Book Description
Hailed as a prophet of modern war and condemned as a harbinger of modern barbarism, Sherman is the most controversial general of the Civil War. "War is cruelty, you cannot refine it," he wrote in fury to the Confederate mayor of Atlanta, and his memoir is filled with dozens of such wartime exchanges and a fascinating, eerie account of the famous march through the Carolinas.
Customer Reviews:
Read it !.......2007-10-06
Sherman is (perhaps arguably) the most articulate and intelligent autobiographer (and biographer) of the Civil War period. Yes, he was controversial, but that, in great part, came from the times, and the period politics, and later from the political agendas of modern politically correct historians/writers. The overriding elements in Sherman's autobiography are the matter-of-factness and the fairness with which he describes events and people in his life. With much the same exquisite Dignity as U. S. Grant in his memoiors, Sherman speaks to the reader with a clarity and honesty no decent person can help but admire. He is painstaking in relating military associations - sometimes wearily so. But his thorough and candid descriptions of events, people and places still present themselves in an entertaining manner time and time again. For the reader mature enough to accept those times without tainted sanctimonious judgement, Sherman's memoirs will be a fascinating and enlightening glimpse of the people and the soul of our country during one of our most trying eras.
"MEMOIRS" BY W.T. SHERMAN.......2007-06-28
INTERESTING TO READ "SHERMANS" SIDE OF THE STORY !! GOOD READ IN CONJUCTION WITH "CITIZEN SHERMAN" BY MICHAEL FELLMAN !!!
Sherman in his own words..........2007-06-27
General William T. Sherman's memoirs, first published in 1875, are primarily an account of his service in uniform during the Civil War. Sherman rallied to the Union colors early in the conflict, but had indifferent success until the searing crucible of the Battle of Shiloh, where he fought under the command of the stalwart U.S. Grant. Shiloh was a turning point. With increasing confidence as a leader, Sherman played key roles in the siege of Vicksburg and in the relief of beseiged Union forces at Chattanooga. When Grant was called east to head up all Union forces, he hand-picked Sherman as his successor in the West. Sherman would go on to take Atlanta, march to the sea at Savannah, and pillage his way through the Carolinas to hasten the end of the war.
Sherman the man, and his memoirs, stand in vivid contrast to his contemporary and close friend U.S. Grant. Where Grant was modest and reserved, Sherman comes across as all nervous energy, talking up a storm and hardly able to sit still doing it. His memoirs are reflective of his personality, passionate and argumentative in between inserted copies of key correspondence. While less polished than Grant's, they are in many ways more entertaining and certainly more revealing of Sherman's feelings and personality.
Sherman expresses an opinion on practically everything. His battles with newspaper reporters, whom he despised, date from an alleged nervious breakdown in the first year of the war. His exchange of correspondence with Confederate General John Hood over the forced evacuation of Atlanta, are a malstrom in miniature of the passions behind the war itself. Sherman is more than frank about the politics within the Union Army, and its sometimes troubled relations with civilian authority. Above all, Sherman recognized the cruelty of the war, and was unwilling to sugarcoat that reality for anyone. Sherman and Grant each understood the grim arithmetic that the Confederate Armies must be bled to death in order for the Confederacy to be defeated and were prepared to carry out that strategy.
This book is highly recommended to students of the Civil War, who will find Sherman to be an instructive and even at times entertaining guide through those portions that he personally experienced.
timeless lessons.......2006-11-10
Clearly historians and civil war buffs will acknowledge the brilliance of this memoir for its obvious window into the mind of this most important figure of his time.
I didn't come to this as either one of the former,but as a reader interested in understanding how this man accomplished the most decisive strokes in the war with such skill.
The greatness of book lies not so much in its explanation of military strategy(which it is) but the powerful definition of the principles of freedom as expressed through a common foot soldier.
Sherman understood that no elitist and patrician society could stand however strong there reputation ,against a soldier who fought for this principle.
I found it inciteful that Shermans experience in the prewar south,and his views of its imbalanced society, became more valuable in breaking it than his geographical knowledge.
That Lincoln approved Shermans plan to march through the heart of the confedreacy at the disapproval of all his advisors shows his wisdom to Shermans argument that the south was a shell,and hollow inside.
Grants reluctance to this plan,which he approved only out of his loyalty to Sherman, is poignant to read.Grant thought he'd never see his best friend again.
The genius of Sherman was his utter conviction in the goodness of men to destroy that which was evil,knowing that when his men saw not the soldiery of the south,but its hideous society,he needn't do more to motivate them.
The miserable condition of slavery was known,but the site of 90 percent of a white population virtually no better off provided Sherman with a civilian population unable and unwilling to resist.Noone but Sherman thought this important,and that his diary records this as a current fact and not analysis years later is powerful reading.
