Civil War's Last Warship

by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 8/30/2004

Crown's newly arrived executive editor, Rick Horgan, made what he described as an "aggressive" six-figure offer to pre-empt a book about a Confederate warship in the Civil War that went on firing for months after the country was again at peace because its officers hadn't heard the news. The ship was the Shenandoah, and its story will be told by Ron Powers, author of the bestselling Flags of Our Fathers, writing with John Baldwin, one of whose ancestors was executive officer on the vessel and kept a detailed log of its adventures. The book will be called Last Flag Down and will describe the Shenandoah's marauding of Union shipping and of how, eventually, the rogue vessel was pursued across four oceans by a Union naval force before finally surrendering. Horgan bought world rights from two agents, Jim Hornfischer for Powers and John Talbot for Baldwin, fending off would-be preempts from other publishers and forestalling a planned auction.