Audiobooks by Howell Raines

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Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta--and Then Got Written Ou

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist reveals the little-known story of the Union soldiers from Alabama who played a decisive role in the Civil War, and how they were scrubbed from the history books. "It is my sincere hope that this compelling and submerged history is integrated into our understanding of our nation, and allows us to embrace new heroes of the past."-Imani Perry, professor, Harvard University, and National Book Award-winning author of South to America We all know how the Civil War was won: Courageous Yankees triumphed over the South. But is there more to the story? As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Howell Raines shows, it was not only soldiers from northern states who helped General William Tecumseh Sherman burn Atlanta to the ground but also an unsung regiment of 2,066 Alabamian yeoman farmers-including at least one member of Raines's own family. Called the First Alabama Cavalry, U.S.A., this regiment of mountain Unionists, which included sixteen formerly enslaved Black men, was the point of the spear that Sherman drove through the heart of the Confederacy. The famed general hailed their skills and courage. So why don't we know anything about them? Silent Cavalry is part epic American history, part family saga, and part scholarly detective story. Drawing on the lore of his native Alabama and investigative skills honed by six decades in journalism, Raines brings to light a conspiracy that sought to undermine the accomplishments of these renegade southerners-a key component of the Lost Cause effort to restore glory to white southerners after the war, even at the cost of the truth. In this important new contribution to our understanding of the Civil War and its legacy, Raines tells the thrilling tale of the formation of the First Alabama while exposing the tangled web of how its wartime accomplishments were silenced, implicating everyone from a former Confederate general to a gaggle of Lost Cause historians in the Ivy League and a sanctimonious former keeper of the Alabama state archives. By reversing the erasure of the First Alabama, Silent Cavalry is a testament to the immense power of historians to destroy as well as to redeem.

Howell Raines (Author), Mark Bramhall (Narrator)

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The One that Got Away: A Memoir

"Lost fish," writes Howell Raines, "chasten us to the knowledge that we are all, in each and every moment, dwindling. Imagine my surprise when I discovered well into my sixth decade that losing fish can prepare us for a blessing as well as for pain." Confronting loss -- of an elusive fish or something larger -- is at the heart of "The One That Got Away, " the graceful sequel to Raines's much-loved, bestselling memoir "Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis, " published to great acclaim in 1993. With the same winning combination of reminiscences, anecdotes, philosophy and fishing lore, his bold new memoir covers the eventful years in this latest passage of his life, and the realization that in relinquishing his former identity as a newspaperman he has actually gotten what he wanted, just in the most unlikely way. In wry and witty prose, Raines shifts between fishing vignettes and personal reflections on his childhood, his second marriage, his relationships with his two sons, the trajectory of his career at "The New York Times" and his move toward old age. At the center of his narrative is his most thrilling fishing adventure -- an epic battle with a marlin he hooked and fought for more than seven hours in the South Pacific -- which comes to symbolize his growing understanding and acceptance of the unpredictability of luck, love, lies and life, and how the unexpected can, in fact, be an opportunity to make life more interesting. Raines's wonderful descriptions of streams, people and fish; his passion for angling and writing; and his wise and perceptive commentary on the vagaries of his own life combine to create a profound book -- one of undeniable appeal and uncommon heart.

Howell Raines (Author), Tom Stechschulte (Narrator)

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