Our One Common Country

[Angela]

I have been a little lazy posting here lately and hope to able to apologize with a book review on James B. Conroy’s “Our One Common Country”, that I loved before I even had it in my hands.

The talk Mr. Conroy gave at the recent Lincoln Symposium in Gettysburg was brilliant and despite the rather somber topic, he managed to make the audience laugh heartily many times.

The book itself is such a treat! All the main players are introduced in a way that does not assume the reader knows everything about everybody – at the same time, it does not feel tiring or lengthy if you are already familiar with them because the author peppers in some fun anecdotes here and there that make it such a great read.

It is a minute to minute account of the before-during-after of the Hampton Peace Conference and it ends with a great collection of where fate took the acting group of people after the war.

Great list of sources and while the way the notes were done was new to me, I had no trouble navigating them.

I brought so many books from my most recent trip and now wonder how the others will fare against it.

Has anyone else read it yet?