A few things

With Halloween in the rear view mirror and autumn in full swing, it's time to start thinking about my annual list of favorite titles by category. I always have mixed feelings about the timing of these things. The general expectation is that 'Top 10,' 'Best of,' etc. lists appear well before year's end. The challenge involved with doing this for Civil War books is that, unlike movies for instance, it is very often the case that a number of the year's best releases are bunched together late in the year. Along with the additional lag time between release date and delivery (which has increased of late), there's just not enough time to read and consider by year's end the full fall catalog of deserving titles. In the past, I've handled this by having those releases qualify for the following year's list, but that's always felt odd. Beyond just discontinuing the ritual altogether, the other option is to publish the year-end list sometime during the following January or February, which is also less than ideal. I'll have to ponder the matter some more.

Clint Crowe's Caught in the Maelstrom: The Indian Nations in the Civil War, 1861-1865 is a Savas Beatie book I've been looking forward to for a long time. Originally scheduled for mid-2017, it looks like the long wait might finally soon be over. The appearance of a 'Look Inside' preview (see link above) often indicates approaching release, so I would expect to see it out sometime in December. Maybe.

A trade publishing title that grabbed my interest recently was Donald Miller's Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign That Broke the Confederacy (Simon & Schuster), the first attempt at a major single-volume treatment of the campaign since Michael Ballard's 2004 book Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi. I very briefly thumbed through it at the local library. If I recall correctly, coverage of the Battle of Port Gibson (May 1, 1863) doesn't appear until around page 370 of a roughly 500-page narrative. With its significant focus on the campaign's role in extinguishing slavery in the lower Mississippi River Valley, the study is clearly aimed at broadening the reader's perspective of the campaign, on and off the battlefield. I'm not sure if I'll find the time to get to it, but I thought it was at the very least worthy of mention. If you've read it, feel free to offer your thoughts about it in the comments section.