David Detzer

An excellent unbiased retelling of the first major battle of the civil war by a professor of history at Connecticut State University. I have a number of civil war histories, and plan to read one new book each year during the 150th anniversary of the civil war events of that year. Donnybrook, a history of the First Battle of Bull Run, which took place on July 21, 1861, is an good place to start.
An interesting theme throughout the book, is how unprepared for war both armies were. Several units in the U.S. Army were made up of volunteers who had signed up for terms of 90 days, and the 90 days were up just about the time of the battle. Would you feel like fighting on that day? Volunteer units usually elected their own officers, and many of them had no previous military experience. Detzer makes clear the mistakes and heroics on both sides on a day when the North was nearly victorious but went down to defeat. The maps in this book are inadequate. I suggest you google the battle to find and print out a map you can use to follow the battle. That's what I did and it helped a great deal.… (más)

My approach to non-fiction reading is usually as spontaneous as a glacier, as I tend to work off a reading list that is a couple of years old by the time I get to any particular book on it. But since it had been a few months since I'd done any Civil War reading I decided to pick up "Dissonance" on the spur of the moment. This is without realizing that it was the middle book of a trilogy dealing with the first hundred days of the war. I now regret having not discovered Detzer sooner.

Detzer's main goal is to give you the blow-by-blow of events between the fall of Fort Sumter and the battle of Bull Run, when the control of the District of Columbia appeared to hang from a thread. Thus events in Maryland loom very large in Detzer's narrative; more so than most accounts I've seen. That's one big plus in Detzer's regard for someone who is well-read in Civil War history.

Another plus from my perspective is that Detzer is an unabashed Yankee. This means that a Benjamin Butler can be a bigger hero than a Robert E. Lee and there's no effort to pretty up what "state's rights" meant in practice. Detzer is also sophisticated enough in his politics not to gloss over what Lincoln's assumption of dictatorial powers in a good cause means in terms of handing down to us some distasteful precedents.

Finally, what really justifies Detzer's study is that even though one knows the historical outcome he is able to create a certain level of suspense.… (más)