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GLORY : ONE GALLANT RUSH [ 1st ]
'...written with authority & quiet power, this is the history of a period noted for sweeping action & resounding with the names of great men & women...The decisions they made & the things they did serve as dramatic counterpoint to a story that in the best sense of the term is grand.'--Saunders ReddingNote for Paperback EditionForewordAcknowledgmentsOne Gallant RushAuthor's NoteNotes on SourcesBibliographyIndex
Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1965
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About the author
Peter D. Burchard
36 books2 followersPeter Burchard was the author of 26 books, nonfiction and fiction, adult and juvenile and the illustrator of more than 100 books.
His biography "One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment" (1965), became the main source of historical material for "Glory," the Academy Award-winning film featuring Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman and Matthew Broderick, who portrayed Col. Shaw, commander of the first black regiment in the Civil War.
His first published illustrations appeared in Yank, a magazine published by the Army, in which he served as a signal operator during World War II on troop ships between the United States and France, Egypt and the North Atlantic. He began illustrating books in 1947, the year of his graduation from the Philadelphia Museum College of Art.
Beginning with "The River Queen" (Coward McCann, 1957), a riverboat story, Burchard wrote several self-illustrated books for children. His short novel, "Jed" (1960), the story of a friendship between a 16-year-old Yankee soldier and a Southern boy, had 14 printings in the United States and was published in several languages, including Arabic.
He received a Christopher Award for the humanitarian value of his illustrations for Bulla's "Pocahontas and the Strangers." In 1966, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Shaw biography.
Other subjects of his books are sailing, the history of flight, World War II and New York City during the Boss Tweed era. His most recent book was "Frederick Douglass: For the Great Family of Man" (Simon and Schuster, 2003), a Parents' Choice honor book.
He was a member of the international PEN Club and, up to the time of his death, served on the panel of advisers for the George Polk Awards. His final work, a fictionalized autobiographical story of a young serviceman's first love affair in New York City, is "Paper Shoes."
http://www.iberkshires.com/story/1481...
His biography "One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment" (1965), became the main source of historical material for "Glory," the Academy Award-winning film featuring Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman and Matthew Broderick, who portrayed Col. Shaw, commander of the first black regiment in the Civil War.
His first published illustrations appeared in Yank, a magazine published by the Army, in which he served as a signal operator during World War II on troop ships between the United States and France, Egypt and the North Atlantic. He began illustrating books in 1947, the year of his graduation from the Philadelphia Museum College of Art.
Beginning with "The River Queen" (Coward McCann, 1957), a riverboat story, Burchard wrote several self-illustrated books for children. His short novel, "Jed" (1960), the story of a friendship between a 16-year-old Yankee soldier and a Southern boy, had 14 printings in the United States and was published in several languages, including Arabic.
He received a Christopher Award for the humanitarian value of his illustrations for Bulla's "Pocahontas and the Strangers." In 1966, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Shaw biography.
Other subjects of his books are sailing, the history of flight, World War II and New York City during the Boss Tweed era. His most recent book was "Frederick Douglass: For the Great Family of Man" (Simon and Schuster, 2003), a Parents' Choice honor book.
He was a member of the international PEN Club and, up to the time of his death, served on the panel of advisers for the George Polk Awards. His final work, a fictionalized autobiographical story of a young serviceman's first love affair in New York City, is "Paper Shoes."
http://www.iberkshires.com/story/1481...
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
June 26, 2020
One Gallant Rush practically turned out to be a biography about Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of the 54th Massachusetts regiment consisting of all Black volunteer soldiers during the American Civil War. The book covers his upbringing into young adulthood, his time in college and the military, up to the battle he fought alongside his regiment at Fort Wagner. Also, the author shares facts about his family, and of course his marriage.
Glory is hands down one of my favorite war films. I picked this book up hoping to learn more about the soldiers of the 54th, but there isn’t much here about them at all. It’s the 3rd book I’ve read on this subject that hasn’t met my expectations. Perhaps there isn’t much known about these soldiers, or it simply wasn’t recorded? It came as a surprise that the book does go a bit further into the future after Fort Wagner, which offers a little more information on what happened to the soldiers who perished and also those taken captive.
I enjoyed the writing, but this certainly isn’t an easy read. Reading about the degradation these Black men had to endure because of their skin color, by others—viewing them as nothing but expendable—is difficult to take in. However, the 54th’s heroism and devotion is always awe-inspiring to me.
