or instance he calls George McClellan a "handsome blue-eyed man, broad-shouldered and muscular, with very dark auburn hair, mustache, and touch of a goatee." He says that "Little Mac, as his soldiers called him, carried himself well, and was a magnificent horsemen." Immediately after he begins to talk a little bit about the early life of each leader but only general details as this is only a fraction of each chapter. This includes remarks such as "born in", "attended", "appointed", etc and is approximately only a paragraph. Then it begins to go into detailed information about each commander's positions right before, during, and right after his appointment as leader of the Union armies. This part is the bulk of his descriptions in each chapter and focus mostly though on the commanding period, sticking with the title and theme of the book which is how these men fared individually against the armies of one of the mightiest generals of all time, Robert E. Lee. Mr. Hassler does a good job of staying on task as information not pertinent to the men's command was not mentioned. Mr. Hassler also does a good job of keeping his personal feelings and opinions out of the book so that his views are not biased. By doing this he can stick straight to the facts as he does the whole time and does not lighten up or take pity on some as he refers to a few as "pathetic", "incompetent", "unfit for command", etc By giving it to us in this manner he can there by succeeding in bringing his purpose across to us so that we could learn more about the great things these men did and did not do and how their actions impacted the future of the United States of America.Why did I select this book? After factoring in our preset guidelines of a non-fiction book with at least 250 pages and constraining that to the period of exploration through reconstruction I decided that what I would find the most interesting would be something from the Civil War. When visi...
