Gettysburg requiem

"Glenn W. LaFantasie--bestselling author of Twilight at Little Round Top--has written a gripping biography of Oates, a narrative that reads like a novel and that reveals, for the first time, the compelling and sometimes astonishing dimensions of this remarkable individual. Oates was no moonlight-and-magnolias Southerner, as LaFantasie shows. Raised in the hard-scrabble Wiregrass Country of Alabama, he ran away from home as a teenager, roamed through Louisiana and Texas--where he took up card sharking--and finally returned to Alabama, to pull himself up by his bootstraps and become a respected…