5 comments about Lee and Grant: A Dual Biography.

1. I have been reading about the Civil War for almost 50 years. Despite what most of the other reviews of this biography state, I consider this book the most superficial review of Generals R.E. Lee and U.S. Grant that it has ever been my misfortune to read. However, I do agree with another reviewer that some parts of the book appear to be fictionalized. The book also includes many errors. In fact, the only reason I finished the book was my interest in seeing how many other errors I could pick out.
   
   For example, I seriously doubt that U.S. Grant spent months attempting to take Vicksburg with a northern, overland attack, and several river-borne attacks that were only meant to mislead the Confederates, so that he could finally attack the city by bypassing it and landing further south. I am a great admirer of U.S. Grant, but if he showed up at my house today and told me that the above was true, I would call him a liar. Yet this is exactly what the author suggests Grant did.
   
   Another example, the author claims on one page that a formation of 17,000 Union cavalry was the greatest number of cavalry ever assembled in the *world*. I bet the Mongols would find that amusing.
   
   A third error... The author mentions more than once that 10,000 Union troops died in the attack at Cold Harbor. Meanwhile, every other Civil War historian uses the figure of 7,000. Are they all wrong?
   
   Enough examples, if you want to read good biographies about Lee and Grant then there are a number of them out there, including Grant's own autobiography. A good one-book biography is The Rise of U.S. Grant, and there is an excellent trilogy: Captain Sam Grant, Grant Moves South, and Grant Takes Command



2. The idea of comparing these two iconic figures in a single book seems logical. The author, I think, adds some suspense to the reading by swinging back and forth between the stories of these two men at points of common ground.
   
   Seemingly well researched, the author spends a sizeable amount of time to the pre-Civil War lives of Lee and Grant. This is good, because it is the less known parts of their lives. The post war years also get decent treatment. It's a smart move by the author not to overly reharsh the parts of the story we already know.
   
   If I were to criticize the writing, I would focus on only two points. First, the "early years" information seems overly long without explaining much about how those experiences helped to forge their future personalities. Second, the juxtaposition between Lee as the Scion of the Old South and Grant as the Ideal of the New North should have been driven home earlier. I think those changes might have helped turn this "good" dual biography into something special.
   
   My minor criticisms aside, this is a fine addition to the bookshelf of the Civil War buff in your life. Informative, well structured and not exhaustingly long, it's an enjoyable book.



3. True, documentation on Lee and Grant is extensive, and I enjoyed reading the book - in the beginning. But the minutest details of their lives are told without any kind of passion, making some of the certainly fictionalized mini-events quite boring. Parallelling their lives in alternating chapters would have been much more interesting had more emphasis been placed on the living conditions and philosophy of the time instead of this painstaking effort to details that read worse than the driest of dry history books.



4. 
   I purchased my first biography by Gene Smith on Woodrow Wilson in 1963 and was suitably impressed to later purchase this book that was published in 1984.
   
   In fact, had anyone but Gene Smith written this one I would not have been interested. Having several biographies of both Grant and Lee on the shelf I would not be too keen on an author attempting to cover these men in one book. But I have to laud Mr. Smith that once again he has written a very readable and interesting biography.
   
   By alternating chapters and concentrating mainly on the Western Theatre in Virgina he has been able to give focus on both these military men. Interestingly enough the humble Grant and the aristocratic Lee both ended up in the same room having a similiar goal in mind: bringing the Union back to peace. I stood in that 'reconstructed' room at the McLean house in Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, a short time back, and after all the years even the replacement room can still hold a certain historical feeling.
   
   This is a very good, basic biography of these two military leaders and adequate view of the Civil War in Virginia.
   
   Semper Fi.



5. There is not a lot new to be said about Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. They are, undoubtedly, two of the most documented men in History. What is more important, when tackling this subject, is presenting the subject matter in an interesting fashion. In this regard, Gene Smith succeeds.
   
   By alternating chapters, between each of his subjects, the reader follows the lives of two men as they grow and develop. All the while knowing, they are destined to meet in ultimate contest.
   
   Even more than the book's interesting structure, I was impressed with Smith's well formed thoughts. The narrative is never disjointed or piecemeal, and all details are presented in context to the two men's lives, manifesting in a highly readable work.
   
   I laud Mr. Smith for an excellent effort. And I encourage readers, whether new or old to the subject of the Civil War, to read this book.

