This is a book where the statistics can fool you.

Officially the book is 99 pages long, plus a one page preface, contents, and list of illustrations. Short, but arguably a full-length book.

Then you open it up and look at the illustrations. There are just more than fifty of them. They are, almost without exception, printed two to a page. But here's the thing: Those picture pages are counted toward the page count -- and so are the blank pages on the backs of the picture pages, even though (in my copy at least) the photo pages are not glossy paper; they're the same paper stock as everything else.

So those fifty-odd photos take up fifty-odd pages of the 99 pages of copy! So you are left with only forty-some pages of text. This looks like a book, but in terms of length, it's a pamphlet.

And that means that you can learn about as much about the Civil War in North Carolina from a full-sized general history of the Civil War as you do from this specialized volume. It covers only the standard topics that any good history will cover: Secession, the Hatteras expedition, the Burnside expedition and operations around New Bern, Fort Fisher, Bentonville and the end of the war.

Of course, it's convenient to have all that information in one place. If you want a quick reference to North Carolina's part in the Civil War, this will do well. But if you want to learn something that you won't learn anywhere else, there isn't much. ( )