Member Review The Greatest Brigade by Thomas Craughwell

James N.

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It's too bad Thomas J. Craughwell's The Greatest Brigade resulted in no more than a very mediocre history of a famous fighting unit, the Irish Brigade; I really couldn't recommend it to any but a novice student of the war or the subject unit itself. The area where I thought the book was strongest and most informative was in its discussion of the prewar conditions and personalities back in the Auld Sod that motivated the wave of Irish immigration from the time of the Potato Famine in the 1840's and which made recruiting such a force in the United States possible. The mini-biographies in the first chapter of leaders Thomas Francis Meagher and Michael Corcoran were especially both interesting and enlightening. Unfortunately this apparently useful and entertaining information is undermined by the sloppiness and inaccuracies of the wartime accounts which follow and with which I'm much more familiar.

Author Craughwell has done strangely uneven and shoddy research for his book; it reminds me of military biographies I've read where far too little is known about the subject himself, thereby making the book little more than a rehash of the campaigns he participated in. Greatest Brigade is much like that, recounting as it does in sketchy fashion the campaigns and battles of the Union's Army of the Potomac while largely ignoring the particular part in them played by the Irish Brigade itself. ( I'm not sure even that the author really understands exactly what a brigade is - a combination of several individual regiments under a brigadier general or senior colonel - because he almost totally ignores the individual component regiments or their members.) This is all inexcusable because the Irish Brigade was one of the premier units of its size on the Union side of the Civil War and information about it is certainly neither lacking nor obscure.

There are few statements, memoirs, or reminiscences by actual participants quoted or referenced, relying instead on purely secondary source material. The illustrations are nice and colorful but do nothing to support the largely pedestrian text. As previously stated, this book would likely be of value only to extreme novices on the subject of the Irish Brigade, the Army of the Potomac, and the war in general, and is recommended only with these reservations in mind. There are older and much better accounts available than this!

James N.

Revised from a review I previously posted on Amazon.
 
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