Earl Schenck Miers (1910–1972)

Published in 1951, The General Who Marched to Hell: Sherman and the Southern Campaign tells the non-PC (abundance of grinning n-words), rather rosy,
tale of the swathe of destruction left by Sherman's Union soldiers as they marched from Atlanta to Savannah and up through Colombia to Charleston, South Carolina.

While not without honest depictions, given the many original sources available in the 1940s, and not shrinking from some horrors, the book has been criticized for not show more evaluating
Sherman's choice to burn small homes and farms, to murder animals, and to totally destroy all food and crops.

Burning the public buildings, destroying railroads and bridges, looting art, and taking the food needed to feed the army and the many slaves joining The March, would have been a more compassionate approach. But Sherman and his soldiers, notably after witnessing the conditions of the surviving prisoners at Andersonville, wanted The South to never forget the war
that it had started.

While Sherman is a hero in the sense of ending Confederate power in the South and was a hero to the newly freed slaves,
his treatment of the Nez Perce was unrepentant evil.

And the confederates nearly won another decisive battle because Sherman's soldiers were out of condition after looting all the way across Georgia. show less

The author was born in 1910 and died in 1972, just four years after this book was published. He may have been quite sick when this book was written. I have no other work of his to compare it with. According to his biography, he was the founding director of Rutgers University Press, and he worked for other publishers in various responsible capacities.

Unfortunately this book does not seem to have received the services of an alert and competent editor. That seems to be more or less usual these show more days, but rather more remarkable for the 1960s. Most books that I have read that were published in that period show few obvious grammatical mistakes.

In this book however, there is a dangling participle in the first paragraph of the first chapter, and the last paragraph of the last chapter is missing a verb. Where was the editor? My best guess is that, this being a children's book, a very novice reader was assigned the job or that, since the author had worked in publishing for a good deal of his life, it was assumed that he must know what he was doing, and Grosset and Dunlap just did not bother to assign him an editor. That was a mistake.

The author is devoted to Thomas Jefferson, beyond reason. This is a children's book, and there was a convention in the '60s that all the founders must be praised and not criticized in a children's book. But the portrayal of Jefferson as universally beloved, including by the slaves he or his father had inherited, bred, or purchased, beggars belief.

The tone of the writing fluctuates wildly, from the anecdotal to the wildly ideological, to the personal, to the topical. I imagine that it captures very well a particular 1960s zeitgeist and certain 1960s conventions about writing for children. But I was not alive during that decade, and this zeitgeist and the ideology that motivated this book are simply impossible for me to recognize. show less

An excellent book for my needs. I wanted to read a shorter book on the American Civil War that didn't get bogged down in historical side issues. The story is focused on the final stage of the war when Grant was made Lt. General by Lincoln until its end. I never knew what happened to Grant, Lee, or Davis once the war stopped with Davis being captured. This book is poetic and fixed in what it wants to communicate. Written in the 1970's, it is a history book which tries to be fair and even show more handed as opposed to the currrent style of historical works which are wholly revisionist while condescending to mention minor persons and events for situational context.

This book is by no means exhaustive, and unfortunately it still manages to list far too many names which appear only once and then disappear.

By reading this book you get a sense of what type of losses the country suffered during the conflict. I didn't know that the Southern Confederacy considered itself another country and that they thought they could win the war by withstanding a siege against Richmond fighting only defensively. The South's Jubal Early was man I had never heard of before. His battlefield behind-the-lines adventures which were recounted and the lessons learned by the North from the entire conflct made this book's historical writer a person I am very grateful to. This has been such a positive experience, I now look forward to reading more material on the Civil War. The author is very respectful of Lincoln and his status as a preserver of the Union.
The book's construction is beautiful: stiff paper stock, sewn binding, yellow endpages, bibliography, readable Times font, maps, index. show less

Murder in the suburbs at Christmas time. The solution is a bit murky psychologically, but the setting is well-captured and the protagonist (who is a polio survivor) is interesting.