A Monster Among Us
Butterfield, with Willie’s encouragement, set out to trace Bosket’s family tree. He was able to follow it back to the wretched days of the pre-Civil War South. Forget Margaret Mitchell’s fantasies. Butterfield sketches an era of unbroken brutality in which willful and treacherous men left carnage in their wake. Today we would say they lacked impulse control or were violent; in those days they were Southern gentlemen fighting duels over slights real and imagined....