Defeating the confedracy on this march with no major battles and losing but 100 men of his 62,000, told the south, as well as the north the myth of southern military advantage.
Sherman became so feared ,Southern commanders as well as thier soldiers fled before him,offering almost no opposition.
Shermans Army of the West,recruited and trained by him,became the most feared army in the world,for it fought under the true belief of a free people against real evil.
His own words to that effect are awe inspiring.
Illuminating Generals Memoir.......2006-08-21
I just finished reading this book (from the library, a 19th century edition) and came to search for other books. There are modern histories, but reading the original memoirs is very satisfying. The book by Julius Ceasar of the Gallic wars comes to mind. Sherman is a clear and satisfying writer. He does remind me of Ceasar in his matter of fact recollections.
I enjoyed the section on the taking of California during the Mexican war. Talking about hundreds of ships abandoned in Yerba Buena (to become San Francisco) due to the desertion of all the crews was interesting.
The period between California and Louisiana and secession is less interesting, but he was preparing a memoir of his life.
The war is what everyone will be looking for, and specifically the March to the Sea. The advance down from Tennessee to Atlanta is more militarily interesting. After the fall of Atlanta the battle was all logistics. Could such a large army separate from it's supply lines? According to W.T. Sherman this was all his idea and he documents it exhaustively. Presumeably this was due to disparagements of his leadership in the decades after the war and the presidency of Johnson.
The extensive documentation of lines of battle and effective strength and copies of tremendous amounts of coorespondence can be tedious, but are easily scanned for what is of interest or skipped altogether.
Great read, interesting book. Tecumseh Sherman is one of my heroes.
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Memoirs of Gen. W. T. Sherman Vol. 1 of 2
William Tecumseh Sherman
Manufacturer: Digital Scanning Inc.
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ASIN: 158218187X |
Book Description
Sherman's infamous march on Atlanta during the Civil War demoralized the Confederacy and destroyed the city's military value. This memoir profiles the general's early military career and shows how he gained his command in the Union Army.
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The Memoirs of General W. T Sherman
William T. Sherman
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ASIN: 1406805491 |
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Personal Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman Vol. 1 of 2 (Personal Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman)
William T. Sherman
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ASIN: 1582181047 |
Book Description
This present edition contains the full text of the original work, as revised and corrected by Sherman himself. A brief concluding chapter has been compiled and added at the express request of the publishers, completing an account of the general's life and touching upon his last illness, death, and funeral.
Book Description
General William Tecumseh Sherman, a great man both in his gifts and his achievements, was altogether a solider in the habits of mind. A natural student of the topography of the countryside, this characteristic of true military genius served Sherman well in planning his devastating march from Atlanta, across Georgia to the sea, the most striking achievement of the Civil War. The memoirs of this courageous, patient, and self-sacrificing "Old Warrior" are certain of a permanent place in literature
Book Description
Volume 2 in the West Wall Series. The Allied armies closed in on Germany's West Wall fortifications during the Winter of 1944, after much hard fighting but with a seemingly uninterrupted string of victories. The German surprise attack of December 16, culminating in the Battle of the Bulge, revealed surprising inter-Allied strains and morale problems among the troops.
Charles Whiting, a noted World War II historian who actually served in this campaign, is among the few to cover the dark side of the advance from Omaha to Bastogne. Whiting's detailed account of the 1944 campaign gives unprecedented coverage to behind-the-scenes rivalry between and within the Allied armies. The undermining of the morale of the average soldier (there were 100,000 Allied desertions between Normandy and the Bulge) by combat, fatigue, illness, and the endless waiting between battles is described from original sources. All of the obstacles faced by the fighting men in World War II's final campaign are covered here for the first time by a participant who is not afraid to tell the truth.
Product Description
What it was really like for ordinary troops in 1944 Europe, written by the renowned military historian. With photos.
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'44 In Combat from Normandy to the Ardennes
Charles Whiting
Manufacturer: Spellmount Publishers Ltd
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ASIN: 1862273944 |
Amazon.com
The Weather Underground was a small band of no more than a few hundred radicals, yet the fringe group was widely feared and revered as notorious bombers and violent revolutionaries. In The Way the Wind Blew Ron Jacobs presents a history of the group, from its origins on college campuses to the surrender of its last fugitive members in the 1980s. Along the way they set off bombs (...) and issued communiqués that were largely irrelevant if not incomprehensible to the American public. The dispassionate tone of this book allows for a credible narrative history of the group and its most prominent members, but many questions about the group's motivations remain unanswered.
