Hard Tack and Coffee
Or, The Unwritten Story of Army Life

This is one of my all time favorites. Good old John Billings. Don’t you just love a soldier who gives you the inside dirt with some wit and great illustrations? I do. John enlisted in The Army of the Potomac, but don’t let that remind you of the boring history teacher with coffee breath and endless......more

The go-to book if you want the details of army life in the American Civil War. Having discovered that boys were as fascinated by the details of army life as much as the battles, and realized that all the memoirs were about the battles, he wrote a book about the details. How they did get enough food,......more

This is a difficult book to review because of the subject and because of the author. I have a fetish for Civil War stories and have read many soldier memoirs and diaries. That is what I expected here. I was intrigued by the name of the book because a sense of humor is unexpected in Civil War memoirs......more

This was well written and entertaining, a 19th century account by a Union soldier. One warning: there are no accounts of battles here, and it is not really told in any chronological order, although the part about enlisting does come first. Rather, it is about camp life. He talks about living in tent......more

This was a surprisingly insightful and enjoyable read, but it is not what I was expecting. I expected a very anecdotal recounting of an officers life during the Civil War, but the author sets out instead to provide an overview of the general experience for any serviceman in the Union army. The autho......more