Kindle Edition Amazon An amazingly talented writer... Kobo Category:  Historical Fiction Publisher: Northampton House Press ISBN-10:  1482505169 Pages: 300 Copyright: Dec 31, 2012 ISBN-13: 9781937997175 Price: $6.99 (eBook) A magnificently harrowing trip through the bloody horrors of the battle of Gettysburg. A group of surgeons struggle amid the chaos and carnage of a battlefield hospital in this epic tale of human grist under the grindstone of the Civil War. Stunningly intense, engaging, heart-breaking—and absolutely fantastic. It is the summer of 1863 and the greatest battle ever fought on American soil is in full tilt. Southern Pennsylvania has become one great grinding stone and thousands of men are dead or dying in its wake. In this tilted landscape, reputations are made, careers are ruined, and men are driven to the brink in the wake of two armies intent on killing one another. Opportunity is everywhere… For the men and officers who fight the battle, it's a kill or be killed world, where salvation is ever just a bullet away… For the surgeons laboring over the many wounded, opportunity knocks at the tables, where the price of a man's life is all too often an arm or a leg. The cost to the surgeons, however, will be much higher… For one undertaker in particular, the dead are a canvas and his ability to make a body reflect the living individual is nothing short of amazing. For Jupiter Jones, the burgeoning dead themselves are the opportunity… And finally, for one teenage boy and former slave, alive only because his father had the courage to bury him when the end came, opportunity comes in the form of the boy with a creel and only one shoe, who may or may not be a ghost… It is the summer of 1863 and humanity is under siege. What happens next amid the carnage and human flotsam will be unholy, unnerving, and all but unbearable, with only one thing certain: nobody will escape unscathed. Here, the dead are the lucky ones. For the living, hell is in session. And it's the devil's own day.

Engaging, Heart-Breaking and Absolutely Fantastic
Engaging, Heart-Breaking and Absolutely Fantastic February 13, 2013
By D. Buxman TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE
Format:Kindle Edition
I'm not a Civil War buff. I've always enjoyed history, but I've never been crazy about historical fiction. NOT ONE AMONG THEM WHOLE was the most pleasant surprise I've had in the past year. I was hooked from the first chapter. The writing is crisp, the dialogue is engaging and the plot lines are intricately woven and wonderfully timed. I would give this book 6 stars if I could. Edison McDaniels has a rare gift for honing the experiences of an epic battle into fine points of individual struggle and sacrifice. The descriptions of primitive surgical techniques nearly caused me physical discomfort at times, but I kept coming back for more since I truly cared for the characters. Although I finished the book a few days ago, I still find myself thinking about it. This is a terrific book that I will likely read again. I can think of no higher praise.

IndieReader Review
Verdict: A vivid, engrossing story of one battle, told from the perspective of the soldiers that fought it, and the surgeons who tried to patch them up.

Indie Reader Approved!

In “Not One Among Them Whole,” author Edison McDaniels, takes us by the hand and leads us through the horrors of battle as witnessed by a handful of individuals. It serves as a timely reminder for the video game generation that might see war as a glorious endeavor from which heroes emerge triumphant and whole. There are no heroes in McDaniels’ book, only people coping as best they can with desperate situations. There’s no black and white, only a grimy grey through which the novel’s characters grope for relief from the relentless horror that envelops them.
The story unfolds during and immediately after the Battle of Gettysburg, which lasted for three long days. The statistics are grim: 8,000 died on the battlefield with another 27,000 wounded. McDaniels set himself a difficult task in attempting to humanize those numbers; he has risen to the occasion. The characters in the novel are individuals with their own stories, brought together through the vagaries of a war that, in its time, was the most destructive the world had seen.
Two soldiers—one from each army—introduce us to the battle and it’s horrific aftermath. McDaniels describes, in sometimes gruesome detail, just what it might be like to lie in a field full of dead, wounded, and dying men—not to mention the scavengers (both animal and human). Even the weather, a supposedly disinterested element, seems to conspire against the soldiers and add to their misery.
The book, though, really revolves around those not intimately involved in the fighting, especially the surgeons who do their best to save the wounded. Those wounds are described in clinical detail. And the descriptions of surgery carried out in primitive conditions, before germ theory and universal hand washing, are equally detailed and not for the squeamish. (The surprise is not that so many died, but that anyone survived.) These surgeons are also wounded, by their past and present lives, and their individual tales are woven through and around the story of the two wounded soldiers.
This relentless misery, one of the book’s most salient characteristics, makes it difficult reading at times. Some relief is provided by snake oil salesman Jupiter Jones, who has gathered a crew of misfits to help sell his miracle cure: Jupiter’s Oil. But even that is short lived and the story soon returns to the battlefield.
Despite the death and decay that permeate the novel, it is a compelling read, largely because of the skill with which McDaniels unfolds his characters’ stories, day by day, minute by minute. Equally skillful is the manner in which he brings together all the characters and crafts dramas within dramas against the backdrop of the American Civil War and this one important battle. So compelling are those stories, the war fades into the background as the fate of individuals hang in the balance.
Reviewed by Brid Nowlan for IndieReader

