خاطرات (کتابخانه بارنز و نوبل از خواندن ضروری)

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. General William Tecumseh Sherman stands out as a master of maneuver warfare. In a bloody Civil War chiefly remembered for battles in which each side tried too often to simply pummel the other into submission by sheer weight of numbers and volume of fire, Sherman tried to keep casualties low, both among his own troops and, perhaps equally significant, among those of his Confederate enemy. Sherman, known for his quote, "War is hell," explains in this account of his life how a man of compassion came to embrace a brutal and inhumane approach to war, one that has been the mark of every major conflict since his time.