Hard Tack and Coffee

By John D. Billings,

Book cover of Hard Tack and Coffee

Book description

First published more than 100 years ago, Hardtack And Coffee is John Billings’ absorbing first-person account of the everyday life of a U.S. Army soldier during the Civil War.

Billings attended a reunion of Civil War veterans in 1881 that brought together a group of survivors whose memories and stories…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Hard Tack and Coffee as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Hailed by historians as one of the most important memoirs authored by a Civil War veteran, Hard Tack and Coffee tells the story of army life. John D. Billings traces the trail of the citizen soldier from recruitment and enlistment to the trials and tribulations of camp and campaign. Written more than two decades after the end of the conflict, Billings reflects on those tumultuous times with humor as he and his comrades stumbled their way through the varied lessons of the art of war. After he mustered out of a Massachusetts artillery regiment in 1865, Billings went on…

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Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

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