in an
exemplary biography that puts both Forrest’s genius and his
savagery into the context of his time, chronicling his rise from
frontiersman to slave trader, private to lieutenant general,
Klansman to — eventually — New South businessman and racial
moderate. Unflinching in its analysis and with extensive new
research, Nathan Bedford Forrest is an invaluable and immensely
readable addition to the literature of the Civil War.