Book News: Desert Empire

I was doing some online browsing of titles with tentative release dates for next year and discovered a new slate of Emerging Civil War offerings. I like the ECW series for what it is and what it aims to do, but for a while I did have a bone to pick with its narrow geographical focus on the East. Happily (for me anyway), the always growing writing crew there has added a significant amount of western flavor in recent times. Though they still haven't ventured off into the depths of my beloved trans-Mississippi West, that gap will be initially addressed with the release of Patrick Kelly-Fischer and Phillip S. Greenwalt's Desert Empire: The 1862 New Mexico Campaign.

The 1862 New Mexico Campaign is relatively rare among T-M military campaigns in that it has been the rich subject of both numerous single-volume overviews and highly detailed battle studies (Donald Frazier and later authors have also delved deeply into the "empire" angle), but I will still be very interested to read what Kelly-Fischer and Greenwalt's interpretation has to offer. The modest scale of the vast majority of operations conducted west of the Mississippi River arguably make them a perfect fit for exploration within the confines of the ECW series, so here's to wishing that Desert Empire sells well enough to encourage expanded T-M coverage.