Customer Reviews

Amazing Women of the Civil War: Fascinating True Stories of Women Who Made a Difference

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I am a graduate student in American History with a focus on women and their roles in the Civil War. As such I was pleased to find Garrison's Amazing Women. However, once I started reading the book I was extremely disappointed. One of the first things I noticed was the lack of citations and a bibliography. Garrison neglects to credit anyone with the information he gathered for this particular work except to say that you can find alot of information on the internet. And while I understand Garrison's intended audience to be the general public where footnotes are found to be annoying, a bibliography would surely be helpful to anyone interested in learning more about these women. Furthermore, Garrison displays an attitude throughout the work that some of the acts and actions credited to women must surely be exaggerated. What I found to be particularly annoying with the work was the attention given to the men that were spouses to the women chosen for the work. If the book is about women, write about the women. To make matters worse, Garrison also includes among his Amazing Women a man that cross-dresses. This information is irrelevant to the subject. The only positive thing I can say about Amazing Women is that Garrison provides a nice list of women who played important and diverse roles during the war. So, if you are looking for research, this book is a huge disappointment. But if you are looking for a quick read where all the information is assumed to be correct, without providing any proof then this is your book. However, if you are truly interested in learning about women's roles in the Civil War I would suggest Mary Elizabeth Massey's Women in the Civil War (University of Nebraska Press, 1966) or Elizabeth D. Leonard's All the Daring of the Soldier (Penguin Books, 1999).

This book did an excellent job on describing the roles in which women took part in during the Civil War. Webb Garrison did an excellent job choosing women to write about. Both Southern and Northern women were talked about, showing readers that these women were not as different as they had thought they were.

This book gave too many unwanted details and needed to cover the women in general. I do like interesting facts every once in while, but these facts weren't even interesting. It was also poorly written. I would not recommend this book to anyone!

Amazing Women of the Civil War by Webb Garrison is not so amazing. Garrison profiles 30 women who he claims "made a difference," but there are several who I don't believe fit this description.

Garrison divides his women into various categories that include nurses, doctors, spies, abolitionists, writers, scouts, and couriers. Many of the women truly belong in this book including Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Boykin Chestnut, Elizabeth Van Lew, Clara Barton, Dorothea Dix and Mary Walker. On the other hand, Mary Lincoln, Julia Dent Grant, Mary Custis Lee and Varina Davis were simply wives of famous men. I don't think that they were amazing or their contributions formidable. Amazing Women of the Civil War is also filled with a number of untruths. In the second sentence of the chapter on Mary Lincoln, Garrison writes "Her sister, Elizabeth Todd Edwards, wrote that Mary's four-year-old granddaughter had just died." Mary's granddaughters survived her. It was Elizabeth Edward's granddaughter who passed away. Mistakes such as these make the reader question much of what is written here. Also, there are no endnotes and no bibliography. Such things should be required for any book that deals with history.

The one benefit of Amazing Women is that it gives the reader a short exposure to many women important to the war effort. I would hope that Garrison would whet the appetite for readers to pick up more detailed works about his subjects. Otherwise, this book has too many flaws to pass itself off as serious history.

This was really good. It's about various women that helped shape the Civil War, whether by being Spies, Soldiers, Journalists, Angels of Mercy, or whatever. You'll be surprised how far some of these women went for their cause, and how much they accomplished in that time frame that provided them with so little independent resources. This book is a good introduction into these women, that may trigger your interest to learn more about them. I wish it provided even more information on these people, but basically it seemed to be a book to introduce you to these women and tell of their actions, then go locate more information about them.