DWD's Reviews

Originally published by Knopf in 2009. Winston Groom will always be best known as the author of Forrest Gump , but he should be equally well known as the author of a series of well-told American histories. Included in those histories is a trilogy of Civil War histories that focus on the Western Theater of the war. Vicksburg 1863 is the second book in the trilogy, but it can be easily read as a stand-alone history. After a short introduction to the war itself, it follows Grant's campaign to take the Mississippi River away from the Confederacy, beginning with a mess of a battle in Missouri that proved nothing of any importance except that Grant was game to fight and push forward, even if the conditions were not perfect. That, it turns out, was pretty much the key to Grant's eventual success in this campaign and in the war. From there, we follow Grant through Kentucky, into Tennessee and the terrible Battle of Shiloh. Although ultimately successful, this marked a low point for Gra...

Published by Hourly History in November of 2024. Hourly History offers free e-books every week. Each of the books take about an hour to read and the smaller topics are really quite good. The series is good for things you want to know more about, but you don't want to read a 400 page book on the topic. There is probably a large book about Wild Bill Hickock (1839-1876), but I don't want to read it. This length made for a perfectly enjoyable and interesting read. Hickock started out fighting in the pre-Civil War Bleeding Kansas conflict on the anti-slavery side, worked as a guide, a hunter, a sheriff, and eventually ended up being shut in the back of the head while playing poker in Deadwood in the Dakota Territory by a man who was too afraid to fight Hickock in a duel. I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Wild Bill Hickock: A Life from Beginning to End . 

Published in 2021 by Penguin Audio. Read by the author, Nathaniel Philbrick. Duration: 9 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. George Washington looked at the newly formed United States of America and saw what it had always been - 13 disunited states with nothing to bind them together. Washington may not have been the deepest-thinking founding father, but some things he just "knew" deep in his bones. What did he know in this case? He knew that they actually all did have something in common. They all had George Washington in common. So, George went on a series of extended trips around the states until he had visited all 13 of them and he gave them a visible introduction/reminder (it depended on the state and the citizens) of what the new United States of America was all about. Travels with George is the story of those tours. Each state had its own issues. For example, Rhode Island wasn't even a state when the started traveling - it was holding out. The Southern states, especiall...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2024. Read by Kevin R. Free. Duration: 14 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. In Life After Power Presidential historian Jared Cohen looks into the post-Presidential lives of seven Presidents and their quests for some sort of meaning after having one of the most important jobs you can have. Some Presidents fade away due to health reasons, like Reagan. Others are eager to resume their former lives, like Washington. But, others still feel like they have something more to offer or have unfulfilled goals. The seven Presidents he looked at are: Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush. I have enjoyed hearing about John Quincy Adams' post-Presidential life ever since I first read John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage  30+ years ago. I've read more than one book about him and this re-telling is quite good.  A photo of John Quincy Adams  taken in 1844. Jimmy Car...

 Published by Fulcrum Publishing in 2014. Artist and author Joel Christian Gill is writing and illustrating a series of graphic novels that look into the lives of lesser known, exceptional African Americans. His inspiration is this quote from W.E.B. DuBois: "The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth saving up to their vantage ground." In other words, some will rise up and inspire/lead the rest. This is Gill's way of providing inspiration. Bass Reeves was a legendary lawman in the Old West. He was a Deputy U.S. Marshal that chased down bad guys who would flee into Indian Territory (Oklahoma and Kansas) to hide from law enforcement in the neighboring states. If you've seen either of the two versions of the movie True Grit, that is the exact situation. The character Rooster Cogburn would have been real-life Bass Reeves' co-worker if Cogburn were a real person. The graphic novel tells about Reeves' childhood as a slave in Arkansas, how he escaped durin...

  Published in 2007 by Oxford University Press. The book consists of six essays about the experience of African Americans from the early American period through Reconstruction.  They are arranged in chronological order and, as is the way with all collections, of varying quality. I did not enjoy either of the two essays by one of the editors, Scott Hancock. I did enjoy reading two of them quite a bit. There are two strong essays that read more like small chapters from a Civil War history  about the United States Colored Troops (USCT) - the segregated units of black soldiers led by white officers.  The last essay was by Reconstruction expert Eric Foner. It was a bit tedious to read, but it ruthlessly lays to rest that old Confederate and neo-Confederate lie that Black Reconstruction (when Blacks could actually vote and the old leaders of the Confederacy were not allowed to run for office) just elected illiterate field hands to the highest offices. The men Foner describ...