4****
Glory is hands down one of my favorite war films. I picked this book up hoping to learn more about the soldiers of the 54th, but there isn’t much here about them at all. It’s the 3rd book I’ve read on this subject that hasn’t met my expectations. Perhaps there isn’t much known about these soldiers, or it simply wasn’t recorded? It came as a surprise that the book does go a bit further into the future after Fort Wagner, which offers a little more information on what happened to the soldiers who perished and also those taken captive.
I enjoyed the writing, but this certainly isn’t an easy read. Reading about the degradation these Black men had to endure because of their skin color, by others—viewing them as nothing but expendable—is difficult to take in. However, the 54th’s heroism and devotion is always awe-inspiring to me.
4****
June 27, 2011
Robert Gould Shaw’s drinking and gambling buddies, his fellow Harvard oarsmen and comrades in white regiments all recorded his gaiety, cheerful temper, and frank, easy manners. But he came of crusading stock. The namesake grandfather summoned the sixteen-year-old to his deathbed and exhorted him to use his “example and influence” against the ills besetting the republic, intemperance and slaveholding. His sickly mother constantly reminded him that if he worked for righteousness she could face her impending death serenely (she outlived him by forty years). When his time came, Shaw accepted the colonelcy of the 54th Massachusetts after only a night’s brooding, and, aged twenty-five, and newly wed, went forward to certain martyrdom on Morris Island showing only a slight twitching at the corners of his mouth.
On TV Shelby Foote said the Fifty-Fourth “nevah shouldah made that chahge.” Bull-shit. Of course they should have. Given that doomed assaults, last stands and forlorn hopes were dear to Victorian hearts; that for all its sentiment, the age imposed a harsh ideal of conduct, often saw heavy losses as proof of a regiment’s “gallantry,” its fortitude in the thick of the fight; and given that most Northerners, even or especially reformers and abolitionists, viewed men of an enslaved race as feminized, in the mold of Beecher Stowe’s passive and good Uncle Tom, a heart-melting wretch but no one’s idea of a manly citizen—given all that, it seems to me that charging headlong into a rebel bastion and fighting its defenders hand-to-hand until half the assaulting force is dead or wounded is exactly what you should do, if you want to demonstrate to such a public and to Army brass that the black race produces “true” men who can fight bravely, die “gallantly.” Remember, this was a culture that (like most in human history) felt “only murder makes men” (Du Bois’ wry phrase). People were deeply impressed that Shaw fell at the head of his regiment. The commander rallying his men, waving his sword in one hand and clutching his picturesquely bloodied breast with the other, was a figure of immense romance. Many reveled in Christ comparisons, because of the contempt shown Shaw’s corpse: the Confederates stripped it naked and displayed it within the fort, before doing what they thought was the ultimate dishonor, tossing it to the bottom of ditch and covering it with the bodies of forty-five of his men. One might see in the burial of a wealthy white officer under a pile of blacks a Confederate version of crossroads crucifixion beside thieves—ineffectual degradation. The Northern press exulted in Shaw’s burial, called it the crown of his efforts. After the rebels abandoned Fort Wagner—the decomposing 54th had poisoned its freshwater well—Shaw’s father begged the army not to disturb his son’s remains.
Shaw repeatedly told his lieutenant-colonel he would perish in their first major fight. Was he planning such a death, or accepting it as preordained, as his duty? The tone of the testimony is vague. Shortly after the assault Shaw’s brother-in-law Charles Russell Lowell, a cavalryman killed the following year, wrote his wife that “the best Colonel of the best black regiment had to die, it was a sacrifice we owed,—and how could it have been paid more gloriously?” In any case, the regiment’s unfaltering performance—of stoic composure, of the rite of the suicidal charge, of gyokusai, say—quieted doubts about black troops and opened the floodgates of enlistment. And the 178,000 black soldiers who followed in the wake of the 54th not only helped win the war that destroyed slavery, they got our foot in the door, civically: Lincoln at his most cautious and conservative knew he could not, postwar, deny black veterans the vote.
In the darkness of their bondage,
In the depths of slavery’s night,
Their muskets flashed the dawning,
And they fought their way to light.
(Paul Laurence Dunbar, “The Colored Soldiers”)
When General Thomas rode over the field [at Nashville], and saw the bodies of colored men side by side with the foremost on the very works of the enemy, he turned to his staff, saying, “Gentlemen, the question is settled: Negroes will fight.” How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance and religious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most people, even those of liberals, only murder makes men.
