In At The Death
Book 4 of Settling Accounts
Language: English
1861-1865 Alternative History Alternative histories (Fiction) Confederate States of America Confederate States of America - History Fiction General Historical Science Fiction Southern Victory United States United States - History - 20th century United States - History - Civil War War & Military War stories
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: Jul 30, 2009
Description:
Franklin Roosevelt is the assistant secretary of defense. Thomas Dewey is running for president with a blunt-speaking Missourian named Harry Truman at his side. Britain holds onto its desperate alliance with the USA’s worst enemy, while a holocaust unfolds in Texas. In Harry Turtledove’s compelling, disturbing, and extraordinarily vivid reshaping of American history, a war of secession has triggered a generation of madness. The tipping point has come at last.
The third war in sixty years, this one yet unnamed: a grinding, horrifying series of hostilities and atrocities between two nations sharing the same continent and both calling themselves Americans. At the dawn of 1944, the United States has beaten back a daredevil blitzkrieg from the Confederate States–and a terrible new genie is out of history’s bottle: a bomb that may destroy on a scale never imagined before. In Europe, the new weapon has shattered a stalemate between Germany, England, and Russia. When the trigger is pulled in America, nothing will be the same again.
With visionary brilliance, Harry Turtledove brings to a climactic conclusion his monumental, acclaimed drama of a nation’s tragedy and the men and women who play their roles–with valor, fear, and folly–on history’s greatest stage.
From the Hardcover edition.
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From Publishers Weekly
Alternate history master Turtledove brings his 10-book saga of a Confederate Civil War victory to a satisfying if predictable conclusion. Outfought by the United States and their German allies (as anticipated in 2006's Settling Accounts: The Grapple), the Confederates finally surrender, ending WWII. Now the Southern states must be brought back into the Union after four wars and 80 years of independence. The victorious Northern forces wage a brutal occupation, ruthlessly retaliating against the local population for ambushes and car bombs. While the Union joyously punishes the persecutors of those Negro residents of the Confederacy who survived the Freedom Party's genocide campaign, it fails to remedy its treatment of its own black citizens. With Canada and the secessionist Mormon territories remaining under martial law, some readers may wish that Turtledove follows this time line into uncharted territory in yet another sequel. (July)
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From
Here ends (probably) alternate history's closest rival—10 volumes and a prequel—to Robert Jordan's plethoric fantasy, the 11-volume Wheel of Time. The Confederacy crumbles in ruins, as Jake Featherstone meets the end he richly deserves. Generals Dowling and Morrell end with the high rank and position their efforts deserve, while Michael Pound recovers from burns received in a well-drawn tank battle, and Chester Martin ends his second war successfully, having kept his platoon commander from killing the whole platoon. On the other hand, the saga's four-contestant nuclear race leaves four nuclear powers still standing at war's end, and both soldiers and civilians contemplating the spectacle with crossed fingers. Moreover, race relations in the defunct Confederacy are horrible, entailing the murder of at least six million "colored," a genocide that dwarfs this-world Bosnia and Rwanda combined. Meanwhile, Clarence Potter, Cincinnatus Driver, and Flora Blackford will be working to heal the malignant scars in Turtledove's parallel continuum, so who can say how the U.S. might emerge? Perhaps into a three-cornered cold war (U.S., Germany, Japan)—if and when Turtledove obliges reader curiosity A conclusion worthy of a nonpareil saga. Green, Roland