Booknotes II (Aug '15)

New Arrivals:

1. Forts and Posts in Kansas During the Civil War: 1861-1865 by William C. Pollard, Jr. (Author, 2015).

This oversize softcover briefly explores a number of Kansas Civil War camps, forts, posts, etc. (over 50 of them). Each entry gets somewhere between one and a handful of pages of well researched narrative devoted to it. The appendices help with finding the sites today, providing GPS coordinates and also pinpointing locations on modern plat maps. Additionally, there are numerous line drawings tracing in some detail the current and/or historical layouts of many of the sites. The list price of just over $12 is practically a giveaway for this valuable reference tool.

2. Union General Gouverneur Warren: Hero at Little Round Top, Disgrace at Five Forks by Donald R. Jermann (McFarland, 2015).

Whatever one thinks of G.K. Warren as a corps commander or whether he should have been relieved at Five Forks, he clearly deserved a more honorable end to his Civil War career than the vulgar dismissal he received from Phil Sheridan. Examining extensively the testimony from the post-war court of inquiry, Jermann's book seeks to clearly establish the facts of the case as far as they can be determined and let the reader decide whether Sheridan's actions were justified.