Memoirs (Penguin Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: William Tecumseh Sherman
Creator: Michael Fellman
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $20.00
Buy New: $11.14
You Save: $8.86 (44%)
New (21) Used (17) from $8.20
Avg. Customer Rating:  29 reviews
Sales Rank: 410930
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 880
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.1 x 1.7
ISBN: 0140437983
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.7092
EAN: 9780140437980
ASIN: 0140437983
Publication Date: August 1, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Before his spectacular career as General of the Union forces, William Tecumseh Sherman experienced decades of failure and depression. Drifting between the Old South and new West, Sherman witnessed firsthand many of the critical events of early nineteenth-century America: the Mexican War, the gold rush, the banking panics, and the battles with the Plains Indians. It wasn't until his victory at Shiloh, in 1862, that Sherman assumed his legendary place in American history. After Shiloh, Sherman sacked Atlanta and proceeded to burn a trail of destruction that split the Confederacy and ended the war. His strategy forever changed the nature of warfare and earned him eternal infamy throughout the South.
Sherman's Memoirs evoke the uncompromising and deeply complex general as well as the turbulent times that transformed America into a world power. This Penguin Classics edition includes a fascinating introduction and notes by Sherman biographer Michael Fellman.
"Because [Sherman] was a ruthlessly sharp intellect and a writer of considerable power, his memoirs succeed in presenting a vivid picture not only of his actions and reactions, but of the world through which he moved with wit and bluster and broadsword."--Michael Fellman, from the Introduction
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 24 more reviews...
 Five star precious gem of a book November 15, 2008
As a writer Sherman was a natural. This book is a wonderful read and I've heard that it is the most important of all of the Civil War era autobiographies and I believe it. Everything that can be said of the book has been said in the many reviews, but I would just like to add my approval. Highly recommended book.
Good Writers Make Good Generals! July 22, 2008
27 out of 27 found this review helpful
There's the example of Julius Caesar, of course. And in America, there was Ulysses Grant, whose orders and dispatches were so concise and unequivocal that they were credited by his subordinates for many of his victories. Grant's Memoirs are widely recognized as a classic of autobiography, as much for their literary merit as for their content. I've had this Penguin edition of "Cump" Sherman's Memoirs on my shelf for so long that the price is about a third of the current, but I've never been tempted to read them, chiefly because of Sherman's reputation for inhumanity during his service against the trans-Mississippi Indians.
A couple days ago, however, I opened the book on a whim and started reading, and I've hardly looked at anything else since. The writing is fantastic! Utterly unadorned yet vividly descriptive. Witty, and that's a surprise! Forthright, modest, down-to-earth. As thoroughly planned as one of his campaigns, which I find may be explained in part by his frequent assignment of logistic tasks in his early military career. He knew how to move supplies and keep account of where things were.
Like any 19th C memoirist, or any Viking skald, Sherman feels obliged to trace his ancestry for a few pages, which I confess didn't immediately stir my interest. Then, however, when he begins his narrative of his military service in Florida, against the Seminoles, suddenly the saga comes to life. I learned more from this one chapter, as a primary source, about the early Americanization of Florida than from anything I've read elsewhere. I could feel the rash from the palmetto on my skin. Likewise, the two chapters on his years in California just after the invasion of Mexico, took me to Monterey, to Yerba Buena before it became San Francisco, and up the river to Sutter's Mill and the Gold Rush Country more vividly, more "virtually" in the game-boy sense of the word, than any historian's account of those years. Sherman was, in his blunt style, as fine a writer as Twain. No wonder he was so effective as a general. Good writers make good generals, as I said before. My thesis is proven; I'll be sending a sample of my reviews here on amazon to the new Commander-in-Chief in Washington next February, in hopes of an appointment in the field. I will, of course, in true 19th C fashion, remind Pres. Obama of my ardent electioneering on his behalf.
[I had no intention of reviewing this book until I finished it, but the first 112 pages have been so exciting that I wanted to share them. I plan now to add paragraphs to this report as I continue reading.]
One of the thrills of reading Sherman's account of his years in California is encountering the street names of San Francisco -- Mason, Larkin, Stockton, Ord -- incarnated as ardent young bucks, flesh-and-blood yearning for the accomplishments you know lie well in their futures. It's also intriguing - poignant, if you will - to find Sherman hunting geese or courting senoritas in company with young fellow officers whom he will be thrashing on the battlefields in another fifteen years.
