Wow James M. McPherson takes John Keegan's the American Civil War:A Military History behind the woodshed in this week's New York Times book review. Guess I won't be bothering with that. Here's the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/...

Wiadomość zmieniona przez autora, lis 3, 2009, 2:24am.

Hmm, not surprising, I unhappily gave up on Keegan several books ago myself. A mystery how that happens.

Yeah I threw in the towel with his Intelligence in War But I'm hopeful that he'll someday get back on form.

I was looking forward to Keegan's book since I have not given up on him. However McPhearson's review killed this book at this time. Ugh, one would hope that the fact checkers if one one else would catch mistakes. I have noticed Europeans (another example is Van Kreveld) make mistakes when they concern North America. It must be a result of a lack of non-European geographic realities.

As a Brit, I might very well have gone for Keegan's book. It is very hard not to trust authors writing books about which one knows little so it is useful to get this sort of pointer from a critic who is well informed.

So, people, what would you recommend as an accurate, well-written and not excessively detailed single volume on the history of the American Civil War?

#5, I believe The Battle Cry of Freedom remains the standard.

I second that motion that The Battle Cry of Freedom is the one books to read on the subject of the American civil war.
I also note the the British reviews of Keegan's book were positive. The Telegraph's review is easily explained. The others not so much.
5> I do remember when going to post grad in England and visiting relatives in Scotland my being taken aback on the size of things as compared to Canada. There was a saying at school that you could tell Canadians and Australians in that they measured distance in time taken and not on absolute linear measures. It just proves that misconcerptions travel both ways.

#3 "Yeah I threw in the towel with his Intelligence in War" ...
Can you expand more on this? I've just gotten the book and didn't have a chance to read it yet.

8:Sure, the book is a straw man argument. That victory doesn't always go to the side with the best intelligence. Ok so what? Who exactly is claiming that it always does? The case studies don't seem to have been picked for any logical or thematic reason. There's also a lot of padding and recycling of material.

For all of us who have not read this book, and I doubt that I will, before we all get too pretentious, here is the first NY Times review:

October 16, 2009
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
America’s War, British View

By DWIGHT GARNER
THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

A Military History

By John Keegan

Illustrated. 396 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.

John Keegan — dapper, lantern-jawed, a man who pounds facts into place as if with a sledgehammer — is the military historian’s military historian. A longtime senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, he is the author of 20 fearsomely erudite books, including “The Second World War,” “The Battle for History” and “The Face of Battle.” If he did not exist, the History Channel would not be able to invent him.

Mr. Keegan’s new book, “The American Civil War,” bristles with data that will send a thrill down any military geek’s leg: details about tactics, geography, economics, ideology, generals, psychology, demographics, weaponry, even weather. But the human element has, puzzlingly, gone missing. Distant and chilly, “The American Civil War” seems to have been written by a mainframe computer buried deep in a fortified bunker. It’s as soulful as a stack of punch cards.

Not all of Mr. Keegan’s books are this way. Though he has never fought in a war, he has written (especially in “The Face of Battle”) with real insight and feeling about the experience of both grunts and generals. But here the soldiers feel mostly like chess pieces, moved about the board amid a cloud of cigar smoke.

If Mr. Keegan’s book isn’t going to replace James McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom” (1988) as the go-to single-volume history of the Civil War, however, it is unusual and valuable for other reasons. Mr. Keegan, who is British, takes the long view — a European view — of that war, putting it into broad historical context amid history’s great conflicts, from the Napoleonic wars and World War I to Vietnam.

This is a war that, it’s clear, perplexes him. “The American Civil War is one of the most mysterious great wars of history,” he writes, “mysterious because unexpected, mysterious also because of the intensity with which it took fire.” Mr. Keegan traces this brush fire as it burned across the Eastern half of the country, and he provides dense accounts of nearly every important battle, from Sumter to Shiloh, from Antietam to Chickamauga, to William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea.

The mysteries pile up, central among them how the overmatched Confederate Army managed to fight so well for so long. (One Confederate soldier, asked by his Union captors why he was fighting, replied, “Because you are here.” Mr. Keegan observes, “It was, and remains, as good an answer as any.”)

