I just finished reading all the volumes of David Poyers Civil war at Series
http://www.esva.net/~davidpoyer/civilwar.htm.
The books were published in what is called trade paper back- 5" x 8".
Here are the three titles. They historical fiction and are well worth reading. Anyone else read these book?
FIRE ON THE WATERS: A Novel of the Civil War at SeaIn FIRE ON THE WATERS, Elisha Eaker is twenty, the scion of a wealthy and politically connected mercantile family in Manhattan. As war looms, Eli joins the sloop of war U.S.S. Owanee as a volunteer, as much to escape his impending marriage to his headstrong cousin Araminta as to defend the flag. There he meets Lieutenant Ker Claiborne at his own moment of decision.
Claiborne, an Annapolis graduate, has seen action in the West Indies and the Africa Station as part of the U.S. Navy’s Antislavery Patrol. Cool and competent in storm or battle, Claiborne now faces an agonizing choice between his two loves -- the Navy, and his native state of Virginia, which is on the verge of declaring for the fledgling Confederacy. He knows no matter which he chooses, he'll be called a traitor. How can a man who values honor renounce his oath? But how can a man who loves his family, and his state, fight against them?
These two men, the Yankee and the Southerner, the volunteer and the regular, will personify the two sides in the desperate conflict that begins in 1861. Together with their rationalist shipmate, engineer and freethinker Theodorus Hubbard; Eaker’s cousin and fiancee, horsewoman, thespian, and eventual spy Araminta Van Velsor; and escaped Georgia slave turned Navy gunner Calpurnius Hanks, they will face storms, mechanical breakdowns, official blundering, treachery, and eventually the test of battle in the greatest war in American history.
A COUNTRY OF OUR OWNWe first met Lt. Ker Custis Claiborne, formerly of the United States Navy, in Fire on the Waters. By his own admission, Claiborne is "no admirer of the institution of Hamitic slavery." Its horrors struck home on antislavery patrol along the Coromandel Coast in the 1850's. But he's also a Virginian. When the North decides to preserve an outworn Union by force, his course is clear. In A Country of Our Own, he "goes South", joining first the Virginia Navy, then the fledgling Confederate States Navy in April, 1861.
After defending the shores of the Potomac alongside the hastily mustered troops of the Army of Virginia, Ker runs the blockade out of New Orleans aboard a converted sidewheeler turned Confederate raider. He and his saturnine mentor Captain Parker Trezevant burn, sink, and destroy across the Caribbean, to undermine the Union's financial might and force a truce favorable to the Confederacy.
But when that first cruiser proves unstable, under-armed, and short-legged, Ker joins Commander James Bulloch in England, to buy or build a ship of war that can sweep Union commerce from the seas. When a daring coup puts Ker in command of the fastest, most dangerous raider ever to range from Brazil to Boston -- the ex-opium clipper C.S.S. Maryland -- he'll set Yankee seamen a-tremble wherever the water's salt and seagulls scream. And maybe even, decide the issue of the war.
THAT ANVIL OF OUR SOULSWe first met Eli Eaker, Theodorus Hubbard, Araminta Van Velsor, Alphaeus Steele, Cal Hanks, and Ker and Catherine Claiborne in Fire on the Waters. Then, in A Country of Our Own, Ker Claiborne took the war North as captain of the most dangerous Confederate raider ever to put to sea. Now That Anvil of Our Souls takes us into the turrets and casemates of the most historic sea engagement of the Civil War. In New York, Theo Hubbard, engineer for a revolutionary new “fighting machine” called the Monitor, compromises his future by accepting a bribe. In Norfolk, Catherine Claiborne faces her husband’s impending hanging for piracy, the death of their baby daughter, and the bitter realities of enemy occupation.
In Richmond, Lt. Lomax Minter searches for a spy who threatens the Confederacy’s ultimate weapon: an invulnerable ironclad named Virginia, rebuilt from a sunken wreck in a race against time. While the aging Dr. Alphaeus Steele witnesses the horror that’s the aftermath of glory; and gun-captain and escaped slave Calpurnius Hanks struggles with the demons of his past and the challenges of freedom.
Poyer’s vivid fictional characters join meticulously researched historic figures to re-create the bloodiest conflict in American history – one whose reverberations will endure as long as freedom, equality, and home have different meanings in proud and unyielding hearts.
