Author(s): Thomas Keneally

Audiobook

From the author of Schindler's List. Internationally published author. Thomas Keneally was the winner of the Booker Prize. Narrated by an American Publishers Assocation Audie Award winner, Humphrey Bower. American Scoundrel is the lens through which the listener can view history at a time when America was being torn apart. Charming and ambitious, Dan Sickles literally got away with murder. His protector was none other than the President himself, the ageing James Buchanan; his political friends quickly gathered round; and Sickles was acquitted. His trial is described with all Thomas Keneally's powers of dash and drama, against a backdrop of double-dealing, intrigue and 'the slavery question'. Enslaved, in her turn, by the hypocrisy of nineteenth-century society, his wife was shunned and thereafter banned from public life. Sickles, meanwhile, was free to accept favours and patronage. He raised a regiment for the Union, and went on to become a general in the army, rising to the rank of brigadier-general and commanding a flank at the Battle of Gettysburg - at which he lost a leg, which he put into the military museum in Washington where he would take friends to visit it.
"America Scoundrel offers a fascinating look at time when powerful men could get away with virtually anything - as long as they were a bit charming and well-connected." - Houston Chronicle "Keneally ...is a gifted writer who captures the mood and manner of an age in succinct verbal portraits." - Book Page "It is a great tale, and Keneally has told it with skill and relish..." - Independent, UK