A Western Life Well Lived

Blaine Lamb’s biography The Extraordinary Life of Charles Pomeroy Stone chronicles the life of the inimitable military engineer, including his lifelong friendship with fellow West Pointer President Ulysses S. Grant (center in sun helmet), who visited Karnak, Egypt, in 1878. – Courtesy Library of Congress – — Blaine Lamb’s biography *The Extraordinary Life of Charles Pomeroy Stone* chronicles the life of the inimitable military engineer, including his lifelong friendship with fellow West Pointer President Ulysses S. Grant, who visited Karnak, Egypt, in 1878.

Charles Stone is best known as an infamously treated scapegoat. In his concise and well-sourced biography, Blaine Lamb—author of The Extraordinary Life of Charles Pomeroy Stone: Soldier, Surveyor, Pasha, Engineer (Westholme Publishing, $29.95)—takes Stone from West Point, through his contributions in Winfield Scott’s invasion of Mexico, to his self-inflicted financial disasters in California and Sonora, his stellar service organizing Washington’s defenses at the outset of the Civil War, his loose leadership at Ball’s Bluff that led to his unconstitutional imprisonment without any charges filed, and on to his 13-year service to the ruling khedive of Egypt, and his construction of the base and pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

—Paul Cool, author of Salt Wars: Insurgency on the
Rio Grande