Customer Reviews

Civil War Journal: The Legacies (v. 3)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I found the text well written and learned a lot that I had only guessed about previously--and was way off base. Several chapters deviate from the broadcast episodes, but they seem to benefit in doing so. (A few of these topics were never even broadcast by A&E and I haven't seen them on the History Channel either.) Some of the photos I had not seen before, and the Confederate flags on pages 340 and 341 (but did we need the lyrics to the "Bonnie Blue Flag"?) and the African-American regimentals on pages 346 and 347 are very special. My pet peeve about this book and its companion volumes is that some of the interesting photos are reproduced too small to appreciate. Others are too big. In this book, much more than the other two, the pages look like they've been thrown together carelessly. Ovals are thoughtlessly reproduced in rectangular boxes when they should have been reproduced as ovals. Some things are silhouetted beautifully, but a few that should have been handled that way are just pitched onto the page. Somebody needs a lesson in perspective. In general, this book looks "sloppy" compared to the first two in this series. In too many chapters these illustrations jump around as if no one knew what to do with them. For instance, in the Alexander Gardner chapter, the text just stops for a bunch of photos and then resumes with nothing to indicate what's going on. And the artillery and prison camp chapters look like alphabet soup. Apart from the illustrations themselves, in way too many instances the captions just repeat the text whereas most of the descriptions in the other two volumes had some neat information not in the text. I recommend the book for the text anyway--don't judge it by the weird arrangement of the photos and the mundane captions.

A very interesting reference book, however I would not recomend it to the reader who is more interested in the battles or leaders in the war. The book touched on a lower level not often heard about the Civil War, such as women in the war, slaves, trains in the war, and photogriphers in the war. I for one am not to interested in these topics but still found the book very readable. It is a fine conclusion to the other two books in the History Channels three volume set.

This is an excellent read. This book takes you to places and things that you may not have read much about. Any serious Civil War reader needs this in his library.