(W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction)
But about Burchard’s book…it is skimpy and uninspired. Wikipedia says he wrote mostly for children and young people. In desultory follow-up reading, I saw Burchard listed among the revisionist historians—little Stracheys lifting Shaw’s statue to expose wormy neuroses and Freudian family strife. Bland Burchard must be their least emphatic, most peripheral member; or simply a pioneer who first published the documents. Nothing in the book more than hints at the revisionist reading in which Shaw is a troubled young man who briefly rebels against—but in his need for approval, becomes the half-willing sacrifice of—Sarah Sturgis Shaw, his powerful mother and quintessence of New England’s evangelical, sentimental, abolitionist-reformist matriarchate. It is true that teenage Rob did much to scandalize expectations. The revisionist reading is founded on abundant evidence that Robert was at times the black sheep among his four older sisters (future social workers and suffragettes), domineering-because-sickly mother, as noted, and father who, at his wife’s urging, retired from business as a young man in order to evangelize reform (their money funded the Transcendentalist commune, Brook Farm, and an array of antislavery and feminist agitation). The revisionists see the father’s relinquishment of his career, the “male sphere” of Victorian gender division, as evidence of the castrating gynarchy of the Shaw household. Rob drank and partied across Germany while his sisters dutifully availed themselves of Paris, as a school of linguistic and musical finishing (the Shaws, like the Jameses, spent the 1850s educatively abroad; Wilkinson James, Henry’s younger brother, was an officer in the Fifty-Fourth). He wanted to attend Columbia instead of Harvard (oh, naughty boy!), and though forced into Harvard dropped out after two years. He rolled his eyes at abolitionism, wrote nasty things about blacks and the Irish his mother later scissored from his letters, and once declared, to parents consumed by national sin and public expiation, by what family friend Elizabeth Gaskell called “the deeper responsibilities of their position,” that he had no taste for anything but amusing himself.
I find the revisionists’ mother-hating proto-Hemingway as lifeless as the Abolitionist Saint—“the angel of God come down to lead the host of freedom to victory,” John Greenleaf Whittier called him—and am persuaded, at least for now, by Joan Waugh’s centrist and synthetic argument that in soldiering Robert found a confidence, a sense of his powers, and a version of his mother’s ideals, but cast in his own intensely masculine terms—recruiting the Fifty-Fourth he rejected one-third of applicants, and everyone from Boston reporters watching them drill to Confederate opponents burying their bodies remarked what “fine, strong, muscular fellows” the chosen men were; and he dreamt of leading his men into action alongside a white regiment and doing better. Waugh thinks Shaw’s sudden and secret abandonment of the job found for him after Harvard, in the offices of an uncle’s firm, to march down Broadway and off to war with the 7th New York, at the outbreak in 1861, marked the consummation of his youthful rebellion and its end, the initiation of a maturity that saw him reconcile his ferocity and love of contest to his family’s public spirit and humanitarian piety. Reading Yourcenar on the Japanese tradition of hopeless battle I thought of Waugh’s interpretation, one of many covering the corpse of this young man long dead, Robert Gould Shaw:
On TV Shelby Foote said the Fifty-Fourth “nevah shouldah made that chahge.” Bull-shit. Of course they should have. Given that doomed assaults, last stands and forlorn hopes were dear to Victorian hearts; that for all its sentiment, the age imposed a harsh ideal of conduct, often saw heavy losses as proof of a regiment’s “gallantry,” its fortitude in the thick of the fight; and given that most Northerners, even or especially reformers and abolitionists, viewed men of an enslaved race as feminized, in the mold of Beecher Stowe’s passive and good Uncle Tom, a heart-melting wretch but no one’s idea of a manly citizen—given all that, it seems to me that charging headlong into a rebel bastion and fighting its defenders hand-to-hand until half the assaulting force is dead or wounded is exactly what you should do, if you want to demonstrate to such a public and to Army brass that the black race produces “true” men who can fight bravely, die “gallantly.” Remember, this was a culture that (like most in human history) felt “only murder makes men” (Du Bois’ wry phrase). People were deeply impressed that Shaw fell at the head of his regiment. The commander rallying his men, waving his sword in one hand and clutching his picturesquely bloodied breast with the other, was a figure of immense romance. Many reveled in Christ comparisons, because of the contempt shown Shaw’s corpse: the Confederates stripped it naked and displayed it within the fort, before doing what they thought was the ultimate dishonor, tossing it to the bottom of ditch and covering it with the bodies of forty-five of his men. One might see in the burial of a wealthy white officer under a pile of blacks a Confederate version of crossroads crucifixion beside thieves—ineffectual degradation. The Northern press exulted in Shaw’s burial, called it the crown of his efforts. After the rebels abandoned Fort Wagner—the decomposing 54th had poisoned its freshwater well—Shaw’s father begged the army not to disturb his son’s remains.
