142 of 148 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Weak offering from a normally stellar military historian, November 5, 2009
I'm a big John Keegan fan. I'm also a serious reader of Civil War history. On both counts I'm very disappointed in this book. Keegan is usually an insightful historian and a solid writer. This book falls short in both areas. I can't recommend the book even for serious Civil War buffs as, at best, there's nothing new here. The book has annoying factual errors (doesn't anyone fact check anything anymore?) and is very poorly edited to the point that it's almost incoherent in several sections.
The factual errors tend to be related to details, e.g. on page 321 Keegan states that Winfield Scott was 85 years old at the beginning of the war while Scott's actual age was 75 or on page 218 the Confederates are described as making preparations to escape from besieged Vicksburg by crossing to the "eastern shore" where in fact Vicksburg was on the eastern shore of the Mississippi River. This doesn't distract necessarily from Keegan's larger point but it's highly distracting to any reader who has background in the period. These types of factual errors are scattered throughout the book and their accumulation eventually undercuts belief in the larger picture that Keegan attempts to paint.
But even more seriously the book is almost unreadable in a number of sections. The quality of the editing in this book is nothing short of appalling. There are serious problems with continuity throughout the book. There is significant repetition in the book. These problems seems to occur much more frequently in the sections describing the war in the "west" (i.e. Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama). It is literally impossible to read the sections on Chickamauga or Hood's Nashville campaign and not get seriously confused and misled regarding what actually happened relative to who did what, in what sequence, etc. When poor editing leads to creating factual confusion, as in the discussion of the end of the siege at Vicksburg when we have the Confederate General Bowen seemingly described as a subordinate ("his emissary") of Union commander Grant, the results should be embarrassing to a publisher like Knopf and an author like Keegan.
There are many good single volume treatments of the American Civil War. This is unfortunately not one of them.
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61 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Should be approached with caution; many errors, November 13, 2009
I'm a big fan of John Keegan. I first read The Face of Battle in the late '70s, soon after it was published. It convinced me he was going to be one of the more important historians of the last part of the century, and for the most part that's proven correct. He has since produced a large library of interesting, intelligent books, the content of which has been interesting. I can't say I agree with everything the author writes and advocates, but I can say that he's generally thought-provoking and intelligent. Which is why the current book is such a disappointment.
The American Civil War is perhaps one of the more written-about wars in world history. This is, of course, because the market for American history is so large, because there are so many Americans. It's also got something to do, I suspect, with the size of the conflict and its course. There's a tradition of foreign interest in the war (the current standard history of the Confederate Navy was written by an Italian historian, and then translated into English) and British historians have especially been fascinated by it. One of the older biographies of Stonewall Jackson was written by a British soldier, G.F.R. Henderson, in the late 19th Century, and early in the 20th J.F.C. Fuller and B.H. Liddel Hart wrote extensively about the war from various perspectives. Liddel Hart's biography of Sherman still has some followers; he made some good points.
Keegan has written about the American Civil War in the past. In his partially autobiographical book Fields of Battle, he recounts that he first came to America as a grad student with a grant to study the Battlefields of the American Civil War, what has to be 50 years ago or so. Knowing this, you'd imagine that the author would have a good knowledge of the conflict and the characters involved in it, and that he'd provide a good thorough history of the war. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Some of his general discussion of the war is interesting, and has insight, but the narrative is so confusing and riddled with errors you have to wonder how he came to the correct conclusions.
The book begins with a series of topical chapters, describing the events leading up to the war, and describing such things as American geography and the state of the Republic at the time of the war. These chapters are *generally* better than the narrative ones that follow, though the one on geography contains a few errors. Once we get to the account of the war however, things begin to deteriorate.
