A war hero, statesman, maker of marathon speeches, prodigious drinker, brawler, and leader of the Texas revolution, Sam Houston was also a peacemaker and diplomat. He served as governor of Tennessee and Texas and as president of the independent Republic of Texas. His two contrasting father figures were a Cherokee chief, who had adopted him as a runaway teen, and President Andrew Jackson, who later assigned Lieutenant Houston with the task of moving the Cherokee off their cherished ancestral lands in the Southeast.

In Born for the Storm, novelist Robert Wisehart tells Houston's story not as a dry history lesson, but as a grand, coursing adventure of the early nineteenth century. He places the reader amid the swirling currents of the times and into the thoughts of his compelling protagonist—a creation that hews closely to the facts surrounding the historical Houston yet possesses all the dimensions of a first-rate fictional hero whose faults sometimes overwhelm his considerable virtues.