Review of the book Legends & Lies: The Civil War by David Fisher

After graduating from Marist College, Bill O’Reilly was for a brief time a secondary education history teacher in Florida.  Despite moving on to broadcasting fame, O’Reilly continues to be fascinated with history and the unbiased telling of it.  That was his purpose in producing his infamous “Killing” series.  It has also been the case in his lesser known but very effective series, “Legends & Lies”, in which the legends and lies about some of the central characters from a particular period in our nation’s history are brought to light and the truth, gets told about who they really were and what they did.  Such is the intent of Legends & Lies: The Civil War, to cut through whatever myths have been perpetuated relative to some of the central characters and events from that epic conflict and to get to the truth.  
Though O’Reilly wrote the book’s introduction and lent his name to its publication, the actual author is David Fisher, who is no slouch as a writer in his own right, having written twenty-four New York Times bestsellers himself.  Using key personalities, both heroes and villains, from these extremely turbulent years, Fisher paints a portrait of both the tragedy and triumph that was the Civil War.
After O’Reilly’s introduction there is a very useful timeline that highlights the most significant events leading up to, during, and subsequent to the actual war beginning with Frederick Douglass’ escape from slavery to Massachusetts and ending with the arrest of the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and the last Confederate soldiers surrendering.  It provides a nice visual overview of the war’s entirety before you dive into the actual text of the book.
The narrative itself is punctuated with seemingly soul-penetrating portraits of men like John Brown, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and, of course, a very thoughtful Abraham Lincoln.  They are worth the pause they cause at the outset of the chapters in which each is highlighted. 
True to form Legends & Lies: The Civil War gets to the heart of the matter in its account of what brought about, what happened, and what resulted from this most humanly costly conflict in our nation’s history.  What it was about was ending slavery in this country.  What it did was just that.  At a cost of 620,000 Union soldiers’ lives.
No matter how much I have read and learned about the Civil War, the brutality of battle, the magnitude of casualties (as indicated above), the horror inflicted, and the incredible suffering endured portrayed in Fisher’s account still staggers the imagination and serves as a stark reminder to all readers of the price paid in the past for the freedom we enjoy in the present.  The enormity of that sacrifice and the nobility of the Union’s cause are worth the telling and retelling, as it is here, so that it is never forgotten.

Reviewed by Richard Dick, Library Assistant, O’Kelly Memorial Library


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