Shaw repeatedly told his lieutenant-colonel he would perish in their first major fight. Was he planning such a death, or accepting it as preordained, as his duty? The tone of the testimony is vague. Shortly after the assault Shaw’s brother-in-law Charles Russell Lowell, a cavalryman killed the following year, wrote his wife that “the best Colonel of the best black regiment had to die, it was a sacrifice we owed,—and how could it have been paid more gloriously?” In any case, the regiment’s unfaltering performance—of stoic composure, of the rite of the suicidal charge, of gyokusai, say—quieted doubts about black troops and opened the floodgates of enlistment. And the 178,000 black soldiers who followed in the wake of the 54th not only helped win the war that destroyed slavery, they got our foot in the door, civically: Lincoln at his most cautious and conservative knew he could not, postwar, deny black veterans the vote.
In the darkness of their bondage,
In the depths of slavery’s night,
Their muskets flashed the dawning,
And they fought their way to light.
(Paul Laurence Dunbar, “The Colored Soldiers”)
When General Thomas rode over the field [at Nashville], and saw the bodies of colored men side by side with the foremost on the very works of the enemy, he turned to his staff, saying, “Gentlemen, the question is settled: Negroes will fight.” How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance and religious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most people, even those of liberals, only murder makes men.
(W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction)
But about Burchard’s book…it is skimpy and uninspired. Wikipedia says he wrote mostly for children and young people. In desultory follow-up reading, I saw Burchard listed among the revisionist historians—little Stracheys lifting Shaw’s statue to expose wormy neuroses and Freudian family strife. Bland Burchard must be their least emphatic, most peripheral member; or simply a pioneer who first published the documents. Nothing in the book more than hints at the revisionist reading in which Shaw is a troubled young man who briefly rebels against—but in his need for approval, becomes the half-willing sacrifice of—Sarah Sturgis Shaw, his powerful mother and quintessence of New England’s evangelical, sentimental, abolitionist-reformist matriarchate. It is true that teenage Rob did much to scandalize expectations. The revisionist reading is founded on abundant evidence that Robert was at times the black sheep among his four older sisters (future social workers and suffragettes), domineering-because-sickly mother, as noted, and father who, at his wife’s urging, retired from business as a young man in order to evangelize reform (their money funded the Transcendentalist commune, Brook Farm, and an array of antislavery and feminist agitation). The revisionists see the father’s relinquishment of his career, the “male sphere” of Victorian gender division, as evidence of the castrating gynarchy of the Shaw household. Rob drank and partied across Germany while his sisters dutifully availed themselves of Paris, as a school of linguistic and musical finishing (the Shaws, like the Jameses, spent the 1850s educatively abroad; Wilkinson James, Henry’s younger brother, was an officer in the Fifty-Fourth). He wanted to attend Columbia instead of Harvard (oh, naughty boy!), and though forced into Harvard dropped out after two years. He rolled his eyes at abolitionism, wrote nasty things about blacks and the Irish his mother later scissored from his letters, and once declared, to parents consumed by national sin and public expiation, by what family friend Elizabeth Gaskell called “the deeper responsibilities of their position,” that he had no taste for anything but amusing himself.
I find the revisionists’ mother-hating proto-Hemingway as lifeless as the Abolitionist Saint—“the angel of God come down to lead the host of freedom to victory,” John Greenleaf Whittier called him—and am persuaded, at least for now, by Joan Waugh’s centrist and synthetic argument that in soldiering Robert found a confidence, a sense of his powers, and a version of his mother’s ideals, but cast in his own intensely masculine terms—recruiting the Fifty-Fourth he rejected one-third of applicants, and everyone from Boston reporters watching them drill to Confederate opponents burying their bodies remarked what “fine, strong, muscular fellows” the chosen men were; and he dreamt of leading his men into action alongside a white regiment and doing better. Waugh thinks Shaw’s sudden and secret abandonment of the job found for him after Harvard, in the offices of an uncle’s firm, to march down Broadway and off to war with the 7th New York, at the outbreak in 1861, marked the consummation of his youthful rebellion and its end, the initiation of a maturity that saw him reconcile his ferocity and love of contest to his family’s public spirit and humanitarian piety. Reading Yourcenar on the Japanese tradition of hopeless battle I thought of Waugh’s interpretation, one of many covering the corpse of this young man long dead, Robert Gould Shaw:
After that, the leaders of the peasant class are lettered samurai, deeply imbued with neo-Confucian doctrines which accept thought only insofar as it ends in action, and who consider, like William the Silent in Europe, that “one need not hope in order to undertake.”…Civilization is the guardian of justice. Many hollow idealists have proclaimed similar slogans. Ōshio and Saigō signed theirs with their blood.
