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Mr. Lincoln’s Brown Water Navy: The Mississippi Squadron

By Gary D. Joiner, The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2007, $70.00 (h); $26.95 (s)

How to Purchase: Links to sellers are on the Amazon.com website.

Gary Joiner is part of a new breed of historians populating the study of the Civil War. He is the nation’s leading expert on the Louisiana Red River Campaign and has given that region of the country a much needed anchor in Civil War historiography. Gary has become prolific in his publications, discharging years of research in a relatively brief period of time and he has recently undertaken a very prestigious editorial function with the University of Tennessee Press. He holds a faculty position at the Louisiana State University campus at Shreveport—his tours of the Red River in Louisiana are not to be missed.

Lincoln in the Times, The Life of Abraham Lincoln as originally reported in the New York Times

Edited by David H. Donald and Harold Holzer, St. Martin’s Press, 2005, $29.95

How to Purchase: At 5 years old this is a bit harder to find. Links to sellers are on the Amazon.com website.

I was given this book by Vicki and Jerry Spier following my heart surgery in 2008. I just finished reading it and found myself wishing that I had picked it up as soon as I received it. While there are no shortage of monographs on Abraham Lincoln in and around his Bi-centennial commemoration this book was refreshingly simple and informative. Indeed with so much analysis of Lincoln filling the bookshelves it was a relief to look at Lincoln in the context of his actual life.

Fields of Blood: The Prairie Grove Campaign

By William L.(Bill) Shea, The University of North Carolina Press, 2009, $35.00

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Bill Shea is no stranger to the Civil War community and is a respected historian that specializes in the Trans-Mississippi region. He has spent the majority of his academic career at the University of Arkansas-Monticello. To date his publications have been collaborative efforts with other respected historians such as Earl Hess (Pea Ridge) and Terry Winschel (Vicksburg). Those works are exceptional and the Pea Ridge tome remains the standard by which other works on that early campaign will be judged. Fields of Blood is his first solo effort—it shouldn’t be his last.

Sam Richards’s Civil War Diary: A Chronicle of the Atlanta Home Front

Edited by Wendy Hamand Venet, University of Georgia Press, 2009, $34.95

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Editor Wendy Hamand Venet is a professor of history at Georgia State University who gave a lecture at a BGES symposium in Massachusetts about six years ago. She subsequently decided to join the BGES and has been an active member since them. In that time she has advanced in her profession having been promoted to full professor several years ago. She is not a military historian and her social interest provides a great prism for studying the war. Previous books such as Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War and A Strong Minded Woman—The Life of Mary Livermore mark her as a person whose research should be reckoned with.

Undaunted Heart: The True Story of a Southern Belle and a Yankee General

By Suzie Barile, Eno Publishers, 2009, $16.95

To Purchase: Call 919-280-3761 or visit www.enopublishers.org

This is a love story describing the marriage of a Union General ( Smith Dykins Atkins) to a Southern Belle, Ella Swain in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The couple met during the final stages of the war as Atkins’ brigade under Judson Kilpatrick occupied Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Swain, the 22 year old daughter of Dr. David Swain, a three time governor of North Carolina and President of the University of North Carolina met Atkins as a result of her father’s prominent role in surrendering the state to General Sherman. Following a whirlwind romance the couple became engaged within two months and married two months after that. The relationship was widely disapproved of and caused a great deal of controversy within the defeated southern community.