Thursday, July 14, 2016

New "Five books on ..." series

Book recommendations that reasonably cover any Civil War topic, large or small, can be difficult to make when limiting oneself to only five source selections, but I am going to try anyway with a new (hopefully regular) series on the site called "Five books on". The biggest subjects will be avoided in their broadest sense. For example, instead of "Five books on Lincoln" or "Five books on Gettysburg," it might be "Five books on Lincoln's emancipation policy" or "Five books on Little Round Top." These won't all necessarily be great books, either, sometimes just the best available from a limited lot. There will probably be a bias toward the modern literature so some still useful classics will be left out, and I will occasionally cheat a little if a single author wrote an entire series of outstanding related titles that might dominate the short list. So, let's get started with ...

6 comments:

  1. This is a great idea and I look forward to seeing what you suggest.

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  2. Thanks for the feedback. Readers can feel free to make topic suggestions here in the comment section, too!

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  3. Some things I'm interested in are: Books on Bushwackers, American Indians in the Civil War. I've looked at a few and read one or two so far. There aren't many.

    I recently found a book on "Galvanized Yankees", but only one book. I would have thought this would have been covered more.

    So many books, so little time...

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    1. Good topics. Offhand, I can only think of two serious GY books (the old classic by Dee Brown and the much more recent one by Butts "Galvanized Yankees on the Upper Missouri", which only looks at one unit). I haven't read either one.

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  4. Terrific plan. What a great way for us to round out our libraries and discover overlooked books. This would be especially true for those of us who focus so closely on the Eastern Theater and overlook the Western and Trans-Mississippi Theaters. Thanks for this new feature.

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    1. Hi John,
      I'll enjoy doing it and hope people find it useful. I'll also try to spread things around but undoubtedly the West and T-M will feature most prominently.

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