February 16, 2023
I was eager to read this considering it was the basis for one of my favorite movies. And while it was enjoyable, the book is overly bogged down in the details of Col Robert Gould Shaw’s life while paying very little detail to the black soldiers under his command. Granted, this book was written in 1965, we have plenty of Shaw letters detailing his life, and fewer accounts from his soldiers. But still, a well researched book would have endeavored to tell more of their story. Further, the book ends with the attack on Ft Wagner and the death of Shaw. I would have appreciated more about the regiment in the later years of the war, or about the enlistment of more black regiments. The book could have easily sacrificed the first half’s excessive details about Shaw’s youth for a more meaningful discussion of what his sacrifice ultimately meant for the cause of freedom after his death. Overall an interesting read though!
April 6, 2019
Sadly not as good as the movie. There was no story up until the last few chapters, it was all just Shaw going back and forth visitng relatives and writing letters. It also made no mention of some key people in the movie such as Forbes or Searles.
August 31, 2013
I read this little history after seeing 'Glory', the movie based upon it. It is to be noted that this was not the only book Burchard wrote about Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts.
July 1, 2023
This has the tone of a hagiograph for Col Shaw, but from what I have seen in other sources, he really seems to have lived from a place of his convictions. His bravery and desire to be in the forefront of the fighting from an honorable stance is an example that seems to be exemplary. The writer does seem to have done a good job in the recollection of a small group and it's crowning achievement in a small action in a very large war.
December 10, 2019
Five stars for the history; three stars for the dry account that did little to illuminate the lives of those in the history. Thank heavens Glory was made and did a better job of bringing some life to the personalities involved.
July 12, 2017
The book that was the basis for the movie "Glory." Good history of Robert Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts in the Civil War.
October 12, 2018
Even better than the movie.
August 13, 2020
Mostly good depiction of African-Americans fighting in the Civil War, but it appears to be a little long winded in places and slightly slanted.
June 30, 2018
This book was a one day read and a good one at that. The author tells the story of Robert Gould Shaw and the historic 54th Massachusetts infantry regiment. This book is a good starting point for anyone interested in learning more about Shaw and his men. I had received this book as a birthday present some time ago and just now got around to reading it. I would say that this belongs on the shelf of every Civil War enthusiast.
July 6, 2016
A short but sweet book telling the story of a naïve young man who evolved into a confident officer after enduring many hardships in the army, eventually accepting the high responsibility as Colonel of America's first black regiment. While he was no fanatic, he was a dedicated soldier who simply wanted to do what he believed, was right for his country and when he became leader of the 54th, he was prepared to die for it. In a strange way, this makes him even more admirable. I highly recommend this book to any fans of Robert Gould Shaw or of the Civil War in general. Burchard remains sympathetic to Robert but at the same time doesn't seek to glorify. The book contains many sources that give us an idea about Shaw's personality and life experiences, mostly via his letters to family and friends. He was an ordinary man for his time, who by his tragically early death at 25, had achieved extraordinary things.
The few nitpicks about this book I would have to mention is that I do wish Burchard had talked more about the men of the 54th, as well as Shaw's experience training them at Readville. I also wish he had mentioned Shaw's personal prejudices somewhere in the book. Those sentiments were (sadly) normal for the time period, even in Shaw's Boston elite society. Still, a mention would have been nice, as it would have added more honesty about the type of background Shaw grew up in as well as his own struggle to identify with races outside his own. Apart from those though, I didn't have too much trouble with the book overall.
Although you will most likely finish this book in a short space of time you will, if you ask me, get a genuinely balanced insight into Shaw's life and thoughts. While I can understand why some people would have problems with this book, I personally think it's quite underrated and should at least be given a chance.
