Jack Hurst has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators. The most-rated is Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Men of Fire
Summary
In 1862 Ulysses S. Grant achieved what President Lincoln had sought since the start of the War: the first decisive Union victory. Fought on the western edge of the theater, the Forts Henry and Donelson campaign was a gruesome omen of what was to come. Grant, until then an obscure brigadier general with a reputation for drink, became the fighting man of the hour, earning the nickname "Unconditional Surrender" Grant for his relentless pounding of the Confederates. But he had a match in ruthlessness in Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest, cavalry commander in the Henry and Donelson campaign, proved a counterweight to Grant: quick and nimble to the former's steady plodding, a ruthless slaveholder and future KKK Grand Wizard to Grant's abolitionism. Hurst captures the battle of these two great men and armies in all its destructive glory.
©2002 Jack Hurst (P)2007 Blackstone Audio Inc.
Born to Battle
Summary
Born to Battle examines the Civil War’s complex and decisive western theater through the exploits of its greatest figures: Ulysses S. Grant and Nathan Bedford Forrest. These two opposing giants squared off in some of the most epic campaigns of the war, starting at Shiloh and continuing through Perryville, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga - battles in which the Union would slowly but surely divide the western Confederacy, setting the stage for the final showdowns of this bloody and protracted conflict. Grant is widely regarded as the man most responsible for winning the war for the Union; Forrest is known as the Confederacy’s most fearsome defender in the West. Both men had risen through their respective hierarchies thanks to their cunning and military brilliance, and despite their checkered pasts. Grant and Forrest were both lower-born officers who struggled to overcome particular, dubious reputations. In time, each became renowned for his intelligence, resourcefulness, and grit. Beginning with the Union victory at Tennessee’s Fort Donelson in February, 1862, Hurst follows both men through the campaigns of the next 20 months, showing how this critical period - and these two unequaled leaders - would change the course of the war. An utterly American tale about class and merit and their role in one of the most formative wars in the nation’s history, Born to Battle offers an impassioned account of two visionary Civil War leaders and the clashing cultures they fought - in some cases, quite ironically - to protect. Hurst shows how Grant and Forrest brought to the battlefield the fabled virtues of the American working class: ingenuity, hard work, and intense determination. Each man’s background contributed to his triumphs on the battlefield, but the open-mindedness of his fellow commanders proved just as important. When the North embraced Grant, it won a stalwart defender. When the South rejected Forrest, by contrast, it sealed its fate.
©2012 Jack Hurst (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Nathan Bedford Forrest
Summary
He was a fierce and controversial Civil War officer, an unschooled but brilliant cavalryman, an epic figure in America's most celebrated war. A superb tactician and ferocious fighter, Nathan Bedford Forrest revolutionized the way armies fought in the course of rising from private to lieutenant general in the Confederate Army. In this detailed and fascinating account of the legend of the "Wizard of the Saddle," we see a man whose strengths and flaws were both of towering proportions, a man possessed of physical valor perhaps unprecedented among his countrymen. And, ironically, Forrest - the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan - was a man whose social attitudes may well have changed farther in the direction of racial enlightenment over the span of his lifetime than those of most American historical figures.
©1993 Jack Hurst (P)1995 Blackstone Audio, Inc.