I’m posting another review of my history of a civil war regiment, Hoffman’s Army: The Thirty-First Virginia Infantry, CSA. This one from Henry Eason, journalist, novelist, and historian.

“Hoffman’s Army…like experiencing the war first-hand”

Henry M Eason Jr

A topic as enormous as the American War Between the States (or the Civil War, if your insist) is too great to fully absorb if you read, as I have, a number of the multi-volume sets that purport to explain the whole scope of the conflict. They are bewildering in their comprehensiveness. Perhaps one of the best ways to really understand the war is to have actually lived through it as a participant. As impossible as that sounds, it is almost possible to do in Wooddell’s extraordinary book Hoffman’s Army. Sometimes, you have to put the book down for a while, because it is so real, so genuine that you are anguished by what is happening right in front of you, as though you were marching along, engaged in battle, knowing the madness. Not since Bell Wiley’s Johnny Red and Billy Yank have I been so taken by a book about the war.

I also have the benefit of knowing the author and of having walked the ground of one battlefield with him on his family’s own property in West Virginia. He is a diligent and creative researcher able to make truth come alive. Hoffman’s Army should be required reading for history students and for anyone who really wants to know what it was like to be in the war that should never have been waged–had wiser heads prevailed to surmount the economic and slavery issues that existed among the contending parties.

Henry Eason was a colleague back in the 80’s, and a heck of a journalist. Before I met him, Henry was an investigative reporter on the staff of the Atlanta Constitution Journal. Later, he was a business editor and journalist for Nation’s Business magazine in Washington, DC (where I was photo editor for a couple of years.)

Here’s a link to Henry’s Into the Pacific Fog, a novel of suspense set in San Francisco during WWII. It’s a fun, and lively read, and very well researched.