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Review: Pryor, Reading the Man (2007)

Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters by Elizabeth Brown Pryor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I have very conflicting feelings about this book.

On the one hand, I love the concept. It's a biography of Robert E. Lee where each chapter's starting point is a letter or letters (mostly written by Lee, some written to him, and a few written about him). And Pryor does a great job of using the letters as launching points to talk about the different phases and aspects of Lee's life. It doesn't feel gimmicky at all. Pryor is an excellent writer and a thorough historian, so the book is a pleasure to read.

On the other hand, while I support and admire her determination to talk about Robert E. Lee as he was, not as he was hagiographied, and while she is persistent in pointing out his flaws, I find some of her philosophy, like the idea that Lee's decision to fight for the Confederacy was a noble decision because he "followed his heart," highly questionable. A bad decision is still a bad decision, even if it's made sincerely, and as some of her other chapters make clear, Lee made that bad decision because he fully bought into his culture's beliefs about the superiority of the white race and the utter inferiority of Black people. She also thinks Lee should get big kudos for surrendering at Appomattox (rather than perpetuating a guerilla war) and persuading his soldiers to follow his example, and I'm like, yes, that was the right decision, but couldn't he have made it six months earlier? HOW many men died because Lee couldn't admit the defeat staring him in the face? And she makes statements in discussing Appomattox and the end of the war like "The dignified relinquishment of command is among the most ennobling of American traditions" (441) which I think blurs the line between relinquishment of command, like a president stepping down after his term is up (and she uses John Quincy Adams and Harry Truman as examples, so she really is thinking of presidents), and the surrender of an army. Lee's not relinquishing command; he's accepting defeat. Totally different.

Basically, I think she rejects hagiography and then circles back around to it anyway.

I think Lee is a fascinating figure. I think he had a year where he (and Stonewall Jackson) was a great general. I think Pryor does a really excellent job of showing why he made the decisions he did. I also think he was wrong, wrong, wrong, and I DON'T think you can ignore the ideology he supported when you are deciding whether he is a heroic figure or not.

So this is an excellent book, but I disagree with it a lot.




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Review: Foreman, A World on Fire (2010)

A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is SO GOOD.

I hoped it would be interesting, but it is both fascinating and beautifully written. Foreman discusses Britain's role from the governmental to the personal level, tracking the careers of several people, mostly diplomats and politicians British, Federal, and Confederate and British volunteers with the Union or Confederate Army---of which there were way more than you would think---but also people like Rose Greenhow and Belle Boyd. Foreman writes about diplomats and privates with the same care and focus and has done a wonderful job of ferreting out letters and memoirs, both of the people she is following and of the people they interacted with. She also does a really excellent job of guiding her readers through the Civil War. I never felt lost or confused, and my attention did not flag through the whole 800 page* book

Highly recommended and obviously five stars.

___
*not counting endnotes and the glossary which, as with so many glossaries, would have been more helpful if I'd known about it on page 1, instead of on page 917



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Review: Cunningham, Shiloh (1966, 2007)

Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 by O. Edward Cunningham

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This was Dr. Cunningham's Ph.D. thesis. It is the result of a prodigious amount of research. The 2007 editors (Dr. Cunningham died in 1997) claim that the thesis is "extremely well written," and I regret to inform you that that is not true. I found him hard to follow, and especially got bogged down in the endless roll calls of troop dispositions (e.g., "The Kentucky Unionist [Crittenden] chose to attack with his Fourteenth Brigade, commanded by Colonel William Sooy Smith, a thirty-one year old West Point-trained Ohioan. Smith had the Thirteenth Ohio, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Hawkins, on the left, the Twenty-sixth Kentucky on the right, Lieutenant Colonel Cicero Maxwell, and the Eleventh Kentucky, Colonel Pierce Hawkins, in reserve. The Fourteenth Wisconsin, Colonel David Wood, was attached to the brigade, and it fought to the right of the Twenty-sixth" (353-54)---and this is a relatively small and restrained example). I get why the troop dispositions are an important part of Cunningham's thesis (so much research!), but that doesn't make them any easier to wade through. And otherwise, no, like most Ph.D. theses including my own, Shiloh is very clunkily written and I don't come away feeling like I understand the battle any better than I did before. I know more, if I can retain any of it, but I feel like I'm drowning in details (including awkwardly inserted human-interest anecdotes) and never got anything really to hang those details on.

