Engineering Victory

Though the marketing people at Southern Illinois University Press trumpeted Michael Ballard's Grant at Vicksburg: The General and the Siege as "the first in-depth exploration of Grant’s thoughts and actions during this critical operation [the siege part of the campaign]", the book was really more of a thematically scattershot collection of essays associated with the subject. The siege has not been treated in any significant amount of detail since the Bearss trilogy, so those looking for a book solely devoted to it will have to look to the future. Fortunately, the same publisher may be offering just that with Justin Solonick's Engineering Victory: The Union Siege of Vicksburg (SIUP, April '15). For a release date that far ahead, we might have to wait a while for more information to emerge.