Still though I find it very hard to believe that Glory was actually based off this... hmmm...
The few nitpicks about this book I would have to mention is that I do wish Burchard had talked more about the men of the 54th, as well as Shaw's experience training them at Readville. I also wish he had mentioned Shaw's personal prejudices somewhere in the book. Those sentiments were (sadly) normal for the time period, even in Shaw's Boston elite society. Still, a mention would have been nice, as it would have added more honesty about the type of background Shaw grew up in as well as his own struggle to identify with races outside his own. Apart from those though, I didn't have too much trouble with the book overall.
Although you will most likely finish this book in a short space of time you will, if you ask me, get a genuinely balanced insight into Shaw's life and thoughts. While I can understand why some people would have problems with this book, I personally think it's quite underrated and should at least be given a chance.
Still though I find it very hard to believe that Glory was actually based off this... hmmm...
May 18, 2009
12/29/08 One of my favorite (based-on-a-true-story) movies has a NF book about the historical events! I am so excited my library owns a copy and can't wait to delve into this one, too!
5/17/09 I did like this book. It took me almost 5 months to read it because I got involved in quite a few faster reads (both Fic and NF). This book was well-written, but it did not have me driving to finish it until near the end--when I knew what was coming and wanted the full details. Unfortunately, the book did not give me as many details about the part of the story that I'm most familiar with. However, I still learned quite a few things about Shaw's overall history and more of sides of the Civil War that I had not read about before. A good book, though one can tell it is a little dated in writing style (very "thick" and occasionally to dry to keep one's interest). But informative and quite good in giving honor to Shaw and his regiment.
I chose this book to fulfill my Book Challenge's requirement of reading a book about someone I admire. And, yes, I still think Shaw is someone with many admirable qualities. The book did not over-glorify him. (The movie didn't either.) And, as I usually do, I liked learning things that the movie never put in.
5/17/09 I did like this book. It took me almost 5 months to read it because I got involved in quite a few faster reads (both Fic and NF). This book was well-written, but it did not have me driving to finish it until near the end--when I knew what was coming and wanted the full details. Unfortunately, the book did not give me as many details about the part of the story that I'm most familiar with. However, I still learned quite a few things about Shaw's overall history and more of sides of the Civil War that I had not read about before. A good book, though one can tell it is a little dated in writing style (very "thick" and occasionally to dry to keep one's interest). But informative and quite good in giving honor to Shaw and his regiment.
I chose this book to fulfill my Book Challenge's requirement of reading a book about someone I admire. And, yes, I still think Shaw is someone with many admirable qualities. The book did not over-glorify him. (The movie didn't either.) And, as I usually do, I liked learning things that the movie never put in.
March 23, 2023
This volume about the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers is one of the books on which the movie "Glory" was based. While interesting, I thought the author dwelled too much on the prewar life of Shaw. He comes across as a pleasant enough fellow during this period, but leads the idle life of a rich young man without much purpose. The raid on the town of Darien is portrayed, and, of course, there is the stirring assault on Fort Wagner. In those situations, we see something of the determined and heroic Robert Gould Shaw depicted in "Glory." But there is essentially nothing about the molding of the black recruits into a fighting unit, which was a major part of the film. It makes me wonder if anything like the episodes featured in the film even occurred. And you learn nothing about the black soldiers in the regiment. Guess I'll have to find something further to read.
April 17, 2009
I received Peter Burchard's book One Gallant Rush as a gift from my parents in the early 1990s. In hindsight I wish I had not waited almost twenty years to read Mr. Burchard's book because I really enjoyed it. I became interested in the American Civil War as a young boy after seeing the movie Glory on television, a movie based largely One Gallant Rush.
September 1, 2009
A wonderful short history of the bravery of the men of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment during the Civil War and their brave young officers, a glimpse into the bravery of former slaves and their love of freedom. Robert Gould Shaw's letters are beautiful and a sad reminder that all war grants is loss and destruction and for what? worth reading.
February 29, 2012
The other book Glory was based on . . . clearly! Good read, though a bit dry . . . (well . . . it was either this book or Lay This Laurel that was a dry read . . . the other was a bit better). Honestly . . . one of the rare cases where I preferred the movie to the books!
November 28, 2010
Good, even if it didn't give me as much insight as Shaw's letters.
February 1, 2015
Story tells of an ignored part of the Civil War. Good to bring a forgotten group of men into the history books.
April 7, 2008
solid history; inspiring story
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews