Eleven-year-old Marty Preston loves to spend time up in the hills behind his home near Friendly, West Virginia. Sometimes he takes his .22 rifle to see what he can shoot, like some cans lined up on a rail fence. Other times he goes up early in the morning just to sit and watch the fox and deer. But one summer Sunday, Marty comes across something different on the road just past the old Shiloh schoolhouses -- a young beagle -- and the trouble begins. What do you do when a dog you suspect is being mistreated runs away and comes to you? When it is someone else's dog? When the man who owns him has a gun? This is Marty's problem, and he finds it is one he has to face alone. When his solution gets too big for him to handle, things become more frightening still. Marty puts his courage on the line, and discovers in the process that it is not always easy to separate right from wrong. Sometimes, however, you do almost anything to save a dog.
Marty Preston wonders why it is that despite Judd Traver's attempts to redeem himself everyone is still so willing to think the worst of him. Marty's friend David is sure that Judd will be named as the murderer of a man who has been missing. Others are sure that Judd is behind a series of burglaries in the area. But Marty's parents and, with some trepidation, Marty himself persist in their attempts to be good neighbors and to give Judd a second chance. Now that Marty has Shiloh, maybe he can help Judd to take better care of his other dogs. Then again, maybe folks are right -- there's no way a Judd Travers can ever change for the good. Then a terrifying life-or-death situation brings this dilemma into sharp focus. Saving Shiloh is a powerful novel that brings this trilogy to a close.
"Marty and his best friend, Shiloh are on another adventure. Marty learns when a secret is too dangerous to keep, and that hate can spread like fire"--
Marty gets to keep Shiloh! He wasn’t able to rescue all the dogs that Judd Travers mistreated, but at least Shiloh is safe . . . right? Not necessarily, it turns out. With hunting season approaching, Judd has started drinking again, and hunting on the outskirts of Marty’s family property. What if Judd tries to take back Shiloh? What if one of Marty’s sisters gets in the way of Judd’s shotgun? It seems only a matter of time before something goes very wrong. The thing is, Marty knows a secret about Judd that no one else does, and if anything terrible happens, he will never be able to forgive himself for keeping quiet. Is it time for Marty to speak up? And can he find the courage to do so, before someone he loves gets hurt?
"These stories will last," said Raymond Carver of Shiloh and Other Stories when it was first published, and almost two decades later this stunning fiction debut and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award has become a modern American classic. In Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason introduces us to her western Kentucky people and the lives they forge for themselves amid the ups and downs of contemporary American life, and she poignantly captures the growing pains of the New South in the lives of her characters as they come to terms with feminism, R-rated movies, and video games. "Bobbie Ann Mason is one of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader," said Robert Towers in The New York Review of Books.
The story of the world is the story of things forgotten, of desperate people cowering in the dark, blind to who they truly are. In Shiloh it is no different, except there, the darkness is tangible. And it has a name. The Shadow. Amos was born a thousand years after Evander led his clan in search of the legendary Sun and disappeared from all knowledge. Evander was called a madman for seeking a world beyond the Shadow, but there are some who still believe, Amos among them. He has special power over fire, and he seems to fear nothing. But when his world falls apart, the fear takes hold, and Amos becomes a pawn in the hand of darkness. It takes Orin, the master blacksmith, Simeon, the Dreamer, and Isolde, the fiery woman with the mighty destiny, to draw Amos back. Together, they set out to find the path of escape from the Shadow.
The daughter of a religious fanatic tells the true story of a dynamic religious leader who settled in Shiloh, Maine, and his perfectionist followers, giving insight into countless extremist movements today.
Colorful, dramatic, blundering, and tragic - these are some of the adjectives that have been applied to the two-day engagement at Shiloh. This battle, which bears the biblical name meaning "place of peace," was one of the bloodiest encounters of the Civil War. The Union colonel, whose words give the present book its title, foretold the losses when he told his men: "Fill your canteens Boys! Some of you will be in hell before night...." Fought in the early spring of 1862 on the west bank of the Mississippi state line, Shiloh was, up to that time, the biggest battle of American history. One hundred thousand men were involved, and major Civil War commanders such as Grant, Sherman, Johnston, Beauregard, Bragg, and Forrest participated. The battle took the life of Johnston and it left a lasting impact on the reputation of other commanders. More-over, it played a significant role in the campaign for control of the Mississippi Valley. Although hundreds of books have been written about the Civil War and its battle, questions about the disorganized struggle at Shiloh have continued to perplex historians. Why was Grant absent when his army was attacked? Why did Grant and Sherman apparently ignore evidence of a Confederate advance? What happened to Lew Wallace that he never got his division into the fight on the first day of battle? Why did it take the Rebels so long to make their way from Corinth to the battlefield? Did the Rebels really have a distinct opportunity to win the battle, as it seems in retrospect, or were they doomed from the start? Were Johnston and Beauregard working at cross-purposes? Shiloh-In Hell Before Night provides answers or clues to answers of clues to answers for these and other questions arising from this controversial engagement. The author tells his story by placing Shiloh in the larger context of the war and by exploring the very personal side of the conflict through the words of the Union and Confederate participants, officers and common soldiers alike. Touches of humor and even or romance are revealed in the midst of the carnage, but the overriding element is the specter of death. Among those who survived, the soldiers who had been eager to "see the elephant," as they commonly referred to combat, could never again feel so eager for a fight. James Lee McDonough is professor of history at Auburn University, and the author of Stones River - Bloody Winter in Tennessee, Chattanooga - A Death Grip on the Confederacy, and the co-author of Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin.
This fictional re-creation of the battle of Shiloh in April 1862 is a stunning work of imaginative history, from Shelby Foote, beloved historian of the Civil War. Shiloh conveys not only the bloody choreography of Union and Confederate troops through the woods near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, but the inner movements of the combatants’ hearts and minds. Through the eyes of officers and illiterate foot soldiers, heroes and cowards, Shiloh creates a dramatic mosaic of a critical moment in the making of America, complete to the haze of gunsmoke and the stunned expression in the eyes of dying men. Shiloh, which was hailed by The New York Times as “imaginative, powerful, filled with precise visual details…a brilliant book” fulfills the standard set by Shelby Foote’s monumental three-part chronical of the Civil War.
