Andrew McGarry

Joe Escobar

HST209 McPherson 1

January 11^th 2015

After reading these reviews I am very unsure about the approach I will be taking while reading through this text over the course of the term. Since there are so many different reviews that have their own opinions about the book and author I am choosing to go into this book with an open mind. I have my own opinions and am going to reserve the right to make my own up as I go further into the information that is in the book. The civil war is not something that is taught in extreme depth through levels such as middle school and high school so reading that the details in this text are very extensive is a nice sign that I will learn a lot during the term in a subject that is overall a little bit hazy to me.

One thing that did kind of spark up my concern a little bit were the reviews that said the author was using his own bias during the writing of this book. I am hoping that this is not the case as that could skew the facts and details that are discussed. However, many of the other reviews said that it was a very detail oriented book that goes to great lengths to relay facts that are little known or discussed. My primary hope for this book is the detail I read about all of the political issues that were going on right before the start of the Civil War. This is stuff that is rarely talked about in great lengths by teachers in class so it will be a great part of the history to learn about. It is these facts that I am most interested in learning about during my time in the class.

Of all the reviews I have read on this text there is no clear source in which I trust more, some of the reviews are very professionally written by people who have continuously studied the topic while others are wrote by people like me, just everyday purchasers off of Amazon.com. Although I feel that the professionally written articles are more credible, I feel like I have more of a common ground with those reviews that were wrote by the “everyday citizens”.  It is because of these reasons why I will try to keep an extremely open mind during my time reading the book, as I would like to pull the facts for myself instead of going off of someone else’s opinion. It is for this reason that I feel like the text that was selected for this term is very credible and appropriate. If it wasn’t I do not feel like it would be used as the primary text for this course, I trust it will be a very fact-heavy book that will provide us with credible information on a very widely discussed topic on our nations history.