Booknotes: Detour to Disaster

New Arrival:

• Detour to Disaster: General John Bell Hood's "Slight Demonstration" at Decatur and the Unravelling of the Tennessee Campaign by Noel Carpenter (Savas Beatie, 2023).

I sometimes wonder how many quality retiree passion projects are out there that didn't get published before the author passed and ended up gathering dust in some relative's storage (or, worse, thrown out in the estate clearing). You can't really blame anyone too much for letting it happen. After all, publishing something worthwhile is a big job and family members often don't share the writer's interests and motivation.

Happily, that is not the case here. A Decatur, Alabama native, Noel Carpenter, upon retirement from his Air Force officer and data specialist careers, researched and wrote a strong contribution on a neglected topic associated with the 1864 Tennessee Campaign. Unfortunately, Carpenter passed away in 2000 before publishing his completed manuscript. Thankfully, however, that is not the end of the story, as Carpenter's daughter, Carol Powell, did us all a favor by giving the manuscript a grammatical review and printing it locally in 2007 under the title A Slight Demonstration: Decatur, October 1864, Clumsy Beginning of Gen. John B. Hood's Tennessee Campaign [to read my 2007 review, follow the preceding link]. As often happens in such cases, though, availability was limited and the small-run title went out of print.

Fast forward to 2023, and this historiographically valuable manuscript has received a second breath of life, this time from publisher Savas Beatie. Retitled Detour to Disaster: General John Bell Hood's "Slight Demonstration" at Decatur and the Unravelling of the Tennessee Campaign, the new paperback version appears to be mostly a straight reprint. I don't have ready access to the original hardcover edition at the moment, but I did happen to look through it again sometime within the past year or so, and it appears the font (if I recall correctly), page dimensions, and main narrative page-length (156 pages) are unchanged. The SB edition has a new foreword (which adds some contextual background), an index, and the original area map has been replaced with a new one. Otherwise, no tactical-scale maps were added to address the original version's deficiency in that regard. There might be some other differences, but, like I mentioned earlier, I didn't do a page-by-page comparison.

From the description: "In October of 1864, Confederate General John Bell Hood set out through Alabama on what would be the final campaign of the Army of Tennessee. One event in particular, overlooked and misunderstood for generations, portended what was to follow and is the subject of Noel Carpenter’s Detour to Disaster: General John Bell Hood’s “Slight Demonstration” at Decatur and the Unravelling of the Tennessee Campaign.

In this fascinating and meticulously detailed and documented account—the first book-length study of the weighty decision to march to Decatur and the combat that followed there—Carpenter investigates the circumstances surrounding these matters and how they overwhelmed the controversial young army commander and potentially doomed his daring invasion. ..."

I would venture to guess that a lot of western theater enthusiasts who would liked to have added a copy of the original edition to their home libraries missed out. You don't often get a second chance with books of this kind (affordably priced or not), so now's a great time to grasp this opportunity.