No Certain Rest: A Novel (Thorndike Americana)

Rating:
Summary: Not Much Here
Review: At the heart of the book is a murder on the battlefield of Antietam. the remains are found by artifact hunters and the murderis deuced by an archeologist and his Smithsonian pathologist friend. The premise is a good one. Unfortunately, Mr. Lehrer goes no where with it.

This book really contains very little. Very little history, very little mystery, very little archeology, very little forensics - well, you get it.

The story line could have been good if fleshed out more. The author spends way too much time recounting his hero's imaginings of the battle at Antietam Creek. There was also much redundancy in the recountings of the battles.

Lastly, the last chapter containing a modern day murder is completely incongruous and superfluous.

This is a book to skip. I was hoping for some interesting insights into the battle or some in depth accounts on the archeology. The book delivers neither. It is mostly an ode to the Civil War by the main character, a National Park Archeologist, who apparently wishes he was there.

Rating:
Summary: Nice idea...not so nice writing
Review: No Certain Rest is an example of a really good idea smeared by flimsy writing. Jim Lehrer's knowledge and understanding of the civil war is amirable and even educational at times. But when it comes to the fiction-writing aspect, this feels like the work of a weekend warrior/amateur.

The plot is the most intruiging part of the book. An archeology professor stumbles across a case where a landowner found some bones of a Union soldier buried in his property. The more the professor investigates the conditions of his burial, the more confused he gets about the circumstances surrounding the solider's death. Early in the story, the soldier's history is linked to the battle of Antietam, the bloodiest battle to occur during a very bloody war.

Jim Lehrer would be pretty good at writing nonfiction works since he knows so much about what he's assigned himself to write. But he just can't put it into a hypothetical content. And if he does, it is not done with ease. One gets the nagging feeling, while reading, that the whole process of writing a piece of fiction did not come easily to Mr. Lehrer.

Too bad too, because No Certain Rest can give many lessons to its readers concerning history, the ethics of archeology, the role that the past plays in the present, and so on. It's a short book, so if you do in fact pick it up, try to tough it out.

Rating:
Summary: Antietam revisited
Review: This is a short novel dealing with a puzzle from America's past. A pair of relic hunters are searching the Antietam battlefield, and find a skeleton with a bullet hole through its head. As the park service's local archeologist investigates, it becomes clear that the dead soldier was an officer, and was killed in the battle, but not (apparently) in combat. This intrigues the archaeologist, and off he goes to investigate and solve the mystery.

This is an interesting, if short book. There are interesting themes here. Several of the main characters almost kill one another (or do so) at various points, and you get the feeling that Mr. Lehrer is trying to make a point about violence and friendships. There is also some thoughts on the Civil War and the soldiers who died in it, and refreshingly it's not mostly about the gallant Confederates, who tend to get most of the ink in this sort of thing. I enjoyed the book, and would recommend it.