James S. Wadsworth was a successful lawyer and influential New York politician when the Civil War broke out. His wealth, strong anti-slavery views, and active support of President Lincoln made him a controversial public figure in the early war years. In 1863, he was given a field command and proved himself to be one of the Union's most able and daring commanders, although he died before the war ended. His battlefield boldness and righteous resolve to end slavery is, as former U.S. Congressman James W. Symington says, "a vivid reminder that our Civil War was, indeed, fought on moral grounds."

Although he never achieved the renown of Ulysses S. Grant or Robert E. Lee, General Alexander Hays was one of the great military men of the Civil War. Mahood draws on personal correspondence and contemporary sources to complete the picture of a complex man, devoted husband and father, and dedicated soldier.

Stretching three quarters of a century, from roughly 1870 to 1945, "A Strenuous Day" traces the lives of Harve and Hattie England of Maryville, Missouri, an otherwise ordinary couple caught up in events which transformed their lives. In telling their story, Mahood comes to know his grandparents, who are a very real part of a period in history marked by a World War, a flu epidemic, the likes of Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and distinguished by the Great Depression. Mahood deftly pieces together this chronicle of the Englands from diaries,...