| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Nashville: The Western Confederacy's Final Gamble. By James Lee McDonough. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004. xvi, 358 pp. $39.95, ISBN 1-57233-322-7.)

Every year new books on Civil War battles fly off the presses into the hands of eager readers. The quality of these works, however, is often uneven at best. The worst of the so-called battle books often provide little more than a dizzying array of eyewitness quotations connected by mind-numbing descriptions of tactical movements, all of which compel the reader to escape the trees in hopes of finding the forest. The best examples provide a broad context for the battle and its results, use quotations judiciously and effectively, describe the horrors of war without exploiting them, and utilize the historiography on the battle as well as on the war in general to enhance its meaning. James Lee McDonough's Nashville clearly falls into the latter category.

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