Book Description
"You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows." -- Bob Dylan
A gripping account of 1960s radicals who took up arms against the state. The arrest and subsequent imprisonment of Silas Bissell, former heir to the rug-cleaning fortune who was discovered living near Eugene, Oregon, in 1987, drew a line under one of the most spectacular and bizarre episodes in the historv of the American New Left, for it marked the official end of the Weathermen. Product of splits within the antiwar movement during the late 1960s, the Weather Underground would become synonymous with violent, clandestine resistance to racism and imperialism in the United States and, for some, a symptom of how the movement went wrong. In the first comprehensive history of the Weathermen, Ron Jacobs narrates the origins, development and ultimate demise of the organization: its emergence from the Students for a Democratic Society; its role in the famous Days of Rage in Chicago during October 1969; its decision to go underground; the various actions it staged -- and in some cases bungled -- during the 1970s; its role as goad to other left organizations to sustain the struggle against racism and imperialism; and finally its disintegration, as various members were either captured or surrendered. Drawing on a rich array of documents, interviews with participants and an unrivalled knowledge of the history of the New Left, Jacobs weaves a gripping tale, by turns inspiring and hair-raising -- a fitting testimony to the serried adventures of Weatherman itself. The Way the Wind Blew fuses the excitement of a thriller with an objective assessment of US 1960s radicalism. It is an indispensable resource for comprehending the recent history of the US left.
Customer Reviews:
Those Wacky Leftists.......2002-03-18
This short book attempts to outline the rise and fall of the Weatherman Organization. Weather, as it came to be known, was an offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). When the SDS fragmented in the late 1960's, Weather became its best known survivor. Weather quickly went "underground" and engaged in a series of bombings that stretched well into the 1970's. Probably the most recognizable event in the history of Weather was the explosion that occurred in a townhouse in New York in 1970, when three members died while constructing bombs. The group bombed the United States Capitol building, banks, police stations and other "symbols" of what they deemed the imperialist-capitalist system. Most members of the Weather group eventually were arrested and sentenced to prison (unfortunately brief) terms. The last action concerning Weather was an armored car robbery in 1981 in New York.
Ron Jacobs, the author of this book, really could have done a better job. For one thing, he sympathizes too much with his topic. This causes serious problems with his objectivity and taints the book. His research is lacking as well. He relies exclusively on news clippings and documents. I believe I saw only one citation concerning an interview with a figure involved in the actual events. Errors abound as well, mostly concerning editing problems that should have been rectified before reaching publication. The book resembles a laundry list of events more than a historical narrative. In short, Jacobs takes a subject that has the potential for interest and turns it into cerebral novacaine. I'd like to see a more serious treatment of this topic, preferably written by a professional historian.
There is still some value to be found here, however. Even a car wreck of a book can't hide the fact that Weather was made up of serious wackos. The conflicts within Weather about the direction the group should take would be hilarious if it wasn't so dangerous. All the talk about revolution and women's roles in the group become ridiculous when you remember that we are talking about an organization made up of at most a few hundred people. Actually, I hesitate to call Weather an organization because hierarchy was seen as a symptom of the "imperialist pig" system. I also have problems with using the term "underground" in referring to Weather. Most of the group lived openly, albeit under assumed identities, for years. Bernardine Dohrn, who praised the Manson killings and wrote most of the Weather invective, lived with hubby Billy Ayers in New York. They raised children and worked jobs like any other people. When I think of underground, I think of hiding out and moving from safe house to safe house. This definitely didn't happen here. It's unimaginable that members of the Order, a neo-Nazi insurrectionist group active in the 1980's, would have lived the comfortable life many Weather members enjoyed while on the run. Unfortunately, instead of rotting away in prison, most of the former Weather members lead comfy lives today. Billy Ayers is a university professor at UI in Chicago (parents, remember this when looking for schools for your kids) and wife Bernardine works at a legal foundation. Since we can't seem to throw these people in prison, I think the best thing to do is constantly throw light on them and never forget what they did. Marginalize them as much as possible.
A rehash of old sources; unanalytical.......2002-03-18
Many of the issues discussed are framed in a rather negative and unanalytical context. While I agree that mistakes were made and lots of weird things happened, the author's recounting does little to help one figure out why things happened the way they did, in the context of the times.
1. The book contains a litany of weird things done by the Weather Underground, with very little effort at understanding or explanation, or attempt to place in context. I don't think there are easy answers for what happened and what went wrong, but what I would like to see in a study is something that helps one understand. What we have here is not much more than a review of old newspaper stories and some books. Much more primary material is needed, namely, frank interviews with people who were there. That's not easy, because the people are dispersed and not necessarily anxious to talk. But the book fails without some serious first-hand views. And it should be noted that not everything published at the time, by Weather or others, was necessarily reliable or accurate.
2. The author uses a lot of the rhetoric and slogans of the era without definition or explanation. Examples: fascism, imperialism, nationalist (page 3); black colony (page 27); ultra-leftism (page 146).