* It's worth noting that Sherman was only slightly more successful during the 1850s than Grant. Despite his intrepid energy, probity, and obvious business skills, he found himself in 1858 with no significant wealth, no stable occupation, and a family of a wife and four daughters. Perhaps it wasn't so easy, after all, for a person without deep pockets to achieve success in ante-bellum America, except by luck, dishonesty, or slavery. Sherman's last job before the elction of Lincoln was as the superintendent of a "military seminary," that is, a school for the sons of planters, in Louisiana. Knowing that his moderate criticisms of the slave system would get him fired anyway, Sherman resigned as soon as Lincoln was elected. No one around him in Louisiana expressed any doubt that the preservation of slavery was the "fighting issue" behind secession.
** As Sherman left his youth behind and entered the fray of the Civil War, he shifts his tone from that of an adventurous raconteur to an earnest historian, and I've found that I need to read him differntly also, less for pleasure than for historical knowledge. I've slowed down and taken time to evaluate his reportage in comparison to what I already 'know' of Civil War historiography. Sherman's manner of constructing his narrative also changed; he began to incorporate documents - his field reports and letters, the field reports of other officers, etc. By the mid 1870's when Sherman wrote these memoirs, the true course of events and the soundest interpretation of them were already afire with controversy.
Two insights, from Sherman's perspective: 1) the elite Louisianans whom Sherman conflicted with, over the act of secession, were amazingly confident that there would be no war and that their 'peculiar institution' would thrive. They were all remarkably civil and genteel in their agreement to disagree, and Sherman departed without obstruction and with his pay in his pocket! 2) from Sherman's perspective, right at the front firing line with his green regiments, the Battle of Bull Run was a wash; either nobody won or both sides did, but neither side had the military skills to follow up and inflict a tactical victory. The war would continue until somebody on one side or the other knew how to win... and as "we" know, that would be Grant and Sherman himself.
Read it ! October 6, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Sherman is (perhaps arguably) the most articulate and intelligent autobiographer (and biographer) of the Civil War period. Yes, he was controversial, but that, in great part, came from the times, and the period politics, and later from the political agendas of modern politically correct historians/writers. The overriding elements in Sherman's autobiography are the matter-of-factness and the fairness with which he describes events and people in his life. With much the same exquisite Dignity as U. S. Grant in his memoiors, Sherman speaks to the reader with a clarity and honesty no decent person can help but admire. He is painstaking in relating military associations - sometimes wearily so. But his thorough and candid descriptions of events, people and places still present themselves in an entertaining manner time and time again. For the reader mature enough to accept those times without tainted sanctimonious judgement, Sherman's memoirs will be a fascinating and enlightening glimpse of the people and the soul of our country during one of our most trying eras.
"MEMOIRS" BY W.T. SHERMAN June 28, 2007
INTERESTING TO READ "SHERMANS" SIDE OF THE STORY !! GOOD READ IN CONJUCTION WITH "CITIZEN SHERMAN" BY MICHAEL FELLMAN !!!
Sherman in his own words... June 26, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
General William T. Sherman's memoirs, first published in 1875, are primarily an account of his service in uniform during the Civil War. Sherman rallied to the Union colors early in the conflict, but had indifferent success until the searing crucible of the Battle of Shiloh, where he fought under the command of the stalwart U.S. Grant. Shiloh was a turning point. With increasing confidence as a leader, Sherman played key roles in the siege of Vicksburg and in the relief of beseiged Union forces at Chattanooga. When Grant was called east to head up all Union forces, he hand-picked Sherman as his successor in the West. Sherman would go on to take Atlanta, march to the sea at Savannah, and pillage his way through the Carolinas to hasten the end of the war.
Sherman the man, and his memoirs, stand in vivid contrast to his contemporary and close friend U.S. Grant. Where Grant was modest and reserved, Sherman comes across as all nervous energy, talking up a storm and hardly able to sit still doing it. His memoirs are reflective of his personality, passionate and argumentative in between inserted copies of key correspondence. While less polished than Grant's, they are in many ways more entertaining and certainly more revealing of Sherman's feelings and personality.
Sherman expresses an opinion on practically everything. His battles with newspaper reporters, whom he despised, date from an alleged nervious breakdown in the first year of the war. His exchange of correspondence with Confederate General John Hood over the forced evacuation of Atlanta, are a malstrom in miniature of the passions behind the war itself. Sherman is more than frank about the politics within the Union Army, and its sometimes troubled relations with civilian authority. Above all, Sherman recognized the cruelty of the war, and was unwilling to sugarcoat that reality for anyone. Sherman and Grant each understood the grim arithmetic that the Confederate Armies must be bled to death in order for the Confederacy to be defeated and were prepared to carry out that strategy.
This book is highly recommended to students of the Civil War, who will find Sherman to be an instructive and even at times entertaining guide through those portions that he personally experienced.
|
|
|
