We ask authors to share their favorite book they would gift to readers during this holiday season.
Mark Everglade recommends SHERMAN: A NOVEL by Joseph Hurtgen
Sherman is a science fiction book that imagines an alternate history in the making where Native Americans were empowered during the Civil War after coming across a time machine. It is one of the most unusual books I’ve read. It is historical fiction with good use of time-period slang, but it’s also science fiction and satire. In some ways it’s post-modern, from the tone to toying with narrative styles, and the destruction of the grand narrative of history, yet it’s still value-laden and doesn’t quite fit that pigeonhole. Despite reading like absurdism at times, it’s also not an absurdist book, in that each character is imbued with a true sense of meaning in their lives, whether it’s winning a war, justice, discovery, or unabashed hedonism. It’s the extremes to which they take their self-imposed meaning that makes them seem darkly satirical, in essence, caricatures of themselves. The book, like our history, defies categorization, and this itself is a unique and spectacular achievement.
See my full review here: https://www.markeverglade.com/
ABOUT THE BOOK:
The Seminal Indians recruit William Tecumseh Sherman as a time traveler and political lobbyist. He visits American presidents and advocates for greater environmental protections. But the presidents don’t receive Sherman well, and many of the Seminals want a more radical approach to fixing America’s problems and exacting vengeance against the people that destroyed their ancestor’s way of life.From Andrew Jackson’s destruction of Natives to the racist and fascist rule of the 45th president, Dick Powers, Sherman and the Seminals encounter the worst America has to offer.
