Critique du Publishers Weekly
A more accurate subtitle for this opinionated portrait of Civil War-era fighters and statesmen might have been "Military Heroes of the Civil War." Jones, a member of the Baltimore Civil War Roundtable, studied the conflict for 40 years and became curious about its aftermath: "What happened to the participants after the war?" Here he presents a collection of colorful portraits of a range of Southern and Northern men--including Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, William Tecumseh Sherman, Andrew Johnson and George Custer. Johnson was "in almost every way unfit to be president" in Jones's damning (and debatable) view; he also opines that Grant's most important contribution as president was shattering the Ku Klux Klan and that Confederate president Jefferson Davis "treated his slaves leniently..., had a false notion of what slavery was and never fully understood its evil." At times far too sympathetic and adulatory of Lost Cause heroes, Jones nearly veers off into hagiography in his chapter on Lee. However, this vibrant narrative, strikingly illustrated with period photographs, bristles with telling details and memorable anecdotes and portrays vividly the pathos of the war and its aftermath. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Critique de Kirkus
Biographical and background sketches from a pen skilled enough to attract Civil War buffs who seek renewal of their knowledge about the era's best-known figures without requiring challenging new insights. Jones, a mathematician writing history, has sketched the portraits of seven Union and seven Confederate leaders who lived past 1865, only two of them (Jefferson Davis and Andrew Johnson) politicians. While adding nothing to what is already known of the men or the great conflict in which they were involved, the sketches are nevertheless deft examples of this classic genre of art'brief biographies that allow Jones to characterize and judge his subjects. He also provides additional non-biographical chapters on the fall of Richmond and the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, both of which are movingly rendered. All are based upon appropriately wide reading in the pertinent published sources. Ranging from Robert E. Lee to George Armstrong Custer, from Phil Sheridan to John Bell Hood, Jones's heroes are the conventional characters in the written drama of this great war. He never considers how different that drama would have appeared if the worlds of war and its aftermath were filled out and affected by freed slaves, women, writers like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Walt Whitman, and abolitionists like Frederick Douglass'all available to Jones but omitted by him. Jones assumes, unexceptionably enough, that his subjects' postwar acts affected the nation in important ways. But because so much of each sketch is devoted to their pre-war and wartime lives, he ends up squandering a superb opportunity to examine in larger terms how the years following a war are often more significant to a society than its years in battle. He indicates what each of his 14 men did after the guns fell silent, but fails to demonstrate that what they did shaped the nation's history. What remains is a pleasing journey over well-blazed historical trails.
Critique de Booklist
While the Reconstruction period lacks the epic scale and elements of classic tragedy usually associated with the Civil War, it was an age that was vital in forging our industrial nation. Jones, a math teacher by profession, is a Civil War buff who writes with a direct, spare prose that will appeal to the general reader. In his profiles of 14 men who survived the war and then helped create a new nation, Jones displays fine technical knowledge, insight, and a grasp for historical irony. Characters as diverse as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, George B. McClellan, and George Custer are examined. For those with an interest in the period, this work will be informative, surprising, and often emotionally stirring. --Jay Freeman