  Originally published in 2007. Published in 2010 by McFarland and Company, Inc. If you are a student of the Civil War, George B. McClellan is a conundrum at best. After the Frist Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) in July of 1861, the poorly trained Union Army had fled back to Washington, D.C. They were basically a semi-organized mob awaiting someone to take the lead. Lincoln looked around and felt that the leadership team that lost at Bull Run was not going to provide a credible lead general so he looked around the Eastern Theater for anyone else with the aura of success. George B. McClellan had a bit of success in Western Virginia and wrote a lot of reports that made him seem an even better General than he was so Lincoln looked to him to retrain and refit the Army of the Potomac (the main Union Army in the East.) Statue of McClellan outside of the city hall in Philadelphia. It was  dedicated in 1894.  I have no idea why they felt he deserved this honor. When I have talked w...

  Published in 2016 by Hachette Audio. Read by William DeMerritt. Duration: 9 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Underground Airlines is set in the year 2015 in an alternate historical timeline. This is a world where the American Civil War almost happened but did not. In the real historical timeline, an amendment to the Constitution called the Crittenden Compromise was proposed in December of 1860 as the first Confederate states were seceding. It preserved slavery, limited its spread and clarified the role of the federal government in returning runaway slaves. The Crittenden Compromise was not taken seriously by most people and it failed. In this alternate history, the Crittenden Compromise was taken  seriously because President-elect Lincoln was assassinated in Indianapolis as he was traveling to his inauguration in Washington, D.C. The shock of the assassination brought all of the states back together to negotiate and a version of the Crittenden Compromise passed...

  Published by Random House Audio in April of 2023. Read by the author, Jonathan Kennedy. Duration: 9 hours, 23 minutes. Unabridged. Kennedy presents a compelling argument that disease has had a profound impact on world history by just telling a history of Europe from the days of cavemen up until now. The first 45 minutes or so of this audiobook seemed to be wandering around and not going anywhere, but Kennedy was laying a strong foundation for the rest of the book. The book makes it painfully obvious that humanity has bounced from one biological disaster to another. Humanity has adapted (either by behavior - like building sanitation systems to deal with body waste to control cholera) or biologically by simply having a large body count until those with immunity can rebuild (the Black Plague is a prime example.) Kennedy persuasively argues that infection and disease helped the rise of Christianity, the rise of Islam, the end of feudalism, the rise of capitalism, and the European con...

  Book edition originally published in 2006. Audiobook published in 2019 by Listening Library. Read by Asmeret Ghebremichael. Duration: 3 hours, 0 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: This short piece of historical fiction focuses on a slave family in Georgia in the 1790s. The main character is Sally. She has a brother, a mother and a father. The one thing that this family has going for them is that their owners have a policy of not breaking apart families. That is the policy until relatives of the owners find themselves struggling financially. In a couple of days, Sally and her brother and 3 other slaves are going to be sent to the other plantation to help it get back on its feet again.  The family decides to run away together rather than be split apart. After some discussion with a friendly house slave who has done some traveling with the family, they decide not to head north. They haven't seen a map but they know that the trip across northern Georgia, South Carolina, North Caroli...

  Published in 2019 by Penguin Audio. Read by Stephen Mendel. Duration: 11 hours. Unabridged. Synopsis: Peter Ash served multiple tours of duty with the Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. When he left the service, he wandered the roads of America - partly because he could not find a place to settle down and partly because he suffers from claustrophobia as a form of PTSD. He can't sleep indoors. He has a very tough team being inside unless it's a spacious room or has lots and lots of windows.  The author, Nick Petrie. Peter has been living with his very serious (and very rich) girlfriend helping maintain her compound and recuperating from the misadventures of the last book. But...he's getting bored. His girlfriend gets word from a friend named Wanda in Memphis that people are threatening her in her new house that she bought in a tax auction. They are throwing bricks through windows and the like. Peter drives across the country in his restored work truck to help keep an eye out...

  Originally published in 1942 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. I read a 2009 re-print published by Konecky and Konecky. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) In 1940, the famed poet, journalist and author Carl Sandburg won a Pulitzer Prize for his four volume biography Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (published in 1939.) In 1942, his publishers came to him and asked him to re-work the biography into a history of the Civil War in response to America's recent entry into World War II.  The result is a pretty solid history of the Civil War from basically the Union point of view.  Carl Sandburg is best known as a poet and that shines though with some of his prose. From time to time, he comes up with a different and interesting way of telling the story of the war.  The most obvious weakness to this history is the story of African-Americans in the war - the free, the enslaved, the recently freed, the soldiers and others. He mentions them, but does not look at them very hard. To be ...

Published in 2021 by Next Chapter Audio LTD. Read by Crawford B. Bunkley III. Duration: 4 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. I have no idea where I found this book. I think it was a freebie on Audible through Amazon's Prime Reading program. I know that I got it because I am a big reader of Civil War histories and fiction and this sounded like it was right up my alley. Synopsis: The description of this book is accurate, to a point. It is about a freed slave who joins the Union Army and then goes from job to job and place to place with a goal of settling in Africa. My Review: This book is basically a Forrest Gump type of story - one man goes on an epic journey and ends up going through a lot of the historical movements of the era. Warning: Lots of *********SPOILERS********all the way to the end of this review. This audiobook comes in at almost exactly 50% of the run time for FORREST GUMP   and covers maybe even more territory. Our hero (his name changes multiple times) begins as a slave...

