| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through His Private Letters. By Elizabeth Brown Pryor. (New York: Viking, 2007. xxvi, 658 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-670-03829-9.)

This book fails to be what it says it is and succeeds at being what it says it is not. The subtitle referring to Robert E. Lee's private letters is somewhat misleading—a significant number of letters used to preface the chapters are written by other people, while others are public reports. Elizabeth Brown Pryor also promises that "this book is filled with new material" (p. xiii). Instead, more than half of the transcribed letters come from well-used public archives such as the Library of Congress and the Virginia Historical Society, another third come from frequently quoted university collections, and the remainder can be found at popular private archives such as Arlington House, Stratford Hall Plantation, and the Museum of the Confederacy. If any material was drawn from new sources, it is buried deep in fluid prose and copious footnotes.

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