So, yes, amazing research, kind of hard to read. It took me forever to get through it, partly because I kept putting it down to go read other things.



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Review: Glatthaar, General Lee's Army (2008)

General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse by Joseph T. Glatthaar

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is, as the title suggests, a history of the Army of Northern Virginia. It is partly based on socioeconomic data analysis, so Glatthaar can, based on his sample of 600 soldiers, talk about what percentage of soldiers were slaveholders, how much wealth they had (which ranged dramatically from $0 to over $10,000), etc. He does a good job of explaining why the South thought the war started without falling into the error of defending their point of view. This is a history, not an apologia.

Talking about the Army of Northern Virginia is difficult because the soldiers suffered dreadfully---from lack of basic equipment like shoes and pants, from disease, from the awful meat grinder that was a Civil War battlefield---and they sincerely and passionately believed that they were fighting for liberty. And could not see that fighting for the liberty to own other people is the cruelest of paradoxes, just as they could not understand why their slaves fled to the Northern lines by the thousands. Maybe it's that disjunct that fascinates me.

Considered as an army, the Army of Northern Virginia accomplished amazing things, and Glaatthaar does a great job of describing what battles looked like from the South's point of view, which I found an interesting..."corrective" is not the word I want, but it's like reading about the Civil War backwards.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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Review: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988)

Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


One volume history of the American Civil War, soup to nuts.

I did not enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed the Catton. McPherson is much drier than Catton and is not really trying for a NARRATIVE history; he has narrative chapters interleaved with thematic chapters, which enables him to cover a LOT of ground, but he does come off, just very slightly, like a textbook. (It's part of the Oxford History of the United States, so it's possible that should be considered a feature rather than a bug.)

On the other hand, if you want a comprehensive one volume history of the Civil War, McPherson is definitely your guy. He talks about just about everything, and his bibliographic note at the end points to more in-depth books. (Granted, it's thirty-five years out of date.) And although dry, he explains things well.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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Review: Trudeau, Gettysburg (2002)

Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage by Noah Andre Trudeau

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the third book I've read about Gettysburg (the other two being Gettysburg and Gettysburg: The Last Invasion), and in some ways the most incoherent, as Trudeau does his best to recount the battle blow by blow. (Obviously, this is an impossible dream, but the effort is impressive.) He uses primary sources from Union officers and enlisted men, Confederate officers and enlisted men, and citizens of Gettysburg, which all together provide a kind of kaleidoscopic view of July 1st through 3rd, 1863. (Yes, purely by serendipity, I was reading about the battle of Gettysburg on the 160th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg.) He isn't as good as either Sears or Guelzo at providing a framework to hang the individual vignettes on---he's more interested in what's happening to the guys on the ground than he is in what the generals thought they were doing, which is a quite justifiable prioritization of material (I certainly prefer it to histories that are only interested in what the generals think), but it does mean that his recounting, form following content, is chaotic.



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Review: Nolan, Lee Considered (1991)

Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History by Alan T. Nolan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Nolan has a very specific project, which is to take apart the myth of Robert E. Lee, piece by piece, using evidence from Lee's own writings and actions to show that the myth is not the truth. This is rather stiffly written, but Nolan does a great job both of disassembling the mythic Robert E. Lee and of showing why the myth became necessary to mainstream (white) America in the years after the Civil War.

