Customer Reviews

With Blood and Fire: Life Behind Union Lines in Middle Tennessee, 1863-65

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A very strongly recommended addition to personal, academic, and community library Civil War Studies collections, With Blood & Fire: Life Behind Union Lines In Middle Tennessee, 1863-65 by Civil War expert Michael R. Bradley is a brutal and candid accounting of the devastating toll Union occupation took upon Middle Tennesee. Graphic in its detail of murder, robbery, looting, sexual assault, and more, With Blood & Fire is an expertly researched, deftly written, presentation of the hardships of war and scars that could not fully heal.

Dr. Bradley does a marvelous job of showing the level of brutality used by the US Army in its unsuccessful attempt to pacify the Tennessee countryside during the Civil War. Murder, starvation, kidnapping, intimidation were among the Army's tools of the trade, but they never stopped Southerners from shooting at trains and boats. Americans did not make a good occupying force in the 19th Century and we don't make a good one today -- thankfully.

Michael Bradley has such a vast knowledge on the civil war! I enjoy reading all of his books!!! The short story collections are great also! If you ever get the chance to talk to him in person, TAKE IT!!! He is truely an amazing man!

The book is informative, but only in a narrow respect. For a book purporting to be about Middle Tennessee, more about Nashville and the entire "Mother Earth" region would have been appropriate. The writing was second rate, and the bulk of the book is filled out be reproducing letters in their entirety, often repeating points already made earlier in the book. In other words, judicious editing would have reduced this book down by at least a third - the author simply didn't have very much to say about life behind the lines. The copy editing was second-rate as well.