No comments about Borderlander: The Life of James Kirker, 1793-1852.

No comments about "A Fit Representation of Pandemonium": East Tennessee Confederate Soldiers in the Campaign for Vicksburg.

No comments about Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839-1915.

2 comments about Stonewall Jackson (Great Generals).

1. Stonewall Jackson by Donald A. Davis
   (Palgrave Macmillan (2007), Hardcover, 224 pages)
   
   A review
   by
   Colin J. Edwards
   
   Stonewall or Oddball?
   
   I have to come clean immediately and confess that I have difficulty with the description, `tough fighting generals'. What they are describing are heartless individuals who send men to death or mutilation with reckless abandon. Let us remind ourselves that wars are started by politicians, fought by generals and won by soldiers. The American Civil War was the exception: the generals prolonged that one.
   Before you cast me aside as a peace-nik lefty, let me assure you that I saw action as an infantry officer, and know a little of what I speak.
   
   Books about wars: and this is a book about a war more than a biography of an individual, are either from an officer's perspective, or the enlisted man. Donald Davis is the exception being quite at home writing about either. His best seller `Lightening Strike', records the active service of a gunnery sergeant. However, I could find little sympathy for the fighting man in this volume. Mr Davis wrote with touching tenderness of the separation of General Jackson from his wife and new baby girl. A separation that didn't last long as the general called them to his side. Tens of thousands of ordinary soldiers from North and South would have thought precious, just a moment with their loved ones. Rank has its privilege it seems.
   
   Davis' detailed descriptions of the various battles are excellent, if a little tedious. This is due perhaps to a lack of information about Jackson who was such a secretive individual, that it's a wonder Davis was able to write the book at all.
   
   Born at Clarksburg West Virginia on January 21 1824 into an attorney's family, he preceded by four months another general and West Point chum who saw the light of day at Liberty Indiana in May: a future adversary, Ambrose Burnside.
   
   After a very unsettled childhood, he entered West Point more by luck than judgement. He struggled to keep up but had an almost eccentric ability to focus unswervingly on the subject at hand. This paid off and he was able to move up the rankings graduating 17th out of a class of 59. This was not good enough to get him into the esteemed engineers, but it did get him into the artillery as a second lieutenant. This single minded eccentricity bordering on autism became more apparent when he was under fire during the Mexican Way. Observation of his reckless valour caused him to be bumped up the ranks to acting major. Another manifestation of his disturbed mental state was his inability to work in harmony with others. His unresolved dispute with a brother officer while stationed at Fort Mead in Florida, resulted in him leaving the army and taking up a teaching post at Lexington Virginia.
   
   The general consensus was that Thomas Jackson was a poor teacher, but the eight years there gave him the opportunity to meet and marry two wives.
   
   The Civil War found him back in the army and up to his neck in muck and bullets in the battles so precisely delineated by Mr Davis. His eccentricity (or mental disturbance), new no bounds and he and his soldiers went from victory to victory even if it killed them. He even had one of his generals (A.P.Hill), dragged along behind a cart on an interminable march for some undisclosed actus reus. This so damaged the general's tender feet that he was out of action for some time. Not the action of a sound mind you might think; particularly when it concerns one of your better generals.
   
   Jackson continued to carry the whole war on his shoulders, confiding in no one until he experienced a nervous collapse. From then until the end of his life he was conspicuous for his ability to fall asleep anywhere. On one occasion he was summoned to see his boss Robert E Lee, and promptly fell asleep before he saw him.
   
   Thomas Jackson was a religious zealot who spoke more to God than anyone else. However, he did not practice what he preached, nor anything anyone else preached as he didn't stay awake long enough. He had no compunction in raking artillery fire into Mexican civilians when Mexico City failed to surrender in 1848, or later when he gunned down a retreating Mexican army. During the Civil War he showed no reluctance to destroy fellow Americans be them from the North or the South, and insisted that his officers do likewise.
   
