Thomas Weine
Cadet
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2019
I pre ordered Defending the Arteries of Freedom: Confederate Naval Operations in the Mississippi River Valley, 1861 - 1865 by Neil Chatelain.
Just received it today and man am I underwhelmed.
I opened the book to a random page (254) and started skim reading.
Lo and behold, I found this "John Shirley, the same shipbuilder who constructed the ironclad Louisiana at New Orleans,"
I think that qualifies as a glaring error. Glaring as in a high school senior shouldn't make that mistake in a 9 weeks grading period term paper.
Selecting a few topics that I am familiar with, I found no other outrageous errors, but the depth of the content was unimpressive. Maybe good as an intermediate level intro book, but not much beyond that. The footnotes give a small number of sources and when I examined the sources that the author cited, I found that a good deal of the book's content is not found in his cited sources.
The most impressive section was on the CSS MCRae, not surprising as the author had previously published Fought Like Devils:The Confederate Gunboat McRae.
I had really anticipated the arrival of this book, looking forward to some new insights on this subject, but I may send it back for a refund.
Maybe I will find some justification for keeping it, as I am somewhat addicted to almost any books about Civil War Naval matters.
Just received it today and man am I underwhelmed.
I opened the book to a random page (254) and started skim reading.
Lo and behold, I found this "John Shirley, the same shipbuilder who constructed the ironclad Louisiana at New Orleans,"
I think that qualifies as a glaring error. Glaring as in a high school senior shouldn't make that mistake in a 9 weeks grading period term paper.
Selecting a few topics that I am familiar with, I found no other outrageous errors, but the depth of the content was unimpressive. Maybe good as an intermediate level intro book, but not much beyond that. The footnotes give a small number of sources and when I examined the sources that the author cited, I found that a good deal of the book's content is not found in his cited sources.
The most impressive section was on the CSS MCRae, not surprising as the author had previously published Fought Like Devils:The Confederate Gunboat McRae.
I had really anticipated the arrival of this book, looking forward to some new insights on this subject, but I may send it back for a refund.
Maybe I will find some justification for keeping it, as I am somewhat addicted to almost any books about Civil War Naval matters.