Christopher Phillips (2)

Nathaniel Lyon was a strange, strange man. Perhaps it is fitting that his biography is a strange, strange book.

Lyon was simply another career army captain until the events of the last year of his life catapulted him to the attention of the public. Until then, he had been an intelligent but opinionated and insubordinate soldier who was good at getting in trouble. But when the Civil War broke out, he found himself in a place in Missouri where he was at the end of a long lever. He jumped on it show more -- and Missouri moved. He successfully drove Confederate sympathizers out of state government, and put key parts of the state under Union control, earning a brigadier general's commission along the way -- but he also so polarized Missouri society that the state was the battleground of irregular raiders for the rest of the war. In the end, Lyon got himself killed at Wilson's Creek at a battle he didn't really have to fight.

The question is, Why?

That's what this book sets out to answer. Much of the first part of the book is devoted to figuring out why Lyon was the strange, fanatical person he was. It seems clear that author Phillips thinks there was something abnormal about Lyon.

This is where things get strange. This isn't a psychological treatise, so it's no surprise that Phillips never gives Lyon's condition a name (autism? a personality disorder?). But he never really explains how it worked itself out, either. If this were a Greek tragedy, as best I can tell, Phillips would have us believe that Lyon's fatal flaw was not his personality but just... lack of sleep.

The volume is strange on other grounds. Although it is mostly quite readable, there are places where the choice of words makes pure nonsense; it perhaps needed another round of editing. And Phillips opens by complaining about the Civil War biography of Lyon, which he condemns as highly inaccurate -- but uses it anyway. Some of his footnotes are to publications which surely cannot have contained the information he cites in the text. There are things in here that he just could not have known. These are quibbles. The main problem is the psychological one: the lack of an explanation for Lyon. Who certainly needed explanation.

To be fair, background information on Lyon is sparse. He was like a comet -- completely invisible until he suddenly flashed across the night sky for a few months, then vanished. We don't know enough to truly understand him. With all its flaws, this book represents a genuine addition to our knowledge. But it definitely left me confused and wanting more. show less