  Published by HighBridge in 2016. Read by Sean Crisden. Duration: 4 hours, 19 minutes. Unabridged. At the beginning of the Civil War, the Confederacy authorized ships to be privateers. Privateers are basically pirates with the explicit backing of a government. The idea was to authorize as many ships as possible to attack Union shipping as part of the Confederate war effort.  William Tillman (c. 1834-?) One of the early victims of these attacks was the S.J. Waring , a ship out of New York City bound for South America. On July 4, 1861 the ship was attacked, captured, and most of the crew was taken off the Waring to the privateer ship but they did leave a few people behind, including the ship's cook - a free black man named William Tillman.  The privateers made it very clear that they were going to sell Tillman in the slave market in Charleston and Tillman was not going to let that happen... Unfortunately, there just isn't a lot of information about William Tillman - eithe...

  Published by Hourly History in 2022. The  Hourly History  series features e-book histories and biographies that can be read in about an hour. They are great if you want to learn more about a topic, but you don't want to read a regular-sized book or biography. Plus, they offer a set of free books every weekend so you can explore without spending a dime. The Culper Spy Ring has become a trendy topic in Revolutionary War history (if you can have such a thing). The spy ring grew out of the need of Continental Army to keep tabs of the British forces based in New York City. The spies were untrained but clever amateurs who, over time developed fairly sophisticated techniques to deliver information, including newspaper ads, letters with invisible ink and secret codes. They used the fact that they were private citizens to their advantage by taking advantage of their normal business routes and family visits to pass along knowledge. I was intrigued by the fact that after the war ...

  Published in 2022 by Macmillan Audio. Read by Eric Jason Martin. Duration: 6 hours, 39 minutes. Unabridged. McKibben looks back at his life in the suburbs in the 1960s and the 1970s and modern America and compares the two. In certain circles this is an invitation to complain about the modern world with comments like, "When I was a kid, we didn't have all of this blah, blah, blah foolishness." This is not that sort of book. McKibben looks at three general areas: 1) The way that history was taught and the ways that he perceived that his country acted ("The Flag"). He grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts and was a tour guide as a young man for tourists who came to celebrate the bicentennial in 1976. The more he has learned, the more he knows that he was taught a simplistic, feel-good version of American history in school; 2) The things that his church taught him and how churches have fared over the intervening years ("The Cross"). He grew up and was very...

  Published in 2014 by Lyons Press. This is my 142nd Civil War-related review. When I found out about this book, I found myself wondering how these 5 living former Presidents reacted to the Civil War. I also found myself wondering how no one else thought to write this book before. Former presidents have their own political power and impact current events. Nowadays, you can see this with Jimmy Carter's modeling of volunteerism and his attempts to be a peace mediator in the 1980s and 1990s, Bill Clinton's maneuvering to remain relevant, George W. Bush's refusal to endorse or approve of anything done by Donald Trump, the calls that the Biden Administration is really just the third Obama Administration and, obviously, the 45th President's refusal to admit he lost the 2020 election. DeRose starts with a rundown of the political careers of each politician involved: John Tyler, Martin Van Buren, James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and Abraham Lincoln.  Then, he d...

  Published by Random House Audio in November of 2021. Read by Steve Hendrickson. Duration: 16 hours, 31 minutes. Unabridged. When I read the title of this audiobook, OUR FIRST CIVIL WAR: PATRIOTS and LOYALISTS in the AMERICAN REVOLUTION , I was sure that I was going to be listening to an in-depth look at how the population of the young United States dealt with its neighbors and family that disagreed about the question of independence. The most famous example is Benjamin Franklin and his son William Franklin. William Franklin was the last royal governor of New Jersey and their relationship never recovered from the shock of the Revolutionary War.  This book deals with more of these issues than most histories of the Revolutionary War era, but that is not particularly hard to do - most of them mention the Franklin family situation and use it as a stand-in for all families. But, it does not go in-depth into this concept of Loyalists vs. Patriots. For example, I learned more about ...

  Published in 2021 by Macmillan Audio. Read by the author, Noah Feldman. Duration: 11 hours, 14 minutes. Unabridged. In The Broken Constitution Feldman argues that the Constitution as it was known to Congressman Abraham Lincoln (he served in the Congress from 1847-1849) was already a broken Constitution and maybe had been broken since it had been ratified in 1788. What caused this break? No real surprise - slavery. Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) Feldman details the compromises that had been in place to induce the Southern states to join a stronger Federal union and how those compromises were re-hashed in the decades that followed in acts like the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Nullification Crisis (1832-33) and the Compromise of 1850. The Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court in 1857 only heightened tensions between the slave states and the rest of the union. Feldman's point is that if the Constitution were not already broken, these crises wouldn't have been so dramatic and...