Customer Reviews

Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Georgia in the Civil War

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The book is hefty enough for a door stop, which you would like at a $75 retail price. Fortunately they can be found for about half that, but still, I thought pricey. So many great images of Georgia soldiers have been previously published, with so many more to brought public, that I had high expectations for a book chuck full of fabulous new images. What I found were quite a number that had been previously published, some many times. Despite the promise of a slant toward the common soldier, there were more than enough of the generals and famous. The quality of most images was quite good, while a small number were so blurry that I had to wonder if it were a fluke of printing, or they had actually been included that way. Don't get me wrong, there were some splendid images included, but many were rather mundane. It would have been nice to include the regiment with the name of the man in the image, which appears beside each, rather than having to dig it out in the text. Oddly missing were images of GMI cadets with their distinctive insignia, as well as at least two clear images showing Georgia state seal buckles, both oval and two-piece. They are out there. There was one picture of a Georgia soldier wearing a very clearly seen two-piece state seal belt buckle, but oddly enough, it was a South Carolina buckle. Possible, I guess, but it makes you question some of the identifications without some explanation for something so obvious. Not much new on camp or battlefield photographs as well. I wonder the criteria the authors used for picking those they did. If I can find any image of note, I consider it worthwhile, and I guess the book accomplished this by a whisker, but without paying about a fourth of the retail price, I walked away disappointed for what I received.