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Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Roper
Publisher: Walker & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $28.00
Buy New: $11.99
You Save: $16.01 (57%)
New (38) Used (6) from $10.79
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 56922
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.6
ISBN: 0802715532
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.3
EAN: 9780802715531
ASIN: 0802715532
Publication Date: October 28, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The Civil War is seen anew, and a great American family brought to life, in Robert Roper’s brilliant evocation of the Family Whitman. Walt Whitman’s work as a nurse to the wounded soldiers of the Civil War had a profound effect on the way he saw the world. Much less well known is the extraordinary record of his younger brother, George Washington Whitman, who led his men in twenty-one major battles—from Antietam to Fredericksburg, Vicksburg to the Wilderness—almost to die in a Confederate prison camp as the fighting ended. Drawing on the searing letters that Walt, George, their mother Louisa, and their other brothers, wrote to each other during the conflict, and on new evidence and new readings of the great poet, Now the Drum of War chronicles the experience of an archetypal American family—from rural Long Island to working-class Brooklyn—enduring its own long crisis alongside the anguish of the nation. Robert Roper has constructed a powerful narrative about America’s greatest crucible, and a compelling, braided story of our most original poet and one of our bravest soldiers.
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| Customer Reviews:
a complex and layered book November 18, 2008
Those of us that were born during or after World War II have a better understanding of the war than those who only read history of the war. Our history is a combination of personal experiences told by family members and our reading. This makes history a personal experience that makes us part of this great event. We have lived through the war from the stories of our families experiences and became part of those events.
While none of us can hear personal experiences from family members about the Civil War, we can find books that tell the type of stories our families told about World War II. The experiences of those families can become part of our understanding of the war. These small family events become part of our story of the war and increase our understanding of the war. "Now the Drum of War", "The Fighting McCooks" and "House of Abraham" are excellent examples of family histories that illustrate the impact of the war on American families.
This is a complex and layered book, which is more than I expected. This is a history of the Whitman family that is much more than just the Civil War. This is a history of one family trying to make a life in Brooklyn and Long Island before, during and after the war. While the Civil War is the pivotal event in their lives, it is not the centerpiece of the book. The book is more a biography of the Whitman family than a history of the Civil War. While the cover promises a history of the war, it is not the major focus of the book. Walt Whitman worked in the hospitals in Washington, his brother George served in a New York regiment and a third brother paid to escape the draft. The Whitman's were not unusual and their story is not unique. Walt and George contributed to but their brother out of the draft. George enlisted as a private and was promoted to company commander for bravery. Walt saved many lives through kindness in the hospitals. Each day, he came with money, fruit, candy, paper, pens and stamps. He gave these to the penitents, wrote letter for them, talked to them and sat holding their hands as they died. The brother who stayed home, helped support their Mother, sisters and brother who was dying. This is an intimate look at a family living through the war and trying to establish themselves in the middle class.
The author writes well. He tells a story well and writes a good book. There is room for improvement but this is a solid readable account. The book will appeal to those who are interested in Walt Whitman, the Civil War and life in Brooklyn in the 19th century.
A valuable portrait of Walt Whitman as both Civil War bard and family man November 18, 2008
Do our kids learn anything about Walt Whitman in school these days? Do they read any of the work of our nation's greatest poet? Sadly, these are questions worth asking.
A sizeable library of books on Whitman has accumulated since his death in 1892. He continues to provide grist for the lit-crit mills and the doctoral thesis industry. For those curious about Whitman's life or just enthralled by his wide-ranging poetic flights, there is a lot out there.
Journalist, historian and fiction writer Robert Roper has taken a slightly different tack in NOW THE DRUM OF WAR. While concentrating on the poet's well-known service as a sort of unofficial visiting nurse in the military hospitals around Washington during the Civil War, he also places Whitman within his family situation --- his aging mother back in Brooklyn, his six siblings, his early careers as house builder and journalist, and his once glossed over but now openly acknowledged identity as an open homosexual.
Roper's book is not a straightaway biography. It virtually ignores Whitman's childhood and devotes almost as much attention to his heroic soldier-brother George as it does to Walt himself. It is grounded largely in family letters, in Walt's own personal notebooks and in reminiscences of those who knew him both at home and in the military hospitals and camps. Roper sees him as "the war's most knowledgeable noncombatant."
Walt Whitman initially went south to visit George after the bloody battle of Fredericksburg, just one of a long string of major battles in which George performed heroic service under hails of shot and shell, while sustaining only one relatively minor wound. Through acquaintances in Washington, Walt was able to find lodging and part-time government work that left him ample leisure to carry out his real mission of visiting the wounded laden with small articles, food items and words of comfort.
Roper makes clear that Whitman also saw these injured young men as raw material for his poetry. He gives us a goodly amount of analysis of the poems, showing how many of them reflect places Whitman had seen and men Whitman came to know in his hospital rounds. The author is candid too about the obvious sexual attraction that Whitman felt toward many of the soldiers he comforted.
His brother and his elderly mother were both uncomprehending of his poetic gifts, but both loved him and cared for him assiduously by letter. He was, says Roper, his family's father figure. George Whitman could not make heads or tails of LEAVES OF GRASS when that epoch-making collection of poems first appeared, and Mrs. Whitman compared her son's book ruefully with Longfellow --- well, if "Hiawatha" is poetry, I guess his is too.
Roper's mining of family letters and journals gives us a good idea of what life was like both at home and in the army camps during the war. Typical of Roper's lack of interest in standard biographical detail is his dismissal in one sentence of the famous incident when a minor government official got Whitman fired from his Washington job after finding and perusing a copy of LEAVES OF GRASS in Walt's office desk.
Roper's obvious interest in George also leads to a fair amount of discourse about Civil War battle strategies and campaign tactics. This is perhaps interesting up to a point, but it is easily available in quantity elsewhere and seems irrelevant to his book's main purpose. That complaint aside, NOW THE DRUM OF WAR provides a valuable portrait of Walt Whitman as both Civil War bard and family man. He was, as one hospital observer put it, "an odd-looking genius."
Happily, Roper retains the picturesque odd spellings and halting grammar of his original sources. But oddly, the book has no table of contents, and his 29 chapters bear no titles --- merely numbers.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn
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