First I really enjoyed the book, the author used mostly primary sources (diaries, letters and current era reporting) as well as official historical records. He was very good at pointing out the differences in sources and often showed underlying reasons for the differences (memory between current and later writings and often a desire to make the author look good--in some cases a difference in the opinion of the author between early and later writings a good example of this is Sherman and Grant regarding Halleck). The author also did not just present a list of battles and tactics but detailed a lot of the behind the scenes accord (and discord) as well as the thoughts (at least as expressed in letters to family members and friends). Suffice it to say Grant may not have been quite the babe in the woods regarding politics that one is led to believe.
What I did not like about the book was the scanning in to e format the maps were terrible and seemed to be randomly placed within the text without regard to what the text was talking about also frankly the maps were unusable and most were unreadable. I am somewhat familiar with the terrain talked about and often what I did was have another ipad up with a map on the second ipad. Also there were numerous transcription errors final e seemed to be dropped a lot again not a huge deal just made the reading a bit interesting. Also the footnotes were a bit clunky, it was tedious to get back to your place in the text and often the hot links were not usable though you could use a nearby footnote to get back to your spot it did make a point that unless I was very interested I did not read the footnote.
Having said that I would still recommend the book -- though I think I bought it on special and did not pay the current listed price. So text being 5 star plus outweighs the lousy transcription to ebook format.
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As Lincoln said when Grant was accused of being a lush, "find out what he drinks and give all my generals a bottle.'
Reviewed in Canada on November 24, 2016