I actually went to the trouble of taking notes, writing down things I saw that were errors in the book. I kept this up for a while, but ultimately decided it wasn't worth the effort and stopped. When I stopped I had a page of tightly-written shorthand notes discussing everything from the sequence of events in the Valley campaign to Keegan omitting that Stuart got lost before Gettysburg. Most of the author's conclusions about the battles, campaigns, and characters would be sustainable with a factual history of the war, but the errors detract from the narrative. One blight on the conclusions page: the author seems to fall into the Paddy Griffith school of Civil War history. For those who aren't aware, Griffith is British, and he writes on 19th century infantry tactics. He's been rather controversial since his book on the American Civil War, which puts forward the opinion that the influence of rifles on Civil War battles has been greatly exaggerated, and that the battles were essentially still Napoleonic contests. I've never agreed with much of what Griffith wrote, and I was sorry to see his book in Keegan's rather slim bibliography.
There's also the issue of the writing style. All the negative reviews have noted that the book is repetitive, and often the repetitions aren't needed for the narrative to make sense. Occasionally a sequence of events will be recounted, erroneously, and then repeated correctly. I have another criticism, one that's a bit stranger. Keegan is British, and they have their own writing style, generally. It tends to be wordier, and your average Brit has to be edited pretty carefully (or so it seems to me) to avoid prose so dense it can't be penetrated. While he's a skilled writer, Keegan's prose here tends to run on and on and on. Some of the paragraphs are seemingly endless, and there's often no real reason for this. It's as if he got popular and powerful enough that no one dared edit his prose, when it was actually very neccessary. It's also fascinating that no one thought to have someone else look over the manuscript, and comment on what he wrote. If anyone did, they either didn't notice the errors or were ignored.
In addition to everything else, the illustrations occasionally leave something to be desired. The photograph of Jefferson Davis, if it's him, is from very late in his life. Davis was famously tall, spare, and had high cheekbones, sunken cheeks, and a small imperial under his chin, no mustache. The person in the picture is older, much older than Davis was during the war, and has a full beard and mustache, all snowy white. Also, there's a photograph of the C.S.S. Stonewall, with a caption describing her as something along the line of a typical Confederate river ironclad. As any Civil War naval buff will tell you, the Stonewall was pretty much unique, being the only Confederate warship I'm aware of with a turret, and the only ironclad one to cross the Atlantic. She also never sailed on an American river. As an aside, the maps aren't perfect either; the Gettysburg 3rd day map has the XII Corps lead by someone named "Ruge". This is probably Thomas Ruger, who was a division commander and may have led the unit for a day or two while Slocum was commanding the right wing, but why confuse the map by putting the man's name (misspelled) next to the unit? He's not in the narrative of the battle at all; for that matter Slocum's only very briefly mentioned.
I really wanted to like this book, and frankly was surprised by the poor scholarship underlying much of what's in the narrative of the war. Someone should go through this book and carefully edit every portion of the text before it's reissued as a paperback. You'll notice I said *should*. I seriously doubt the publisher will bother.
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33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A disappointing effort, November 8, 2009
Like at least one other reviewer, I found this book disappointing and flawed. My biggest problem with the book is the repetition among and within chapters, which occurs numerous times. The flow of the book is disjointed, as might be expected from a book that was generated from separate magazine articles written by the author. I always am disappointed when I find this because the author generally makes little effort to synthesize those articles into a coherent whole, and that certainly happened here. There also are quite a few factual errors, most obvious enough to have been caught had any serious review effort been made. Keegan early on makes what I thought to be an insightful analysis of how geography impacted the Civil War, but seems then only to consider in a conclusory way how geography affected any particular battle.
Keegan also concludes that Grant was a great general and better than Lee, which certainly may be correct, if for no other reason than that he won, but I didn't think that Keegan supported his conclusion well in light of the tremendous loss of life resulting from battles initiated by Grant. And I was struck--unfavorably so--by Keegan's comparison in an early chapter of McClellan to Patton. I confess I couldn't follow that, because whatever Patton's faults, and he had quite a few, he wasn't afraid of engaging the enemy in battle. Rundstedt said that "Patton was your best"; I daresay no Confederate General ever said that "McClellan was your best." Keegan either is extremely readable and informative --e.g., the First World War--or is impossible to follow--I thought his book on the Iraq war fell within this category--and this book falls much closer to the latter category.
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