I'm a big fan of John Keegan. I first read The Face of Battle in the late '70s, soon after it was published. It convinced me he was going to be one of the more important historians of the last part of the century, and for the most part that's proven correct. He has since produced a large library of interesting, intelligent books, the content of which has been interesting. I can't say I agree with everything the author writes and advocates, but I can say that he's generally thought-provoking and intelligent. Which is why the current book is such a disappointment.
The American Civil War is perhaps one of the more written-about wars in world history. This is, of course, because the market for American history is so large, because there are so many Americans. It's also got something to do, I suspect, with the size of the conflict and its course. There's a tradition of foreign interest in the war (the current standard history of the Confederate Navy was written by an Italian historian, and then translated into English) and British historians have especially been fascinated by it. One of the older biographies of Stonewall Jackson was written by a British soldier, G.F.R. Henderson, in the late 19th Century, and early in the 20th J.F.C. Fuller and B.H. Liddel Hart wrote extensively about the war from various perspectives. Liddel Hart's biography of Sherman still has some followers; he made some good points.
Keegan has written about the American Civil War in the past. In his partially autobiographical book Fields of Battle, he recounts that he first came to America as a grad student with a grant to study the Battlefields of the American Civil War, what has to be 50 years ago or so. Knowing this, you'd imagine that the author would have a good knowledge of the conflict and the characters involved in it, and that he'd provide a good thorough history of the war. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Some of his general discussion of the war is interesting, and has insight, but the narrative is so confusing and riddled with errors you have to wonder how he came to the correct conclusions.
The book begins with a series of topical chapters, describing the events leading up to the war, and describing such things as American geography and the state of the Republic at the time of the war. These chapters are *generally* better than the narrative ones that follow, though the one on geography contains a few errors. Once we get to the account of the war however, things begin to deteriorate.
I actually went to the trouble of taking notes, writing down things I saw that were errors in the book. I kept this up for a while, but ultimately decided it wasn't worth the effort and stopped. When I stopped I had a page of tightly-written shorthand notes discussing everything from the sequence of events in the Valley campaign to Keegan omitting that Stuart got lost before Gettysburg. Most of the author's conclusions about the battles, campaigns, and characters would be sustainable with a factual history of the war, but the errors detract from the narrative. One blight on the conclusions page: the author seems to fall into the Paddy Griffith school of Civil War history. For those who aren't aware, Griffith is British, and he writes on 19th century infantry tactics. He's been rather controversial since his book on the American Civil War, which puts forward the opinion that the influence of rifles on Civil War battles has been greatly exaggerated, and that the battles were essentially still Napoleonic contests. I've never agreed with much of what Griffith wrote, and I was sorry to see his book in Keegan's rather slim bibliography.
There's also the issue of the writing style. All the negative reviews have noted that the book is repetitive, and often the repetitions aren't needed for the narrative to make sense. Occasionally a sequence of events will be recounted, erroneously, and then repeated correctly. I have another criticism, one that's a bit stranger. Keegan is British, and they have their own writing style, generally. It tends to be wordier, and your average Brit has to be edited pretty carefully (or so it seems to me) to avoid prose so dense it can't be penetrated. While he's a skilled writer, Keegan's prose here tends to run on and on and on. Some of the paragraphs are seemingly endless, and there's often no real reason for this. It's as if he got popular and powerful enough that no one dared edit his prose, when it was actually very neccessary. It's also fascinating that no one thought to have someone else look over the manuscript, and comment on what he wrote. If anyone did, they either didn't notice the errors or were ignored.
In addition to everything else, the illustrations occasionally leave something to be desired. The photograph of Jefferson Davis, if it's him, is from very late in his life. Davis was famously tall, spare, and had high cheekbones, sunken cheeks, and a small imperial under his chin, no mustache. The person in the picture is older, much older than Davis was during the war, and has a full beard and mustache, all snowy white. Also, there's a photograph of the C.S.S. Stonewall, with a caption describing her as something along the line of a typical Confederate river ironclad. As any Civil War naval buff will tell you, the Stonewall was pretty much unique, being the only Confederate warship I'm aware of with a turret, and the only ironclad one to cross the Atlantic. She also never sailed on an American river. As an aside, the maps aren't perfect either; the Gettysburg 3rd day map has the XII Corps lead by someone named "Ruge". This is probably Thomas Ruger, who was a division commander and may have led the unit for a day or two while Slocum was commanding the right wing, but why confuse the map by putting the man's name (misspelled) next to the unit? He's not in the narrative of the battle at all; for that matter Slocum's only very briefly mentioned.
I really wanted to like this book, and frankly was surprised by the poor scholarship underlying much of what's in the narrative of the war. Someone should go through this book and carefully edit every portion of the text before it's reissued as a paperback. You'll notice I said *should*. I seriously doubt the publisher will bother.