3. I don't agree that the original Weatherman paper did "little else" than define the role of black people in the U.S. (page 27).
4. I thought the reference to the Weather sign about GE workers (page 75) was peculiar. Perhaps it's accurate, perhaps it's not. To the extent it represents an actual syndrome, more supporting material would be helpful.
5. There are many glaring misspellings and errors of fact. Examples:
Pages 4, 6: Fairmont Hotel misspelled.
Page 5: Herbert Marcuse was at San Diego, not San Jose.
Page 7: Terry Robbins was from Ohio (as noted on page 100), not Michigan.
Page 23: Dean Rusk misspelled (note 4).
Page 62: Richard Elrod was not a corporate attorney; he was a city attorney, as noted on the next page. The story of what happened to Elrod is an interesting one, but the book doesn't really have it.
Page 84: The date of the War Council is wrong in the last paragraph; it was at the end of December, 1969.
Page 114: The lawyer's name is incorrect.
Page 116: First paragraph, incorrect name of Tom C. Huston.
Page 135: Leslie Bacon was called as a grand jury witness but I don't think she was charged with the Capitol bombing.
Page 137: The Georgia Straight was not an Atlanta newspaper; it was from Vancouver, B.C.
Page 146: Van Lydegraf was in his fifties, not his sixties. I'm not certain that he was expelled from either the CP or PL. He may have quit.
Pages 174-178: This section has numerous errors of fact and interpretation regarding PFOC.
Page 175: Mark Perry misspelled.
Page 179, top paragraph: The use of the passive voice here is not responsible. Who suggested this?
Page 180: Grace Fortner was not the name of the "woman originally identified as Esther."
Page 186: PFOC did not exist in Seattle in 1990-91.
All of these errors, and many more not mentioned, demonstrate two things: the author was not really familiar with the subject, and the book was poorly edited.
--Roger Lippman
Fast and loose with the facts.......2001-08-29
Useful for the bibliography and notes, but little else. Chock-full of inaccuracies and questionable interpretation, as Mr. Lippman pointed out below. A few examples: "[Bill Ayers] met Diana Oughton later that school year [1965], and together they began working at the Children's Community School." (p. 203). Ayers' "Fugitive Days": "In my second year at the Children's Community, Diana Oughton...arrived to volunteer at our school." (p. 91). The cover photograph of Bernardine Dohrn and Brian Flanagan is reversed from its printing on p. 63. When easily verifiable factual errors are made, one must question statements of a more interpretive nature. Marcuse is "a controversial Marxist philosopher and professor at San Jose State" (p. 5). This is a less than useful description of "One Dimensional Man"'s author, and contributes nothing to our understanding of his place in the intellectual climate of the time. I think most telling are Jacobs' acknowledgements. He thanks library staff for their help in helping him assemble material, throws off an "[A]lso, acknowledgements are extended to Roger Lippman, ... as well as various activists whose insights and conversation helped to shape my approach to this book." Jacobs then thanks his housemates, put on a par with ex-Weatherpeople. Jacobs is offering his less than well informed review of already published material. There is no indication he went to any effort to discuss the Weather Underground with the major actors he writes about. This might be a worthy masters thesis at a second-rate college, but is not the sort of thing you would get from a professional historian.
A great book---if placed in the right context.......2000-10-27
Jacobs, certainly with a leftist perspective, attempts to explain the motives of the Weather Underground. Classify them as terrorists or glorify them as heroes, but either way, they made an undisputable mark on history if one is willing to take the time to write reviews characterizing them as both. The fact is that in 200 pages, one can not clearly express what the Weather Organization did, why, and when those actions occured and why that timing was deemed necessary. In spite of that, Jacobs gives a great framework, regardless of your perspectives on the movement, for a cursory survey. In that context, this is perhaps the best book on the movement. If you are seriously researching the movement, this is great background, but in 200 pages, you'll never get the whole story.
A Whitewash..........2000-09-19
The weathermen were TERRORISTS, just as if they had blown up planes or taken over an Embassy. Actually, they were expodentially worse, since they were Americans killing Americans. I'd be very interested to hear the feelings of a reader who LOST A FAMILY MEMBER because of these psychotic, spolied little children, as I did. My father died at the hands of the weathermen, and I'm sorry that Boudin and her friend escaped their own bomb. I hope they're slapping each other on the back IN HELL.
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A Concise History of Ornithology: The Lives and Works of Its Founding Figures
Michael Walters
Manufacturer: Christopher Helm Publishing Company
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ASIN: 1873403976 |
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- Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year
- Oscar Wilde's Wit and Wisdom: A Book of Quotations (Dover Thrift Editions)
- Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass
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