Friday, January 27, 2023

Coming Soon (February '23 Edition)

**NEW RELEASES1** Scheduled for FEB 2023:

Cherokee Civil Warrior: Chief John Ross and the Struggle for Tribal Sovereignty by Dale Weeks.
John T. Wilder: Union General, Southern Industrialist by Steven Cox.
I Thank the Lord I Am Not a Yankee: Selections from Fanny Andrews's Wartime and Postwar Journals by Stephen Davis.
Decisions at Shiloh: The Twenty-Two Critical Decisions That Defined the Battle by David Powell.
Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances Clarke & Rebecca Jo Plant.
Civil War Torpedoes and the Global Development of Landmine Warfare by Earl Hess.
Lansing and the Civil War by Matthew VanAcker.
Pulpits of the Lost Cause: The Faith and Politics of Former Confederate Chaplains during Reconstruction by Steve Longenecker.
The Maps of Spotsylvania through Cold Harbor: An Atlas of the Fighting at Spotsylvania Court House Through Cold Harbor, Including all Cavalry Operations, May 7 through June 3, 1864 by Bradley Gottfried.
The Confederate Jurist: The Legal Life of Judah P. Benjamin by William Gilmore.

Comments: Another pretty light month. Cherokee Civil Warrior and Of Age received early releases and are available now. The Decisions series books often go through multiple release dates before finally landing, so hopefully Dave Powell's Shiloh installment (previously slated for last July) will hit its current 2/10 street date. I'm looking forward to that one. I hope to get a review copy of this latest Hess book, too. It will be interesting to see what it has to add to what was good coverage of the same ground in Kenneth Rutherford's America’s Buried History: Landmines in the Civil War (2020).

1 - These monthly release lists are not meant to be exhaustive compilations of non-fiction releases. They do not include non-revised/expanded reprints of previously published books, special editions not distributed to reviewers, and digital-only titles. Works that only tangentially address the war years are also generally excluded. Inevitably, one or more titles on this list will get a rescheduled release (and they do not get repeated later), so revisiting the past few "Coming Soon" posts is the best way to pick up stragglers.

13 comments:

  1. Drew: Union General John T. Wilder by Steven Cox appears to have a publication date in February. I preordered it from Mercer University Press, received it early this week, and just finished reading it. The author claims it is the first full biography of Wilder since a 1936 work. Unfortunately, it is a disappointing book on many levels. Fortunately, University of Tennessee Press is publishing in May what I hope is a more comprehensive biography on Wilder. Once again, we have a neglected topic receiving treatment in two books published within months of each other. John

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    1. Thanks for the reminder, John. I had this on the list and then erroneously moved it to May not realizing that it was two different books. I'll add it back.

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  2. Just noticed that the cover photograph of the Wilder biography coming out in May appears to be that of Charles Dana and not John Wilder. Not an encouraging sign!

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    1. Yes, I just did a quick google image search and that photo is not attributed to Wilder anywhere, but it certainly is to Dana.

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    2. You may recall from Dave Powell’s impressive trilogy on Chickamauga the controversial meeting between Dana (who had been sent by Stanton to “spy” on Rosecrans) and Wilder on the battlefield as the Union line was collapsing. Wilder described Dana as panic-stricken and contended that Dana ordered Wilder to take his entire brigade off the battlefield and personally escort him to Chattanooga. This controversy continued well after the war. Regardless, it hardly merits putting Dana on the cover of a Wilder biography! There sometimes seems to be a disconnect between authors and their publisher. The Mercer University Press dust jacket of its new Wilder biography contains a statement that flatly contradicts the author’s statement on the subject. Perhaps some industry insiders (Ted Savas, are you there?) can shed some light? Hopefully, word gets back to UT Press to reconsider its cover photograph on the Wilder bio due in May.

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    3. They changed the cover. The art dept. got right on it. That was surprisingly fast.

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    4. Don or one of your many followers obviously passed on the word to UT Press! Glad I saved a screen shot of the old cover for posterity. The new photo looks great and is not in the current book on the market now. Gives me hope for this new bio due out in May.

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  3. As Drew did I also looked at the photo. I emailed the main UT Press email. I would love to hear an explanation as to how this happened.
    Don Hallstrom

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    1. Don, did they respond back? I noticed today that the cover has been changed already.

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  4. Ted Savas is here, John. I find this jaw-dropping. We always ask our authors for cover and jacket text ideas, and do our best to work with them. We always send them both for approval / corrections, and it never goes public anywhere without at least two levels of scrutiny. Not sure how this got through. I recall the Ezra Carman single volume history published in 2008 had the wrong man inside (it wasn't Carman).

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  5. They now have a picture of Wilder on the book's Amazon listing.

    Joel Manuel

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  6. Joel, what you apparently are looking at is the just-published bio by Steven Cox (which I just read) which has always had the correct photo of Wilder. The UT Press forthcoming book of Wilder in May is called Forging a New South: The Life of John T. Wilder by author Maury Nicely, and the Amazon listing still has Charles Dana on the cover.

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