This is a wondrous book filled with detailed Civil War history and the author's personal encounters with fascinating people as he walks across Georgia, following in the footsteps of Sherman. I felt like I was right there with the "bummers" who plundered Southern homes and burned them to the ground. At times terribly sad, this book is also enriched with heart-lifting humor. Highly recommended.

The end game of the Civil War was a chess game of trench warfare played out by Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant in a futile effort by the Army of Northern Virginia to keep the Confederate capitol of Richmond from falling to the assembled Union armies. In the spring of 1865 the Confederate trenches were finally stretched to their breaking point and it was 188 years ago today that Lee surrendered his army to Grant in the front parlor of the house of Wilmer McLean. "Pursuit to Appomattox: The Last Battles" focuses primarily on the armies of Lee and Grant, but goes Lee's surrender to those of other rebel armies, the capture of Jefferson Davis, and ends with retired Brigadier General Robert Anderson raising the same flag over Fort Sumter on April 14, 1865 that he had pulled won in surrender four years earlier.

Jerry Korn draws the duty of relating the last days of the war for this volume in the Time-Life series on The Civil War in five richly illustrated chapters. A Season of Forlorn Hope covers the final winter of the war, drawing a stark contrast between the Federal winter quarters at Poplar Grove with the bleak Confederate lines; the only significant military action is General Gordon's failed attack on Fort Stedman. Vengeance in the Carolinas continues the next chapter in William Tecumseh Sherman's army marching up from Georgia, as they visited destruction on the cradle of the Confederacy. Waterloo of the Confederacy relates the Battle of Five Forks, the flanking effort by Warren's V Corps and Sheridan's Federal cavalry that destroyed Pickett's troops and forced Lee to abandon Richmond in a last ditch effort to save the army. A Race for Survival contrasts the Union army entering Richmond, which was nothing like what we watched today on television with U.S. Marines entering Baghdad, with Grant pursuing Lee's army as it tried to join up with Johnston in North Carolina. With the Army of Northern Virginia effectively surrounded, Grant sent Lee a letter asking for him to surrender to avoid "any further effusion of blood."

The final chapter, Surrender with Honor, details not only Lee's desperate final attempts to avoid surrendering, but also the supreme arrogance of the flamboyant Custer during the final hours of the war. Even without his brutality against the Plains Indians his actions at this point speak to his ultimate lack of character. In contrast, the example of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in accepting the surrender of the Confederate troops speaks to the fact that wars do create heroes out of ordinary men. Like all volumes in The Civil War series "Pursuit to Appomattox" is illustrated with historic photographs, drawings, etchings, and paintings; a two-page spread offers three different paintings as Varied Views of the Surrender. The final photo section of the book shows the ruins of Richmond as this superb series draws to a close.

The book How You Play The Game by Jerry Colangelo, is a boring book that is really not that interesting. It is pretty boring. Economics books is really not for me. This book is actually better than the ones I have read. Jerry tells us basically about his life. How he became a multi-millionair from being poor. I would recomend this book to any one that is interested in sports.

Though this book had interesting moments, for the most part it was just a very detailed story of the life of a sports mogul. For people interested in going into the sports business or with a tremendous interest in knowing how the business works, this book could be valuable. I found it interesting to learn how major leage sports teams are started and all the work that goes on behind the scenes. However, since Colangelo is not a man who has had a great impact on the world, I found the many detailed accounts of his various experiences tedious at times and for the most part unnecessary to the story. Though not always engaging, the easy-flowing style of this book makes it an inviting read.

Jerry Colangelo's How You Play the Game is an interesting and informative book. It describes his own story about how he started out play high school sports, continued to play in college, and how he eventually came to be the owner of three major sports teams. His helpful tips about how to make it in the world of business I am sure will be useful to me some day. His book is very encouraging and I believe you don't have to be a sports fantatic to enjoy it.

This is probably one of the worst books I have read in a long time. Mr. Ellis travelogue fails to on so many levels it is difficult to list them all here. He provides little historical context, his opinions are pompous, his anecdotes are trite, his personal life stories are self-absorbed, and his grand attempt to define what it means to be 'Southern' fails. I can only attribute it to my Yankee's perseverance that I did manage to make it through this tripe. I believe that if General Sherman wanted to inflict true pain on the South, rather than burning his way to the sea, he should have forced the rebels read this book.

On his 1994 attempt to re-trace William Tecumseh Sherman's trek from Atlanta to Savannah, Jerry Ellis searches for vestiges of that traumatic time reflected in the people he meets along the way.

This book is an unsuccessful hybrid of social history and an "on-the-road" travelogue. Ellis uncovers no previously undiscovered traces of the effect of Sherman's journey in the New South and after a while it appears he loses sight of his goal. This book has one saving grace: Ellis's natural story-telling ability which captures the spirits of the people he encounters. However, this bright spot isn't enough to compensate for Ellis's failure to achieve his original objective; it just turns this into a passable diary of someone's hike.

In 1864, General Sherman, Union general, began his infamous (or famous) trek through Georgia, vowing to make Georgia howl. Howl it did. And still does. More than a hundred years later, Jerry Ellis walked the same path. It was a trek in search of his own Southerness, and an homage to his father who had died not long before. Along the way, he met people who still remember Sherman and the devastation he and his army left in their wake as though it were yesterday. He found Southern hospitality. He found a South that finds it hard to forget.

This is a personal story, not meant to simply tell the history of the places and people he finds along the way. Their histories are interwoven with his own, their presents forming a framework for Ellis' coming to terms with the possibility of losing the woman he loves because of the journey, and with the death of his father. It adds to what he knows about himself and who he is, a Southerner with ties to the War Between the States, and part Cherokee with ties to a past unrelated in many ways to that war.

This is an interesting view of history and how it affects people's lives, even generations later. At times, Ellis becomes too bogged down in his own problems and we wonder if he misses telling about other things we might have found interesting. But all in all, this is a book for Southerners who know and understand their ties to the South, or who are still trying to find those ties and weave them back into their lives.

Readers who like this book might also want to read other of Ellis' journeys. Also "Womenfolks: Growing up Down South" by Shirley Abbott might be interest. They might also like to read an account of Sherman's march to the sea, such as those included in the nuemrous Sherman biographies, or sets of histories of the war, including the Time Life Civil War volume "Sherman's March."