Booknotes: A Summer of Battles - The Final Weeks of the Civil War's 1864 Atlanta Campaign (Volume 1)

New Arrival:

• A Summer of Battles - The Final Weeks of the Civil War's 1864 Atlanta Campaign, Volume 1: The Siege of Atlanta, Utoy Creek and The Grand Movement by David Allison (Author, 2025).

Well, I hope everyone had a nice and relaxing Thanksgiving holiday (and the turkey wasn't too dry!).

Soon after I brought up the release of these books in an earlier post, the author contacted me and kindly offered to send over copies for review consideration on the site.

As noted before, David Allison's two-volume set addresses at length the final forty days of the 1864 Atlanta Campaign, those late-stage military events still being the literature's least well-covered parts of the campaign to date (although I would imagine that Earl Hess's long-awaited Jonesboro book might emerge sometime in the near future). In covering those actions, Allison's two-volume narrative "presents a wealth of first-hand accounts from soldiers in a day-to-day timeline that will help readers understand the remarkable events that took place on the north, west and south sides of Atlanta in the late summer of 1864."

From the description: "Volume 1 covers August 1864, when the Northern and Southern armies faced off along 15 miles of earthworks and trenches north and west of Atlanta. Volume 1 also takes a close look at the under-studied fighting in the Utoy Creek area southwest of Atlanta, including the Battle of Utoy Creek on August 6, 1864. And it follows the evolution of General Sherman’s reluctant decision to make The Grand Movement.

Volume 1's main text, exclusive of the appendix section, runs 300 pages. Glancing through the page block, I counted six maps (3 Jesperson originals, include a pair of Utoy Creek tactical maps, and 3 archival reproductions). In addition, photographs and informational tables of various types are interspersed throughout. A formal bibliography did not make it into either volume, but a quick thumb through the endnotes clearly indicates that the author conducted extensive research.