Customer Reviews

Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River (Great Campaigns of the Civil War)

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One of five of the Great Campaigns of the Civil War volumes, BANNERS follows the series format, presenting a moderately-priced campaign study incorporating recent scholarship to present an operational analysis of a particular ACW theater. BANNERS carries the reader from the Confederacy's bungled Kentucky campaign, through the less well known battles of Perryville, Iuka and Corinth; down to the meatgrinder of Stones River. Hess' story is accompanied by 11 sound maps, good notes, and, my favorite, a solid, well-presented bibliographic essay. I own and recommend the entire series, very accessable even to the general reader and well worth the money. This series is an ideal interim step for the history buff graduating from popular history to the more scholarly (& more expensive) works. Happy campaigning!

Banners to the Breeze is the second book from the Great Campaigns of the Civil War series that I have read, and I am quite impressed with the product. Each book takes a look at an extended campaign and its strategy and battles, providing a coherent insightful study of a slice of the American Civil War. Banners covers the war in Tennessee and Kentucky from immediately after Shiloh through Bragg's and Edmund Kirby Smith's invasion of Kentucky to Stones River. The author depicts Bragg as an excellent strategist, but worthless as a tactician. My appreciation for the logistical problems in Tennessee and the Civil War in general continues to rise. I guess I am working my way backwards through the series, since I read Crisis in Command (the Chickamauga, Chattanooga and Knoxville campaign) first, and am now reading Struggle for the Heartland (Fts Henry and Donelson through Shiloh). Each book in the series has a different author, but all are excellent.

I am generally just too lazy to write reviews, but in this case I thought I would get off my duff and get to the keyboard.

In graduate school, I was taught the essential importance of backing up information with sources, while leaving personal opinions to the footnotes. Mr. Hess rarely uses supporting evidence even for the numerous quotes sprinkled throughout the text, breaking a fundamental rule of scholarly writing. This absence especially stands out in an historian such as Mr. Hess. I am not sure why the editor(s) of this series allow this kind of sloppiness.

On the positive side, Mr. Hess writes with an interesting and engaging style. He is seldom dry. Mr. Hess makes many a provocative comment about Braxton Bragg, with nary a endnote, but he seldom interacts (if ever?--I would have to read it again to be certain) with other historians whose views might differ from his. The Bragg comments are controversial and need support rather than speculative opinion.

The books in this series are not cheap, and one would hope each volume could live up to its price. A proper bibliography, like the kind required for a graduate thesis, would be appreciated. I haven't seen one in any of the three volumes that I have read in this series.

In conclusion, if you want an entertaining Civil War read, Mr. Hess has written such a book. If you want something scholarly, you will have to look elsewhere, and the pickings appear to be slim, at least for this part of the Western theater.