Ambrose Bierce: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians ed. by Donald T. Blume (review)

that element, and years later Coffin repeated it. The editors do not reconcile the two versions except to include 311 illustration showing Eliza balanced on freefloating ice with her young child in her arms. A careful reading of the Coffin excerpts suggests 1 corrective to future publication. The book also includes Still' s account of a confrontation between local African Americans and slave hunters that ended with the escape of the fugitive,the death of the master,and a charge of treason against some of the rescuers. William Still wrote, published, and sold his book and dedicated k to the men and women who had risked everything to escape slavery. These excerpts add hum. 111 interest tc)a historical drania that many view only abstractly. The source material reprinted in this volume provides 111 introductioti to two of the 11»lore iniportant Underground Railroad sources. A careful reading of such source materials should provide a 117() re aCCutwte accoiitit of \ vhat has becollle a m. VOr historical legend. I.arn, Gara E, ileritits. Wili, ii} tgto)! College Donald T. Blume, ed. Ambrose Bierce: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. Kent: Kent State University Press,2004. 221 pp. ISBN: 0873387775 ( paper), $ 29.00. most legendary accounts of aid given fugitive slaves. Coffin, who never mentioned secret signals or hidden rooms, kept fugitives 111 the upper story of his house despite many in Cincinnati knowing it. A successful merchant,he publicly warned slave hunters that anyone entering his home without permission would face a trespassing charge. While other abolitiot»lists, lacking Coffin's im177 u 11i ty,could not assist runaways so openly,the legendary sh ot d of secrecy is often exaggerated. Coffin's book C nai is an important source and it is useful to have parts of it reprinted. Some authors have created such William Still' s book is a colpo gnant written expressions lection of transcribed interviews - of the human condition that they with fugitive slaves, biograph transce id t me and are rewarded, cal sketches of fugitives and justly by wde readerships decade abolitionists, and excerpts from aftei decade. For others whose newspapers. Still regarded the rept tat on is assured,even if they fugitives, whom he labeled self are labe led with the backhanded emancipated, as the he oes of 11, 1 /' k i ' i compliment " minor writer," the his book. The editors failed to IN 4 I 'lib cyclcal patterns of history must include the story of how one of coll de with contemporary events the fugitives who St 11 ass sted to set them once again upon the turned out to be his own brother, L bedside stands of the living. Such Peter Still. Their e not onal meet a renaissance is underway for 1, the works of Ambrose Bierce. ing inspired Still to prese ve his -, « ts . many interviews for poss' b e , rs - - + -- - - - ' t r-. 14: In 2005, with death a regular SPRING 2005 89 BOOK REVIEWS customer in human fears and in the realities of global life,Bierce' s stories resonate with mankind' s delusions, hopelessness, and random violence to offer an ambivalent ( dis)comfort to modern readers . Indeed, the horrific events of September 11, torture at Abu Ghraib prison, suicide bombings in Iraq and Palestine,internet beheadings of hostages, the systematic slaughter of two million people in Darfur and Sudan, and the monumental disaster of an Asian tsunami drowning thousands upon thousands of victimsagain and again ( and yet, again) for television viewersresurrect interest in Bierce's phantoms. Donald Blume has revived Bierce's 1892 edition of Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, cutting down flabbier subsequent editions to get to what he argues is the most accurate version of the author's original intentions . Three of the short stories (" An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," " Chickamauga," and " The Man and the Snake") are sometime lodgers in literary anthologies. The thesis of Blume' s edition is that Tales is not merely a collection of nineteen loosely connected short stories awkwardly divided into two unmatched parts, but an artfully crafted masterwork offered up as... literary counterpoint to the popular novels and novelists of the late nineteenth century," ( ix) He acknowledges that although Tales is...