Acworth Bookstore will hold a book signing FRIDAY June 15th from 5 to 8 PM. Janet Elizabeth Croon will be available to discuss and sign “The War Outside My Window : The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865″ (Savas Beatie, 2018).
This unique document—rare for its teenager’s perspective, rare for its register of daily pain across five years—is a testament to what it means to watch the world of the Confederacy slowly fall as one’s body fails, too. LeRoy Gresham, from Macon, Georgia, began writing his diary at twelve years old. His leg had been smashed by falling rubble from a chimney of a burned-out house that he and friends were exploring. LeRoy writes daily, most often from a reclined position and with a mind full of good humor and acid wit. He covers the goings on of his home, family, slaves, and the people who pass through town and his house, as well as what he reads in newspapers and in a never-ending stream of novels. The war proceeds with fits and starts, and he adds his cheers for the Confederacy, until, finally, the dream of that nation comes to an end, and he also dies, at the age of seventeen. The cause, it is today decided in a detailed medical afterward written by a specialist in nineteenth-century medicine, was spinal tuberculosis, something much more insidious than a broken leg.
