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BOOK REVIEWS Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864. By Albert Castel. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. Pp. xvi, 665. $29.95.) Had Albert Castel never written this remarkable book, he still would rank among the best modern historians of the Civil War era. During the last four decades the titles to his credit form a body of published work diverse in subject matter and definitive in content. Briefly noted, these include: an intensive study of political upheaval in wartime Kansas; a most original biography of the elusive guerrilla leader William Quantrill; a thoroughly convincing portrait of Gen. Sterling Price's Confederate military career; and most recently, a short but penetrating survey of Andrew Johnson in the White House, arguably the finest volume in the University Press of Kansas's important series on the American presidency. While contributing his professorial share of articles and reviews to scholarly journals, Castel has also educated a far wider audience with a spate of writings published in magazines largely patronized by so-called Civil War "buffs." Many historians would have been satisfied to rest on these laurels alone. And now comes Decision in the West, nothing short of a magnum opus, a door-stop-size volume comprising nearly seven hundred pages of tightly packed narrative. Yet just three discrete aspects of the book make it worth the price (a rather modest price by today's standards). The first, appearing in the prefatory remarks, is a description of Castel's visceral reaction upon viewing Gone with the Wind as an adolescent in downtown Wichita's Orpheum Theater. It was actually his second time to see the film, coming two and a half years after the first, a pivotal interval he had spent indulging a youthful hunger for heroic novels and historical classics. At the crucial age of "almost fourteen," he admits, "I was ripe for what happened" (xi). During the next two weeks he saw the motion picture twice more and read Margaret Mitchell's huge novel as many times. Driven to a deeper understanding, he got his hands on some of the best volumes in military history available then or now: the incomparable Battles and Leaders of the Civil War and, of course, Douglas Southall Freeman's magisterial Lee's Lieutenants and R. E. Lee. For Castel, the Civil War, especially the Atlanta campaign, had become "a passion inseparable from what had inspired it—Gone with the Wind." This kind of raw honesty (a trait hardly ever displayed by academic historians , who generally loathe to admit any romantic roots of imagination) 258CIVIL WAR HISTORY creates a happy energy that leaves the rest of the book just begging to be read—despite what one might think about Gone with the Wind. The second feature of Decision in the West that delivers a powerful, rewardingjolt comes at page 156, about a quarter of the way through the book, early in the section on the Battle of Resaca. In the space of less than four pages Castel delineates as precisely as possible the military rationale, the various means of tactical execution, and the logic of certain typical movements in the field by a so-called "line of battle," the fundamental infantry troop formation used by commanders of both armies throughout the Civil War. In particular, he delineates the roles performed by officers from generals down to the line officers at the company level, along with explaining the critical necessity of color-bearers, predictions of casualties as a result of applied firepower, and the relative risks and rewards of frontal assaults as opposed to flanking attacks. Not one in a hundred readers will fail to profit from this summary , which amounts to a crisp distillation of Castel's profound understanding of the real fighting of the Civil War. The third especially appealing aspect of this book is its five-page "Afterword " (561-65), which is in fact a forcefully argued conclusion that summarizes so well (in eight numbered paragraphs) Castel's soberly reasoned and rather surprising findings, which are, in condensed form: (1) Although Jefferson Davis rightly meant to win the war "by not losing" it, he wrongly demanded that the already battered Army of...

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