Sam Houston, one of the most mercurial and contradictory characters in U.S. history, was a statesman, orator, drinker, brawler, and so much more. In The Rising, Robert Wisehart picks up where he left off in his brilliant historical novel Born for the Storm, about the triumphs and tragedies of Houston's early career as a headstrong soldier and protean politician. This exciting sequel finds Houston-the former U.S. senator and failed governor of Tennessee-in revolutionary Texas, where he has been appointed general of the newly proclaimed republic's revolutionary army. Vividly evoking the hardships and dangers of that muddy frontier struggle, Wisehart brings to life the cool-headed commander's inspired balancing act as he keeps his badly overmatched army-ill-supplied, untrained, and on the verge of outright mutiny-out of harm's way while he plots his one, desperate chance to prevail against the arrogant Mexican dictator Santa Ana. As in Born for the Storm, novelist Wisehart narrates Houston's story not as a musty history lesson, but as a rip-roaring adventure. The reader hears the echoing hoofbeats and the crack of flintlock and percussion-cap rifle fire that punctuate swirling political and cultural currents of an 1830s Texas inhabited by English-speaking Texians and Spanish-speaking Tejanos, delicately allied in their rebellion against Santa Ana's overbearing Mexican government, and also by a colorful assortment of fortune-seekers from the Carolinas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Ireland, and England, all of whom find their futures suddenly dependent on the perilous struggle for Texas independence. Readers who enjoyed Born for the Storm will find this book a more-than-worthy continuation of the story, and an essential transition to The Lion at Bay, the final installment in Wisehart's Sam Houston trilogy.