   To experience fear while in the presence of danger is normal. To some extent it is possible to hide that fear. Jackson did not hide it; he did not have any fear. He constantly took needless risks and in front of his troops defied the conflagration to kill him.
   That was until Chancellorsville on May 2 1863. Throwing caution to the wind as usual, he took his staff beyond his own front lines to reconnoitre the enemy positions. True to form he omitted to inform anyone of his intentions. Upon his return he was fired upon by his own soldiers and hit three times. Six of his staff were killed outright. He however was not killed but was stretchered to an aid station falling off the stretcher on the way. The chief surgeon of Jackson's army, Dr Hunter McGuire, amputated his left arm, but did not notice General Jackson complaining about chest pain. The pain developed into pneumonia from which he died on May 10th 1863.
   
   Google Books list over 4000 entries for General Jackson, and most of them suggest that had he lived the result at Gettysburg would have been different. The generals lost the battle for the Confederates by their bickering and lack of direction. Jackson would have only added to the confusion. The soldiers of the South fought their hearts out at Gettysburg only to be betrayed by their officers.
   
   Donald Davis's book is a myth breaker, and a `must read' for anyone who has an interest in the first modern war.
   
   
   



2. I thought this book provided a succinct and accurate assessment of General Jackson's life and career. I do, however, offer three criticisms.
   
   First, a few maps would have been most helpful. The author presumes that the reader has a working knowledge of Jackson's major battles--the places they were fought, the strategy and tactics employed, and the surrounding topography. I realize that the Great General Series must make certain accommodations in order to accomplish its goal of providing a BRIEF overview of the life and service of its subjects, but a few maps would have greatly enhanced my understanding of what Jackson accomplished.
   
   Second, I thought the comparisons between Jackson's strategy and tactics and those employed in the Iraq War were both gratuitous and a bit of stretch, a not-so-veiled attempt to make the Civil War seem somehow relevant to the conflict in the Middle East.
   
   Third, the editors should have read the text one more time before it went to print. There were several typographical and formatting errors that were a bit of a distraction.
   
   These, however, are minor complaints. If you don't know much about Stonewall and want to get a feel for the contribution he made to the Confederacy and towards the evolution of military tactics, you would do well to read this book.

No comments about Lee: An Abridgement of the 4 Volume Biography.

1 comments about Stephen Decatur: A Life Most Bold And Daring (Library of Naval Biography).

1. Each period of history has seemed to produce a naval officer that has characterized the period. In the Revolutionary War it was John Paul Jones. In World War II it was Nimitz. During the period around the War of 1812 (which also included combat with the Barbary pirates, it was Stephen Decatur. This is his story, well written, and able to place Decatur in the story of the United States of the time.
   
   Decatur entered the navy in 1799 (well after the Revolutionary War) and served until he was killed in a duel in 1820. This was a duel that appears to be even more stupid than most. And the author goes to some effort to describe the failings of their seconds who probably could have prevented the duel from happening.
   
   During his brief career, Decatur rose rapidly in the ranks and with a combination of skill and luck was able to do the right thing, in the right place, at the right time. His promotion was fast, and he was the most famous officer of his day. His is quite a story.

1 comments about Myra Inman: A Diary of the Civil War in East Tennessee.

1. Unless you live in eastern Tennessee, pass this book by. It was written during the Civil War, but you'd never know it. There are only a very few references mentioned about current events, and not even the end of the War. Ninety percent of it is Myra visiting friends, neighbors, hearing of deaths in the community, going to church and not going to church. Boring.

1 comments about Benjamin Franklin Autobiography (Unabridged Classics in Audio).

1. The recording level of this product is extremely low (which may be a batch recording problem)...however once you get past that problem the reader is easy to listen to and the original text of the book is a benefit to any and every person. I was glad to find that an audio recording of the book is available as the book itself is one that I have re-read several times.

5 comments about Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W. C. Fields.

1. Louvish seems to spend about a third of the book on Fields' life, another third criticizing Robert Lewis Taylor's earlier Fields biography, and a final third relating the history of the English Music Hall circa 1895-1915. (Pages and pages of this with no mention of Fields whatsoever!)
   Taylor's book may be innacurate-but as another reviewer noted, it's a heck of a lot more entertaining.



2. W.C. Fields, in my opinion, was the best of the old comedians. I have always enjoyed seeing his old films or hearing recordings of his hilarious old radio shows; but I knew very little about him. This book illuminates his life AND the entertainment world of his era. A very interesting book that seems well documented and authoritative. Recommended.



