This incredible tale of dashing Dan Sickles (1819-1914)-Civil War general, lover of the Queen of Spain, avenging husband who killed his wife's paramour-has all the action and romance of a novel. It provides the first full-length portrait of a colorful American figure who loved to play the hero, and often was one. Here's how the story of Dan Sickles begins: " WHEN HE FIRST OPENED HIS EYES in a modest New York home October 20, 1819, the skyscape beyond the Battery was fretted with the spars of hundreds of tall sailing ships. President Monroe was in the White House, Queen Victoria-to-be still in the nursery...."When, May 3, 1914, those eyes-keen, gray, recalcitrant-closed for the last time, a stupendous one-hundred-year cycle almost had run its course. Woodrow Wilson was busying himself with the New Freedom at home, the Familyhood of Nations abroad. George V and Wilhelm Hohenzollern were exchanging cousinly notes. British dreadnaughts nosed unobtrusively toward Scapa Flow. German cruisers clotted at Kiel...."Ninety-four years of America's turgid adolescence! And some fifty of them spent in the thick of national affairs...."Down the roaring decades that blent a score of polyglot peoples to a new breed, thrust Mexico across the Rio Grande and Colorado, Canada beyond the Columbia, the West out to mid-Pacific, his was a stormy, dramatic figure in Congress, on the battlefield, at the courts of Madrid and St. James's, in the palacios nacionales of Colombia, Panama, Peru...."