Richmond Redeemed: The Siege at Petersburg

Thanks for you help in finding this book. Accurately described and I am well satisfied.

This is a very detailed book. It has fabulous maps, unlike most Civil War books! However, I wish that somewhere at the publishing house someone would have said...write this with clarity in mind! The author indulges in those little petty nuances where he attempts to show you the reader just how smart he is. Constantly, he refers to voltigeurs in both armies. I have read extensively about the Civil War for close to 45 years now...no one, who uses English as a first language, uses this term to describe infantrymen,...except this author. WHY? It's just an impediment to reading comprehension. I had to stop-grab my dictionary-and then move on. It's a form of academic self-gratification. I have yet to see the more common form of academic self-gratification in this book-use of Latin or French phrases extensively without translation, but I'm sure they exist. I feel that this book is a word by word copy of the author's dissertation/thesis. I'm sure that when he wrote these word "voltigeur" he probably thought,"wow, that will really impress Dr. So-and_so on my dissertation board!" The other literary style that this author is constantly using is in his use of pronouns. Given the large number of generals, colonels etc in the battles described I'm sure he felt that repeating Lee after Lee was repetious. However, his habit of calling every general et al as the Virginian, the Ohioan etc makes for a book that reads like a walk through a wet plowed field. If any history student out there reads this...if you want to publish, please write like someone other than your teacher is going to read it.

A few people I know and more than one review have characterized this book as "dry" and "tough to read". I couldn't disagree more. I loved this book, which actually only covers Grant's Fifth Offensive, and which includes the Battles of Poplar Spring Church (Peebles' Farm), Chaffin's Bluff (Fort Harrison), and the Darbytown Road, not the entire campaign as the title might indicate. Sommers goes into great tactical and strategic detail, and I could not stop reading this book. The maps are unbelievable, being some of the best I've seen and by far the best for a late war set of battles. If you buy only one book on the Campaign, even though it only covers one portion and a middle portion at that, this is the book to get. It was published in 1980, however, and may be very difficult to get. I bought mine used. 670 pp., 22 maps