Customer Reviews

Civil War Stories (Georgia Southern University Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Lecture Series)

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This book title seems to imply that the book will be about women/children being impacted by the civil war....what it really is, is a book about women's efforts for the South during the Civil war with a few mentions of children being left behind as orphans. When it did mention the children becoming orphans it was as a passing glance or about how one of these women would try to help find their parents or how someone started an orphanage. I was looking for a book that would give me the human side of the orphans life. Someone to tell their side of the story with the uncertaninty and chilling conditions that some of them must have lived.

That being said, this book is rich in the human history of the civil war. It does tell about some very real women who helped during the war, but most of their problems which the books seems to highlight started long before the civil war even started. I did enjoy learning about these women and it did make the civil war more peronsal....but this book is trying to be something it is not.

A fascinating way to look at the Civil War. Very approachable. The book looks at some everyday and extraordinary people whose lives were forever transformed by the impact of war. Two sisters, one a staunch defender of the Union, the other a passionate advocate of the rebel cause, are traumatized by the divide the Civil War imposes.

This story, while interesting from a social historian perspective, really has nothing to do with what the title implies. This story of a family divided really has nothing to do with the American Civil War. The family Clinton writes about is supposedly torn apart by the war, but that is simply not the case. Long before the war started, the family was split because the father and mother were incompatible. Though when the war started, the family was split in half, mother and one daughter living in the north while father and the other daughter lived in the south, the split occurred long before the war, and continued long afterwards. Clinton has fallen, here, into the trap that many new social historians have, that is "losing" the Civil War. It is true that these three stories occurred during the Civil War, but they cannot be rightly called "Civil War Stories". It is analougus to writing a book about the Kitty Genovese murder and calling it a Vietnam story. On top of it, Clinton is not a good writer, and the book is full of grammatical errors and incoherent sentences. Also, her writing style is not very good, and she could stand to take a few more classes in english, and history for that matter, as she gets some facts terribly wrong. I do not reccommend this book for anyone expecting a social history of women in the Civil War because it is not the case. While the story itself may be interesting to some, it does not deserve the title "Civil War Stories" and should not be presented as such.