One of Mr. Keegan’s favorite topics is how geography, when it comes to war, is often destiny. The sheer size of the American battlefield astounds him. “The territory of the 11 seceding states” alone, he writes, “forms a rough quadrilateral of nearly a million square miles’ extent.”

The theater of war was vast, the territory of the United and Confederate States combining to create, Mr. Keegan writes, one of the largest single landmasses “over which any conqueror had ever attempted to impose his will, larger than Napoleon’s Europe, larger almost than Genghis Khan’s Eurasia.”

Because the South had few if any large cities to attack, Mr. Keegan notes, its army “presented itself as the only target at which to strike.” But that army could be elusive. The sprawling territory on which this war was fought offered “the opportunity to disengage at will” and retreat into the terrain’s open spaces.

Mr. Keegan acutely observes, “Though the truth was not perceived until much later in the war, and then only by a few professional Northern soldiers of brutal imagination, the Southern mind was the only profitable target in the Confederacy.”

“The American Civil War” is a dense book, but a quirky one as well. In part this is because of Mr. Keegan’s usages, some of which seem more appropriate to a rugby scrimmage than to battle. Some Union soldiers begin to “knock the Confederates about.” Others get into “a classic pickle.” Soldiers are observed “milling about this way and that.” Some Confederate strategies are not “really worth the candle.”

Mr. Keegan is opinionated, and a few of his opinions will be fighting words for some. Sherman’s march is likened to Hitler’s campaigns in Eastern Europe. He writes sensitively of the experience of black soldiers during the war, but observes, “Faced by the ferocity of their Southern antagonists on the battlefield, they simply could not stand up to combat as white soldiers did.”

He writes about Southern women as if he is commenting on the Westminster dog show: “Southern women are a distinctive breed even today, admired for their femininity and outward-going personality.”

Mr. Keegan’s vast knowledge about the history of war ornaments “The American Civil War,” but it can lead to pedantic asides. He’s loath to leave any of his erudition off the table.

If he makes an observation about, say, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s failure to win a major decisive battle against the Union Army, he will follow it with sentences like these: “Indeed the era of decisive battles was drawing to a close. There would be several during Prussia’s wars of unification in 1866-71, notably the victory of Königgrätz-Sadowa against Austria, and Sedan against France in 1870.”

However, Mr. Keegan teases out the Civil War’s parallels with World War I with great aplomb, from how troops were mobilized through methods of attacking enemy trenches. He also catches, quite movingly, the essential difference between these two wars.

“The Great War is always spoken of with regret in Europe,” he writes. “It is the Continent’s tragedy, the cause of many of its persisting troubles, the war without justification or point.”

Not so the Civil War, the memory of which “strikes a chill” but also “brings a glow of pride, at the sacrifice a previous generation was ready to make in the cause of ideals held central to its life by modern America: equality, human freedom, the rights of the individual before the law.”

At moments like these Mr. Keegan climbs out of the bunker and stands tall indeed.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Thanks #6 & 7 for the recommendation of The Battle Cry of Freedom. Maybe I'll go to Keegan after that (with an atlas at my side!)

I’m going to pick a copy of Battle cry for freedom also, thanks for the recommendation and the review.

I bought Keegan's book today, I just have to read it on my own to form my own opinion. In his acknowledgment Keegan thanks MacPhearson for his assistance. He also mentions Tom Clancy and Senator Paul Sarbanmes. I just find this interesting.
Keegan also uses McPhearson as a source for the vast majority of his chapters. I guess I will read McPhearson and Keegan together and see what transpires.

I bought it and will read it, but I've been finding Keegan lacking in that special something that made me thoroughly enjoy his early works.

I thought Keegan's descriptions of several major battles was strangely off. Gettysburg is an example. I've never read any other author that thought Sickles' deployment of the Third Corps in a forward salient was anything but a blunder. Keegan called it "creative disobedience" and credited Sickles with delaying Longstreet's attack on the Union left so as to allow deployment on Cemetery Ridge. This overlooks the fact that Sickles was supposed to be dug in up on the ridge, not down in the Wheat Field. He also describes the fighting on Little Round Top as if the 20th Maine was the only regiment there. I almost got the impression his research consisted of watching the Ted Turner movie.