Thursday, October 4, 2018

Booknotes: To Hazard All

New Arrival:
To Hazard All: A Guide to the Maryland Campaign, 1862 by Robert Orrison & Kevin R. Pawlak (Savas Beatie, 2018).

Most of the Emerging Civil War titles have a short tour of some kind that is either integrated into the main narrative or presented as a separate component. In Orrison and Pawlak's To Hazard All: A Guide to the Maryland Campaign, 1862, the tour is the book. Actually it is six day-trip sized tours in one, with each chapter having a dozen or more numbered stops.

The volume is a true campaign (rather than battle) guide, with Antietam covered in a single chapter. That and the other five tours—"Lee Moves North," "McClellan Responds," "Battle of Harpers Ferry," "Battle of South Mountain," and "Return to Virginia"—together cover the entire 1862 Maryland Campaign from beginning to end. 

The tour format will be familiar to those who have already read other titles in the series. Period and modern photographs accompany nearly every page, and detailed driving directions, facing instructions, GPS coordinates, and background history are provided for each stop. Hal Jesperson did the cartography, which consists of both tour route and battlefield maps. In this case, the tours take up all the available space, so there isn't room for the appendix section that has become a popular feature of the series.

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