A must for Civil War buffs!
5.0 out of 5 stars A must for Civil War buffs!, January 22, 2013
By P. B. Sharp (NM) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: NOT ONE AMONG THEM WHOLE: A Novel of Gettysburg (Kindle Edition)
Gettysburg, 1863. Once a meadow of golden wheat, now a playing field of horror, where men were programmed to play a part, to play a position. If their part was to die, they did. If their part was to heal others, they did. North and South came together in an unholy skirmish in which men were drained and bled and left somewhere on that playing field shattered in body and in mind. It was dog eat dog to the men in blue and grey- kill or be killed. "The only real commodity was suffering and the only true coin was death."

The surgeons working in unspeakable conditions, perhaps in an old church or in an abandoned shed had to resort to ingenuity, such as making a splint from the bone of a dead horse, or creating a tube into a soldier's shattered windpipe by wrapping a wire tightly around the neck of a bottle, breaking the bottle and gently inserting the wire in place. Author McDaniels is a surgeon and he takes you there, takes you into the heat of battle and introduces you to the horrors that were Gettysburg.

The novel is built around vignettes. McDaniel's fine Civil War novel is not the world of Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant or even Abraham Lincoln. McDaniel's Gettysburg is a microcosm, a seething world of its own from which no player escapes. The reader follows the characters as they play their parts in the murky tapestry of civil war. There will be a price to pay, not only death but indignity, the exposure of the souls of those who survived. Gettysburg is a very level playing field.

Plying his trade of undertaker, Jupiter Jones, an elderly black man who had graduated from being a snake oil salesman to a salesman of another sort- making the dead look decent. Jupiter is perhaps the most interesting character in the book. Wearing an old green bowler atop his head and always accompanied by a small monkey named Archimedes, Jupiter would set about transforming the cadaver beneath his hands into something that almost -at least Jupiter thought so-resembled life. Pumping some sort of arsenic mixture into the body, Jupiter would affectionately pinch the corpse's cheeks like one would pinch a child, tuck a wad of chewing tobacco inside if the dead soldier's yellow-stained hands revealed tobacco use. Snake oil, a concoction garnered long ago from trees in Africa was applied to the open eyes, plumping them out. Jupiter waxed philosophical, talking to the doctors laboring beside him, talking to the bodies. "The dead talk to me" he remarks even though "nobody gets out of life alive." Although the doctors work with the living, and Jupiter with the dead, somehow the macabre rituals are the same.

The surgeons, laboring under unspeakable conditions, using the altar of an old church as an operating table, can only push their weary bodies so far. Author- surgeon McDaniels does not spare the reader. Throughout the novel the horrendous wounds and their infinite variety and the procedures of the embattled surgeons are described in great detail. Perhaps the most interesting surgical operation concerns the trepanning of a young soldier who had been shot in the head. Surgeon Hardy had made the appalling discovery that the barely- alive boy was his own son but Hardy could not force himself to operate, so Doctor Boyd, although addicted to laudanum, performs the very tricky drilling into the boy's skull. What makes the medical narrative so authoritative is, of course, due to the author's expertise. But the information has to be honed to fit the appalling conditions, where instruments were never sterilized, where doctors could not wash their hands, where the floor of the operating theater was slimey with mud and gore. Doctor McDaniels will take you there.

On the battle field two soldiers fall together side by side, one a Yankee, the other a Rebel. The two former enemies are bonded together in misery and indeed they do bond in extremis, giving each other comfort by reciting the Beatitudes. The Yankee boy, Ezra Coffin, manages after great effort as each physical move is agony to get the Rebel's gun, thinking that he can kill them both to put them out of their misery. But there is only one ball left in the gun's chamber...

What goes around comes around, even in war, even in tragedy. Good springs from evil and author McDaniels will bring his novel to a satisfying close. Perhaps, when you finish the book you will find yourself thinking of Gettysburg not so much as a shrine but a place where humans suffered horribly and where the healed America rose- I will say it- like a phoenix from the ashes.