Why did Abraham Lincoln sneak into Washington for his inauguration? was the Gettysburg Address written on the back of an envelope? Where did the Underground Railroad run? Did General Sherman really say, "War is Hell"?
If you can't answer these questions, you're not alone. Millions of Americans, bored by dull textbooks, are in the dark about the most significant event in our history. Now New York Times bestselling author Kenneth C. Davis comes to the rescue, deftly sorting out the players, the politics, and the key events...
IMAGINE THAT THE SOUTH HAD WON THE CIVIL WAR. From the ashes of a divided nation came the Confederate States of America-the capitol is Richmond, and the races are equal but very, very separate. For President Spencer Jefferson Lee-the great-great-grandson of both Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee-it's politics as usual.
A veteran of the Mexican War, W. W. H. Davis returned to New Mexico in 1853 to become United States Attorney for the territory. He soon thought of himself as El Gringo, the stranger, who had much to learn about his new home and its people.
Equipped with a few changes of clothes, a two-book law library, and a ravenous curiosity, Davis recorded in his diary all that impressed him on his thousand-mile trip to Santa Fe and his thousand-mile court circuit. In 1856 he ransacked the diary to write El Gringo, selecting those features of custom, language, landscape, and history most likely to interest general readers.
Engines of Logic is a thoroughly enjoyable mix of biographical portraits and theoretical mathematics. If, in places, the mathematical/logical ideas are not so clearly developed, we don't fault the author. In a book of this size (slim) and scope (broad), one can only hope to find a decent overview of a particular subject matter. Engines of Logic is more than decent; it is highly entertaining, informative, and thought-provoking. The great pleasure Davis took in writing it springs from every page. Davis is a fine guide through some very abstruse mathematical and computer science fields -- to which he himself has been a significant contributor. This book is a first-rate piece of popular science.
