A Soldier's Book

In this wrenching fictional diary of a Union prisoner battling to survive the malodorous conditions of a Confederate camp during the Civil War, Higgins demonstrates an eye for telling detail, a compelling narrative voice and psychological insight into the mind of a man who has endured hell. Ira Cahill Stevens, a young apothecary's apprentice from Montrose, Pa., was captured with hundreds of others during the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864 and incarcerated in the infamous Confederate prison of Andersonville, Ga., and later in Florence, S.C., from which few survivors ever emerged. Gnawed mercilessly by hunger, disease and vermin, on constant watch against the dreaded raiders who steal from other prisoners and besieged by the temptation to switch sides in order to get food and clothing, Ira finds the only things that nourish his will to survive are the illusory hope of exchanges, his valued Christian Soldier's Book for Leisure Moments and the friendships of his fellow soldiers. These men--notably the loyal veteran preacher, Gus, and the incorrigible skeptic of man's folly, Marinus--are, one by one, picked off by death or madness, and Ira is tortured by the thoughts of being similarly extinguished. Moreover, Ira must settle his conscience for having turned in his employer (and father of his beloved) for dealing in contraband, an act that forced Ira to flee and enlist in the army under a false name. In tightly packed prose with expertly rendered bits of dialogue and telling details of daily hardship, Higgins, who wrote the much-praised short-story collection The Importance of High Places, brings to vivid life one of the most atrocious episodes in the history of warfare. While MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville remains the classic account of that experience, Higgins's narrative is worthy of comparison. And, like Charles Frazier in Cold Mountain, Higgins manages to create through one small story a lyrical snapshot of an entire nation in mortal turmoil. BOMC selection. (Aug.)