Book Review

I have mixed feelings about the author, but I’ll save that for another time. He seems to have done his homework pretty thoroughly in preparation for Born Fighting. As the descendant of a Scotsman who migrated to South Carolina in the mid-eighteenth century, the subject matter of this book resonates with me a mighty way! Here’s Webb to summarize his main point better than I could:


"This people gave our country great things, including its most definitive culture. Its bloodlines have flowed in the veins of at least a dozen presidents, and in many of our greatest soldiers. It created and still perpetuates the most distinctly American form of music. It is imbued with a unique and unforgiving code of personal honor, less ritualized but every bit as powerful as the samurai code. Its legacy is broad, in many ways defining the attitudes and values of the military, of working class America, and even of the particularly populist form of American democracy itself. And yet its story has been lost under the weight of more recent immigrations, revisionist historians, and common ignorance."



I'm only a third of the way through it, but Born Fighting's proving to be a great read.