A critic for the Los Angeles Times described Blood and Thunder as 'stunning, haunting, and lyrical,' while the Washington Post called it 'riveting, thoritative and masterfully told.' Blood and Thunder was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2006 by Time magazine, and was the subject of a major documentary on the PBS program American Experience. Sides' Blood and Thunder (2006) focuses on the life and times of controversial frontiersman Kit Carson, and his role in the conquest of the American West. The book's success led Sides to create The Ghost Soldiers Endowment Fund, a non-profit foundation dedicated to preserving the memory of the sacrifices made by Bataan and Corregidor veterans by funding relevant archives, museums, and memorials. Ghost Soldiers won the 2002 PEN USA Award for non-fiction.

Esquire called the book 'the greatest World War II story never told.' The book was the subject of documentaries on PBS and The History Channel, and was the basis for the 2005 Miramax film, The Great Raid. Ghost Soldiers (2001), a World War II narrative about the rescue of Bataan Death March survivors, has sold slightly over a million copies worldwide and has been translated into a dozen foreign languages. His magazine work, collected in numerous published anthologies, has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing. Sides is editor-at-large for Outside magazine and has written for such periodicals as National Geographic, The New Yorker, Esquire, Men's Journal, and the Washington Post. He is the author of Hellhound on His Trail, Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, and other bestselling works of narrative history and literary non-fiction. Hampton Sides is an American historian and journalist. Rich in detail and spanning more than three decades, this is an essential addition to our understanding of how the West was really won. Sides shows us how this illiterate mountain man understood and respected the Western tribes better than any other American, yet willingly followed orders that would ultimately devastate the Navajo nation. At the center of this sweeping tale is Kit Carson, the trapper, scout, and soldier whose adventures made him a legend.

In Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides gives us a magnificent history of the American conquest of the West. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness. In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

Blood and thunder by hampton sides