The Bonfire is the intimate and epic story of the most terrible city siege in American history: the destruction and burning of Atlanta.<BR>The struggle for Atlanta, the Gate City of the South, culminated a series of brutal battles on the western front of the Civil War. From Tennessee to the banks of the Chattahoochee River, federal invaders and Confederate defenders fought mile by bloody mile until finally Atlanta was partially encircled and besieged. Presidents Lincoln and Davis and the people of North and South followed the vicious fighting every step of the way. The future of one - or two - nations hung upon its outcome.<BR>The story of Atlanta's cataclysmic final days begins in the story of its equally spectacular rise. The development of the city by men such as its Civil War mayor, James Calhoun, was closely connected with the settlement of the American West and the country's long struggle to displace the native population.<BR>The story of Civil War Atlanta is also a rich and contrary social history. Nothing is quite what it is supposed to be: Sherman, who made Georgia howl, was as unreconstructed a racist at the end of the war as at the beginning; Union troops and Confederate forces laughed and sang together from opposite sides of the Chattahoochee River before the hellacious final conflict in which they slaughtered each other unhesitatingly by the thousands; Mayor Calhoun remained a staunch believer in the Union at the same time he waged war against it; and a handful of slaves - like Bob Yancey, who rode out alongside the town's leading citizens to surrender the city to Sherman's forces - exited the war not only freed of slavery's yoke but among the wealthiest citizens of a devastated city that would emerge as the engine of the New South.<BR>Through the compelling, interwoven, and often surprising life stories of a diverse cast of colorful characters - schoolchildren and booksellers, bootleggers and covert Unionists, bondsmen and soldiers - Marc Wortman creates a rich and multilayered portrait of the age, the city, and the terrible siege. The rise and fall of Atlanta embodied all the myths, contradictions, and aspirations of the American South, and it was in Atlanta, in 1864, that the Confederacy met its destiny.