Preview: Ural, “Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades”

New from Osprey Publishing and Dr. Susannah J. Ural is Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades: The Civil War In the Words of Those Who Lived It. I’m a little leery of collections of first person accounts from different sources, unless the theme is compelling. And that appears to be the case here. Dr. Ural has chosen letters and diaries to tell the stories of families (well-known and not, north and south, free and slave) during the war. There also appear to be a few memoirs in there – that gets my Spidey-senses tingling, as I’ve never been able to get over how the co-mingling of immediate and recollected accounts fatally flawed Richard Moe’s otherwise fine The Last Full Measure (the use of a lone memoir to provide a counter-point to overwhelming contemporary opinion really changed the tone, IMO.) We’ll have to see how that affects things here. But this one looks good at first glance, and as soon as I finish this light-weight, really kinda silly account of George Washington’s New York spy ring I’m going to dive in.