Buy My Friend's Book

. . . or I'll kill this dog. (No I won't. Please don't cancel me, PETA.)

The book is Huckleberry Finn In Love And War: The Lost Journals. (You have to admit, that's a lot of title for the money.) The author is an old friend of mine.

If you happen to have Kindle Unlimited, you can download the e-book for free; if not, the download will cost $9.95 (which strikes me as steep, but blame the publisher, not the author). The dead-tree paperback is $14.95, which is closer to reasonable.

If you're into Mark Twain and/or the Civil War, I think there's a good chance you'll like it. If not, probably not. It took some chutzpah for the author to get in the ring with Sam Clemens. If you want to judge whether he's got the chops, there are a couple of excerpts below the "Read more." Also, you can read the first seven chapters at the Amazon link; they mostly take place during the Mexican-American War.

Here Huck tells how his Mexican lady-friend tried to teach him to play chess:

I says no I don't [play chess], far as I knowed. She says that warn't no problem, she'd teach me; she was going to be a teacher some day. And so when we got all the pieces laid out, she says I can be white and take the first move. The two rows on the one side had darker hats, and the other side lighter ones, and she says they was supposed to represent armies with kings and castles and everything. 

Well, it turns out that after I got to move one of my row of little sombrero folks out one square, she got to jump one of her caballeros on horseback all the way over her first line, and right there I seen how it was going to be, and I allow she was a match for Tom Sawyer at making rules up as they was needed. I could see how maybe a horse might jump over some poor fellow fighting on foot, but that rider could be whipped by a "bishop" with nothing but a shepherd crook! And you'll never guess who the powerfullest fighter of them all was: the Queen! That's right -- she got to sashay all over the board taking prisoners and whole castles all by herself with no weapon a body could see, and the sad old King has to set off in the corner and can only move one square at a time, and if he gets so much as boxed in, the jig was up!

And here Sid describes the ground over which the Battle of the Wilderness was fought:

The name Wilderness is misleading: had the area really been untouched by the ax, it would have huge oaks, hickories, and poplars, with their canopy keeping underbrush to a minimum. You could see through those woods for fifty yards or more -- shoot through them and march through them, at least in columns, and take shelter behind those trees. But this "wilderness" -- more than a hundred square miles -- has been cut over and burned and cut over again, to fuel nearby furnaces for low-grade metal and charcoal. So these woods are new and green, thick with second-growth pine, sumac, and black gum, and choked with honeysuckle and laurel and greenbrier near the streams . . .

. . . And lines of battle are nearly impossible, with officers and flags often out of sight, and once firing begins enemies and comrades may be visible only by rifle flash -- and friendly flashes look just like unfriendly ones. But there's little real cover: the second growth stops you from seeing, but it doesn't stop shot and shell -- which go right through saplings and into your groin, shattering your hip and sending you straight into shock, and when you fall, nobody knows where.