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Revolutionary novel more than meets the mind Burnsville, North Carolina, author Charles F. Price's new work of historical fiction, Nor the Battle to the Strong: A Novel of the American Revolution in the South, slated for a summer launch by Frederic C. Beil, Publisher, of Savannah, is garnering advance praise from novelists and poets of national reputation as well as some of America's most highly respected historians of the Revolutionary War. Seabrook Wilkinson, a collateral descendant of Greene, literary critic for The Charleston Mercury, and author of A Local Habitation, a poetry collection, has written: "Charles Price's masterful novel Nor the Battle to the Strong…[is] the most compelling portrait of Nathanael Greene I have read [and] will doubtless win many admirers for this great man whose courageous persistence ensured that the South would be part of the new America." Greene, commander of the Southern Continental Army from late 1780 through the spring of 1783, is one of the two chief characters in Price's novel. Among noted authors of fiction who have given the work favorable notice are Ron Rash, author of One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, The World Made Straight and the forthcoming Serena; and Robert Morgan, whose Gap Creek was an Oprah Book Club winner in 2000 and whose own Revolutionary War novel, Brave Enemies, appeared in 2003. Eminent historians have also celebrated Price's new work. These include Dr. Dennis M. Conrad of the Naval Historical Center in Washington, D.C., editor of the monumental documentary collection The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, now recognized as having set a new standard of excellence for annotation of documentary materials; and John Buchanan, author of The Road to Guilford Courthouse, acknowledged as the definitive modern account of the campaign that won Revolution in the South. Previously Price's novels about his native Southern Appalachian Mountains- Hiwassee; Freedom's Altar; The Cock's Spur; Where the Water-Dogs Laughed- have earned positive notice from critics and readers, and three have won coveted literary prizes. But in the new book Price makes a startling departure in narrative style, content and setting, though his trademark, a meticulous attention to historical accuracy, is again vividly present. The novel tells in alternating chapters the interwoven stories of ex- Quaker, Rhode-Island-born Greene and a common soldier serving under him, Scottish immigrant and runaway indentured servant James Johnson, during Greene's arduous campaign in the late summer of 1781 to drive the British from South Carolina. This structure provides the reader both a "top-down" and a "bottom-up" look at the conduct of a little-known but decisive aspect of the war that established our nation. It also relates the love stories of Greene and his vivacious wife Caty and of Johnson and his North Carolina back-country sweetheart Agnes Baker. Price is a direct descendant of Johnson and Agnes Baker. The book culminates with an account of the Battle of Eutaw Springs, today an all but forgotten engagement, which was actually the bloodiest of the war for the numbers involved. Nor the Battle to the Strong will be released July 4.
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