last reads

1. Civil War In Appalachia: Collected Essays (1997) edited by Kenneth W. Noe and     Shannon H. Wilson. I try to place a general overview of some kind at the top of each list in this series. I don't know of any comprehensive narrative survey of the entire region (that would be a big job, especially at this point), but this anthology has more than enough geographic and thematic range to serve as

Later this summer, another volume in Darrell Collins's Civil War army reference series is scheduled to be released from McFarland. The books trace over time the composition, strength, and casualties of the principal eastern and western theater armies of both sides. Collins started it all with The Army of the Potomac: Order of Battle, 1861-1865, with Commanders, Strengths, Losses and More (2013),

New Arrival: • "Don't Tell Father I Have Been Shot at": The Civil War Letters of Captain George N. Bliss, First Rhode Island Cavalry edited by William C. Emerson and Elizabeth C. Stevens (McFarland, 2018). "Don't Tell Father I Have Been Shot at" compiles the Civil War letters and newspaper dispatches (to the Providence Evening Press under the pseudonym "Ulysses") of Captain George N. Bliss of

New Arrival: • The Civil War Dead and American Modernity by Ian Finseth (Oxford UP, 2018). Ian Finseth's The Civil War Dead and American Modernity "offers a fundamental rethinking of the cultural importance of the American Civil War dead. Tracing their representational afterlife across a massive array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861 to 1914, Ian Finseth maintains that

[Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research by Paul D. Escott (University Press of Kentucky, 2018). Hardcover, notes, bibliography, index. 202 pp. ISBN:978-0-8131-7535-5. $50] On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of James McPherson and William Cooper's Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand, Paul Escott's Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research offers

Limits of the Known, by David Roberts. 336 pp. New York: Norton ISBN 978-0393609868 Reviewed by Jonathan Dore After half a lifetime of mountaineering, and another half of canyoneering and writing books and magazine features, David Roberts has pulled together the various threads of his life in a book that is part memoir, part historical anthology of notable exploration, and part meditation on the meaning and limits of adventure and adventuring. Its summatory and valedictory flavour come from the autobiographical element, disclosed early on, that the author is living with an aggressive cancer (he guards us against the well-meant but double-edged metaphor of “battling” or “fighting” the disease), already spread and metastasized but against which, as of late 2017 when he finished writing, he was holding his own. Each of the seven chapters of this artfully constructed book interleaves an account of one or more historical expeditions with an episode or aspect of the author’s own life that r...

After a long contemplation over my family's vacation overseas, I thought long and hard about whether I had the strength and energy to continue reviewing books weekly. When I started reviewing books on my own blog, State of Review , I did it as a way to keep track of what I was reading and my initial thoughts on the books. Over time the audience grew. It was never my intention but it did allow me to meet and become friends with fellow book lovers and reviewers, which I am proud to say are a great bunch of guys and gals. I continued my passion and reached out to some like-minded individuals and started this blog, Speculative Book Review, over the years people came and went as life got in the way, as it often tends to do. While Yagiz and I have done our best to bring fresh, new content each and every week, it is now my turn to bow out and say my goodbye. I have had the pleasure of meeting some of my favorite authors and they in turn have introduced me to their favorite authors and fr...