2008 1st Ed. Signed 2x Gene Hackman Escape from Addersonville Novel Civil War

  

Book was signed in my presence at the Margaret Mitchell House on Friday May 16, 2008. Gene signed to Marjorie (two book limit; brought a friend) and signed "Hope you Enjoy This" then both authors signed.

The voice of Gene Hackman: Over the course of his 40-plus years in cinema, it has been street-tough (The French Connection), gleefully villainous (Superman), on-your-feet inspiring (Hoosiers), and solidly terrifying (Unforgiven), but there's a consistent edge to it that hints at something unsaid, and you alwaysalwaysknow it when you hear it. After starring in more than 70 films, the two-time Oscar winner once called "Hollywood's uncommon everyman" by The New York Times has all but said goodbye to the screen, choosing instead to develop his voice elsewhere: on the page. "I only wish I would have started sooner, " Hackman, now 78, says of writing. The veteran actor laughs and invokes a little Brando: I coulda been somebody! I coulda been a contender! Hackman and his friend, underwater archaeologist Daniel Lenihan, have recently completed their third historical novel, Escape from Andersonville. The book centers around Nathan Parker, a captain in the Union army who escapes the hellish Civil War prison (roughly 13,000 men died of starvation and disease in the 14 months Andersonville was open) and, with the help of an opportunistic ex-Confederate soldier named Marcel Lafarge, assembles a band of morally compromised raiders to free the rest of his unit, the Fifth Michigan. Escape from Andersonville is a nod to the yarn-spinners of yore: a plot-driven, pulpy read aimed at Civil War aficionados who will appreciate the authors' careful research and obvious enthusiasm for the subject. Readers in search of a more complete depiction of the infamous prison may want to turn next to MacKinlay Kantor's 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Andersonville. Hackman and Lenihan, who both live in New Mexico, met in the early'90s, when Lenihan taught Hackman and his wife to scuba dive. They began writing together 12 years ago after discovering that they shared an enduring love for the adventure stories of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway. "We tended to gravitate toward yarn-spinners, " Lenihan says, people who were intrigued with a period of time that had an intensity to it and then laid a human drama over it.

Neither Hackman nor Lenihan had written fiction before. Living up to the saying that writers are readers moved to imitation, the two worked out a method in which each would take on a character and write chapters from that character's point of view, then they would meet every week to discuss how the story was progressing.