Edwin C. Bearss (1923–2020)

Magisterial and definitive. Readers who found the first volume rather stilted in its prose will be pleased to see that Bearss had improved his writing for this second volume. He even includes a number of first-person accounts, albeit primarily in footnotes. The campaign really picks up steam in this volume, and Bearss does an excellent job of tracking the movements and battles along with descriptive text and analysis. The maps are terrible, hopefully you have Warren Grabau's 68-map "Ninety-Eight Days" close at hand for reference.… (meer)

I haven't read a lot of Civil War books, so maybe I'm not as qualified as others to comment on this effort by US National Park Service Historian Emeritus Edwin C. Bearss. But this is some pretty hard (and dull) reading. I was expecting to hear stories about some of the important battlefields of the Civil War, and while there are a few good nuggets in here, most of it is simply Bearss trying to describe which segment of which army moved here, followed by more descriptions of which army moved somewhere else. I really liked the maps that Rick Atkinson used in his book that described the 1944 western front of Europe ([b:The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945|16044941|The Guns at Last Light The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (World War II Liberation Trilogy, #3)|Rick Atkinson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1435169033s/16044941.jpg|21858205]). Bearss needs more of both those large scale (southern PA to Richmond VA) and small scale (NW of Gettysburg) maps in this book. Plus, there's just so many names and numbers that it is very difficult to keep track of who does what when. I didn't care for the Epilogue that described the finding of the ironclad Cairo. A good epilogue to me tells me what became of the men so often mentioned in the narrative.… (meer)