Richard Hall (3) (1930–2009)

This is one book in my large collection about imposters. The book was entertaining. The author's writing style is not stilted or academic. Like too many books of its kind, it is very poorly documented. In his notes the author claims that he "did not want to be a party to reporting fiction as fact, or to help to develop a mythology about women in the Civil War" and then proceeds to do exactly that. There is only a selected bibliography. There are notes in the back of the book for each chapter but, if you check the author's sources, background historical information about battles or local history come from well-researched sources but specific facts about individual women tend to come from sources even more poorly documented than this book. In his notes on Loreta Janeta Velazquez he admits that the evidence is circumstantial. He also states in the notes that when he did check primary sources he found major discrepancies.… (meer)

This is one book in my large collection about imposters. The book was entertaining. The author's writing style is not stilted or academic. Like many books of its kind, it is very poorly documented. In his notes the author claims that he "did not want to be a party to reporting fiction as fact, or to help to develop a mythology about women in the Civil War" and then proceeds to do exactly that. There is only a selected bibliography. There are notes in the back of the book for each chapter but, if you check the author's sources, background historical information about battles or local history come from well-researched sources but specific facts about individual women tend to come from sources even more poorly documented than this book. In his notes on Loreta Janeta Velazquez he admits that the evidence is circumstantial. He also states in the notes that when he did check primary sources he found major discrepancies.… (meer)

Too much space is taken up with women who were no more in disguise than I am--nurses, Daughters of the Regiment--and with women whose stories are, at best, highly suspect. The author has attempted to verify as much of these latter type as possible, but we are talking about a guy who also "researches" UFOs, which makes me leery .

On the up side, he provides a very useful list of known female soldiers, by state and unit, and there's an interesting section on how some were caught out. He also points out, convincingly, that there were probably many more women who succeeded in serving as soldiers than we will ever know about.

A little dry initially, the book turns out to be a fair read overall.… (meer)