By Frank Miniter
POST HILL PRESS BOOK
Soft Cover 206 pages
$17.99
ISBN: 979-8-89565-525-2
ISBN (eBook): 979-8-89565-526-9
Available at Amazon.com
Frank Miniter has done it again!
The author of This Will Make a Man of You, which I read a few years ago not only because Frank is a friend of mine, but also because it was written with the kind of prose for which Ernest Hemingway became famous.
Cool Heroes for Boys, published recently, tells 20 stories about genuine heroes in a way a good storyteller spins a yarn, except this book is non-fiction and the accounts are true. Readers can learn about men who stood out from the crowd. Their names are carved into history.
You’ll learn some interesting things about Sgt. Alvin York, the WWI soldier who singlehandedly captured 132 Germans after having killed several by shooting them like he would turkeys back home.
There’s a story about T.E. Lawrence, made famous by the epic film Lawrence of Arabia, which straightens out what really happened between him and an Arab tribesman named Gasim. Hint: It wasn’t accurately portrayed in the film!
Find out about Davy Crockett—not the “Davy Crockett” of the Walt Disney film, but the real flesh-and-blood frontiersman/politician—and what led to his departure from Congress and his fateful trek to Texas, where he ended up at the Alamo.
Miniter tells us about the real “midnight ride” of Paul Revere, again without the embellishment of some Hollywood script writer.
He takes us along on a narrative about a young George Washington, and his baptism of battle during the war between the British and French (1757-59) in what is now western Pennsylvania.
One of my favorite stories is about Samuel Hamilton Walker, and the first Texas Rangers armed with Colt revolvers and another Ranger, Captain John Coffee Hays, whose name is not as well known as Walker’s or Colt.
And there’s definitely some hero stuff in the section about the actions of Col. Joshua Chamberlain, commander of the Twentieth Maine regiment, which turned the tide of the fight on Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.
Miniter excels as the storyteller, mixing history and personalities in a way which grabs the reader’s attention and holds it. You may not like every detail of every story, but real life is rarely like the way history is often distorted on the big and small screen.
If you like history but dislike the typical dry accounts one finds in high school textbooks, Cool Heroes for Boys will find a treasured spot on your bookshelf.—Dave Workman
