The Demon of Unrest

[Tom Bogar]

Just finished The Demon of Unrest and want to share that it is really quite good (at 490 pages of text, a thorough read, but never a slog). I don’t think it was written for posters and readers of this board, but rather for a public not as familiar with the events which transpired between Lincoln’s first election and the bombardment and capitulation of Fort Sumter. This is deep-dive, long-quotation-transcribing micro-history at its best. There are countless flashes of enthralling narrative brilliance, with Larson’s descriptive powers as evocative as ever. Individual characters are set forth in strikingly colorful detail (for example, Buchanan appears far more hopelessly inept and indecisive—bordering on treasonably so—than I had realized, and Edmund Ruffin and Louis Wigfall appear as cartoonish self-aggrandizers). Larson does note in his Acknowledgments that on his editor’s advice he cut 40,000 words, and I would suggest that another 20,000 or so might additionally have been trimmed. (Did we really need to know all about James Henry Hammond's pedophilia, the details of Mary Chesnut’s flirtations, and precisely how many slaves each southerner owned?) But then, would you want to be the person to tell Erik Larson what to cut? My other quibble would be his fairly consistent (about half the time) reliance on secondary sources. That being said, this is an engrossing, vivid narrative that I would highly recommend, especially if one is not overly familiar with the events described.