3. Although I have reservations, Simon Louvish's *Man on the Flying Trapeze* is a thoroughly competent job, strong in many areas. Louvish paints the vaudeville show circuit out of which Fields's later inimitable character was born with just the right amount of detail. Fields's earliest years were spend both in America and in Europe as one of a series of variety acts presented as part of an evening's performance (he was often on stage for only 12 minutes), and Louvish recreates this ambiance with some deftness, not easy to do when researching materials 90 years old. The Ziegfeld Follies live again! Similarly, by the time Fields starts in motion pictures in 1915, and with an explicitness that grows throughout the book, Louvish gets behind Fields's connection with the studios that filmed him. Chapter 23 on the now obscure producer J. P. McEvoy is a great piece of detective work: here is a key figure who underlies most of Fields's most sympathetic satirical postures.

   Louvish doesn't claim to have figured out what he cannot: what caused the breakdown of Fields's marriage to Hattie Hughes? A biography that does include many of Fields's well-known lines--"Have you had this tooth pulled before?"--and reprises the best skits has much else to relish: e. g., the movie studio atmosphere and the hilarious objections to Fields's then-too-smutty-but-now-tame-enough gags. Louvish represents dutifully if a little thinly Fields's decline from illnesses brought on by alcoholism.

   Now a few cavils. We need more on why William Claude Dukenfield was able to transform his life into comedy. Why could he and not others sublimate his anger and tensions first into juggling and then into physical and finally verbal humor? If the book needs the inspiration of genius to answer this point, that nevertheless is what a Fields fan wants. It also needs a fuller, richer aesthetic and intellectual context in appraising Fields's films. Less consequentially, Louvish on occasion needs more distance from Fields; adopting the master's voice in the narrative ("Never give a sucker an even break, particularly when he might be your biographer," p. 165) blurs the vision instead of clarifying it. There are a few factual errors: *Babbitt* was published in 1922, not 1921; the poem on p. 388 that Louvish thinks is Fields's was written by Ogden Nash (surely the W. W. Norton Company has editors for such details?)

   Nevertheless, *Man on the Flying Trapeze* is an entertaining and illuminating biography, and I am grateful for it. Godfrey Daniel!




4. Simon Louvish once again dazzles the reader with his tremendous research, and still is able to make an interesting subject boring. Louvish gathers many details about Fields' early life and career and uses this material to punch holes in the constantly repeated misinformation previous biographies contained (most of the misinformation was supplied by Fields himself. For the facts alone this book is worth the purchase for any fan of "The Great Man," but don't expect to be enthralled by the writing style of Louvish, who has a tendency to write while patting himself on the back. Not enough time is spent on Fields' movie career and his personal life remains a mystery despite Louvish's efforts. Probably the best biography available on W.C. Fields, which only proves how well he covered his tracks.



5. I really cannot understand why someone would give this book a bad review.

   FIRST - It is rare that there is a book written about THE GREAT MAN. We should give a hearty handclap to those who take the time to revisit such a great comedian and orginal personality.

   SECOND - It is rare that a book would be honest enough to say where it's shortcomings may be. Meaning that, much to my and I'm sure other peoples amusement, our friend W.C. did a lot of tall-tale telling in his day. It is hard to decifer where truth on his life lay. Louvish checks with all resources to find whre the turth may be. He had access to family members, W.C.'s own scrapbooks, library archives, etc. He presents the book in the begining as a sort of mystery - and that's what it is. Even W.C.'s own authorized bio is full of holes and tall tales - and Louvish proves it. Those who are familiar with THE GREAT MAN know that even he fouled up his own tale telling at times.

   THIRD - This book is not only a biography but a historical account. A good biography should not only tell the story of a person but should also give you points of reference in regards to time, event, people & places. Louvish does this. He gives you helpful background on key people and places in W.C.'s life. It allows the reader to understand the subject clearer. And this information is presented clear and concise - not as a "filler" for the text.

   FOURTH - For those who feel that Louvish is being a "wiseguy" by the way he writes I ask you to think about who the subject matter is! One of the biggest and most original wiseguy of them all. I feel it makes the book more personal and fun to read.

   If you're a fan of Fields you read it & judge for yourself. However, unlike some more ignorant folk, you must remember that ANY biography is not an "end all" to who that person is. A personality is a many layered thing, and so is telling the story of someones' life.

   Take the book as it is. An enjoyable journey into the world of W.C Fields. You may learn something new, or you may not. However I'm sure you'll enjoy!