Duty, Honor, Country: West Point to Shiloh

This big book is ambitious, even epic. Mayer populates this novel with both fictional and historical characters to weave a story that starts at West Point in 1841 and ends at the first bloody day of the Battle of Shiloh. The four main POV characters range far and wide and they witness most of the big events that shaped the U.S. during those fateful years—Frémont's expeditions, the Mexican-American war, the founding of the Naval Academy, the hanging of John Brown, the attack on Fort Sumpter, and the battles that studded the first year of the Civil War. However, this isn't a dry book about events. Loves, hopes, victories, and defeats bring the characters and their families to life. Damned good book.