In particular, I liked Nolan's emphasis on not taking what Lee himself said about his actions at face value, as most Lee biographers up to 1991 had done. Nolan demonstrates that Lee was extremely gifted at self-justification, and particularly at the bit of circular reasoning that goes "the thing I want to do is honorable because I want to do it" (which is very different from "I want to do the honorable thing"). I also liked Nolan sorting out the different levels of strategy it's possible to look at, from the general's strategy of campaign to his government's strategy of the war (subdivided into the official strategy and the true strategy). The CSA had no official strategy, which is arguably part of their problem, but their true strategy was---had to be---to outlast the North, not to defeat them. So every time Lee won a brilliant but costly victory, he was working at cross-purposes to the best strategy the CSA had. He may have been a brilliant tactical general, but his much-vaunted audacity and aggression were great only so long as the CSA had the manpower to support them. Which was not really very long.



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Review: Ellis, The Contested Castle (1989)

The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology by Kate Ferguson Ellis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book, about the Gothic from Walpole to Shelley, with a great epilogue on Emily Bronte, is arguing that the Gothic is about the Fall, and about the way the Fall changes the enclosed space of the Garden (represented by the home---she also talks a lot about the ideology of separate spheres and about changing theories of child-rearing in the 18th century); it becomes either a prison you can't get out of or a refuge you can't reach, and changes from one to the other depending on where you are. (So it may start out as a refuge you can't reach, but when you overcome your trials and tribulations to reach it, it becomes a prison.) It also depends on whether you are male or female. Women are mostly imprisoned; men are mostly exiled. I found her lens extremely useful as a way of sorting out what happens in Gothic novels---and of course immediately thought of Hill House, which is the epitome of both the home post-Fall and the prison you can't get out of.

It is a theory-informed book, but it is not theory-heavy. It's a LITTLE on the dense side, but extremely readable for an academic book.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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Review: Catton, The Army of the Potomac (1951-53)

The Army of the Potomac, 3 Vols by Bruce Catton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Vol. 1: Mr. Lincoln's Army
Vol. 2: Glory Road
Vol. 3: A Stillness at Appomattox

I liked this trilogy of books SLIGHTLY less well than the Centennial History of the Civil War, and that mostly for a reason that Catton points out himself: the story of the Army of the Potomac is really the same story told over and over again: the best efforts of the soldiers doomed by bad generalship to failure (drink once if the bad general is McClellan, drink twice if the bad general is Burnside, chug if the bad general is Hooker). And then there's Grant, who was not at all a bad general, but who had a completely different idea of how you fought a war. In the Centennial History, Catton had a much broader canvas and a wider variety of incidents to work with.

But The Army of the Potomac Trilogy is still beautifully and thoughtfully written (a quick example: "Grant had a basilisk's gaze. He could sit, whittling and smoking, looking off beyond the immediate scene, and what he was looking at was likely to come down in blood and ashes and crashing sound a little later."); Catton uses his primary sources to excellent effect, and he is incredibly good at making a coherent narrative out of something that at the time was neither, without ever losing track of how bewildering and dispiriting events were for the men who lived through them (or didn't live through them, which is its own part of the story).



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Review: Purkiss, The English Civil War (2006)

The English Civil War: A People's History by Diane Purkiss

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As an introduction to the English Civil War, this book is unfortunately confusing. She starts out chronological, but does not stay that way, and for the last third of the book, until the last chapter, I really wasn't sure where Charles I was or what he was doing, and I don't feel like I came away with a clear understanding of any of the sets of negotiations that went on (and failed), whether between Charles and the Scots or between the New Model Army and Parliament.

What this book DOES do extremely well is give vivid portraits of the people involved, from Charles himself (and his controversy-magnet queen) to the citizens of London and the soldiers in Parliament's army. She does a great job of showing, through primary materials, what people on both sides (or, I suppose, all three sides) thought and why they thought it. (I loved her lengthy detour into the life of John Milton; she captured both why I hate him and why he is nevertheless rightly considered a major English poet.) And she talks a lot about women: queens and prophets and chatelaines left holding the bag when their husbands rode off to war.

She also does a good job of conveying how horrible the English Civil War was, the way that both armies spent more time pillaging than fighting, the way that, as the war went on and the propaganda on all sides got worse and worse, men's ideas of what it was okay to do to the enemy got more violent and dehumanizing.

So for a grasp of chronology and how events fit together, this is not a good book. But for a sense of the people involved and the human cost of war, it is an excellent book.



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