Books can take us on adventures and to places we never thought possible. Through Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, one can travel the mid-19th Century world's oceans and return to a tiny East Coast sea port once viewed as the world's richest cities.

One-hundred-and-forty-five years had passed since Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson was mortally wounded by "friendly fire" in the woods at Chancellorsville, and yet it might have been yesterday. Thick forest still hangs over the waning vestige of the Old Mountain Road where the general was riding, beyond the front lines, on the night of May 2, 1863, when members of the 18th North Carolina mistook him and his aides for a Union incursion.