'Ware Sherman

This extremely interesting book . . . gives a graphic picture of some of the things that were going on behind the lines during the last six months of the Confederacy. Written in scraps as a journal and soon afterwards transcribed, it is a record of the experiences of a consulting chemist in the Confederate States Nitre and Mining Bureau (formerly a professor of chemistry and geology at South Carolina College and afterward a prominent geologist and professor at the University of California) in trying to remove part of his family and, later, Nitre and Mining Bureau stores and personal possessions from the path of Sherman’s army. The reproductions of pen-and-ink sketches made by the author on the original draft of the journal are valuable.

Vivid, unpretentious . . . unforced, genuine. . . . Its picture of the confusion and improvisations of a collapsing civilization is sharp.