University Press of Virginia, 1999

Like a new shoe of the correct size that initially seems to fit awkwardly because of its unusual design, Stephen Cushman’s Bloody Promenade requires patience on the part of the reader before its virtues become apparent. What at first seems to be a series of rambling, disjointed musings soon builds into a provocative, multi-layered meditation on that “particularly awful moment in the American Civil war” marked by the Battle of the Wilderness in central Virginia on May 5 and 6, 1864.