Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground

"Quite a literary accomplishment...The reader watches with increasing fascination as the Union and Confederate ghosts of a small but deadly skirmish come alive again between the rows of the author's golden harvest." THE NEW YORK TIMES Peter Svenson, a successful artist, dreamed as many people do, of owning a farm where he could live and work in bucolic splendor. But the forty acres of rolling hayfield that he bought in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley turned out to be the site of the Battle of Cross Keys, a Civil War engagement during which Stonewall Jackson's army scored a victory over the Union forces. Intertwining field reports, letters, and histories of the Battle of Cross Keys with the tasks of building a new house and raising a first crop, Svenson masterfully conjures up two separate but deeply conjoined worlds. Even as we come to share his reverence for the land, we become swept up with him in the momentous events that transpired there on June 8, 1862--the strategies of the indecisive army commanders, the emotions of the men in the field, the heavy casualties that both sides suffered. The two stories make BATTLFIELD a beautifully written memoir and a powerful work of historical recreation.