Customer Reviews

Gettysburg: A Battlefield Guide (This Hallowed Ground: Guides to Civil Wa)

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4 star:		(1)
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I have tramped over the Gettysburg Battlefield a half dozen times with various books in hand. My hat is off to Mark Grimsley & Brooks D. Simpson. I found this book to be the most thorough and well written of any text I have used. In November, 1999 I went to the battlefield with the main purpose of studying the fighting around the Peach Orchard and Wheatfield. This book was very helpful in helping me understand the chain of events that occured in these places July 2, 1863. I also found the descriptions of the fighting July 1st around the McPherson Farm to be excellent.

A very good and practical guide.

I grew up near Gettysburg & have been there numerous times. I just spent 2 days there with this book on the battlefield--this book made the battle crystal clear! I ran out of time exploring the battlefield (it takes more than the 6 hours described in the book--my only criticism). This book brings the battle to life and explains the terrain like never before. I learned a lot about the battle that I never knew and many components of the battle came into focus in new and exciting ways. In particular, this book does a good job on overviews of each day and with it's clear directions, leads the reader through each stop--I really felt as if I had an expert by my side explaining all the facets of each aspect of the battle. Along the way, everything was just as the book described. The maps were excellent & it's nicely complimented with various portraits of leaders, common soldiers, etc. The guide brings the 3 days together as a cohesive whole. This is the book to get if you're going to visit Gettysburg; forget all the others.

I now live near Chickamauga and I plan on getting their book on that battle!

An excellent, well-written guidebook and the best I've seen on the subject. I carried this book on my first visit to Gettysburg in Spring 2001, and it greatly enhanced the experience. The directions are clear and up to date, and the text is precise and detailed enough to be compelling without trying to be an exhaustive treatment of every minute detail. If used as a companion to an actual visit, I would strongly recommend reading the book in advance of your visit, then bringing it with you for reference. There are only a few very minor faults I might find with this guidebook. On the maps, it would be helpful to have present-day landmarks indicated in some way to help with orientation. Also, the book suggests the full tour can be completed in six hours, but in my experience to make all the stops and fully enjoy it you'd need at least a full day, or preferably two. You'll want to leave some time for reflection at such places as McPherson's Ridge, Little Round Top, the High Water Mark, and others to think about the enormity of what occurred on that ground.

Read this book and you'll come away with a good working knowledge of the three-day battle. Highly recommended!

A masterful guide to the Gettysburg battlefield. I took several books on my trip to Gettysburg earlier this year but this was the only one I carried on the battlefield. It is organized around the tour stops, but also contains several side trips to lesser known areas, and simply tells you all you need to know about the events in that area at the time of the battle. It contains several maps and the directions it provides to areas on the battlefield are concise and easy to follow. If you wish to seriously tour Gettysburg National Park, this book is essential.

I recently took a trip to Gettysburg (my 3rd) and carried this tour guide for the 1st time. It is far and away the best experience I've had seeing the battlefield. It follows the battle chronologically and offers several sites and insights not offered on the audio tours available at the local shops. Many of the stops are multifaceted. At several points the stops feature 7 to 10 asides which often involve only a minor shift in position to point out various phases of the battle. It includes a side trip to the cavalry field which I've never run into on the audio tours. The driving directions are easy to follow but do veer from the order of the Military Park brochure and the audio tours to give greater detail to the battle. The book says to allow for 6 hours-it's more like 10 hours to give time for exploring beyond some of the "stand here and turn left" instructions. 11 hours total if you include a break for lunch. We started at nine on one morning, toured until about 4 with a break for lunch and finished the following day. Sites included on the audio and Park tours tend to start getting crowded from 11 to 3, so this will add to the tour time depending on time of year and crowd. To sum it all up and paraphrase a popular commercial-when going on a tour of Gettysburg-"Don't leave home without it!"

I've lived and/or worked in Gettysburg for almost twenty-five years, and I've been on the battlefield hundreds of times. But I can honestly say that I never really had a good appreciation for what happened there until I got my hands on Grimsley's and Simpson's guide. It's completely user-friendly.

For each of the places it highlights, the guide includes:

(1) Driving instructions to each site.

(2) An extremely useful orientation section telling you what's on your left, on your right, in front of you, etc. (For example, for Barlow's Knoll, the Orientation is this: "As you face west, the town of Gettysburg is due left of you; Oak Ridge and Oak Hill are straight ahead, as is Carlisle Road in the middle distance.") For those battlefield visitors who don't think to bring a compass with them, this kind of information is worth its weight in gold.

(3) An historical description of what actually happened during the battle at the site.

(4) A "Vignette," which provides one or two eyewitness accounts pertinent to the site.

(5) A tactical analysis of what happened at the site.

The maps are excellent, the layout of the text is convenient and easy to follow, and there's an informative appendix on "Organization, Weapons, and Tactics." Moreover, the East and South Cavalry Battles are included in the guidebook, and the description of Farnsworth's deadly charge in the latter is the best I've ever read.

Highly recommended for both the beginner and the seasoned Gburg afficionado.

By the way, for those who don't know it, co-author Mark Grimsley's The Hard Hand of War (1997) really is one of the best books on the Civil War written.

There are many books about the battle of Gettysburg, but this is the one guidebook you want to have in hand when you head out to the battlefields. Written in sequential order, the book tells you everything you want to know about where you are, what happened, and who was involved in the three days of conflict. The personal vignettes and expert commentary bring the the battle to life for novice and Civil War buff alike. I felt well-prepared for my visit because I read this guidebook before I left home. This is a must have guide before you visit Gettysburg!

Gettysburg was the location of a 3-day battle in July 1863 which resulted in approximately 50,000 casualties. President Lincoln gave his famous speech there a few months later.

This book, and others in the series, is useful for getting around battlefield locations, and providing some history and analysis of the individual skirmishes.

There are about 20 "stops" and 2 longer "excursions" on the self-guided tour. They can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour to complete, accordiing to the authors. Most involve only a small amount of walking, and for most, you do not even have to leave your car. The longest walk is about a mile across a field for "Pickett's Charge", though other stops cover the start and ending points of it.

A few in the sequence have you "remain in place" at whatever monument or feature the authors have directed you to. Essentially, several aspects of the battle are described, all viewable from this vantage point.

As a former map-maker, the only negative I have, which is minor, is with the maps, They are not quite scale, but more stylized where the curves and angles may be approximated. Although they do mark the general tour-stop location and give some geographical references, occassionally the specific features mentioned in the text are not shown on the map, and not all roads show the name. I think in actual use, this will not be a problem, though.

The tour can be completed in 6 hours according to the authors, however, just about everyone else says you have to take more time. As an amateur photographer, I will be giving it two full days :-)