Patriots in Disguise: Women Warriors of the Civil War

by Richard Hall

Book by Hall, Richard

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Civil War, Womens

225 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

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There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Reviews

[Cynda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started this book in hope that the boring historical narrative would get more interesting. No hope for this book. I read it off because I was committed, but found it to be in the end as it was in the beginning: A dry history, as though the historian were committed to writing this book with no joy in his heart. I see that my local library system has other civil war history books written by women. I will stic to those.

[Jessica Sedgwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

My actual rating would be 3.5 stars.

This book had an interesting premise - women disguised as men to fight in the Civil War. Here though, is where the story fell short for me.

I was promised a lot of stories of female soldiers. Instead, I got mini autobiographies of a handful of women. The author went into so much detail with one lady alone that it made up over a quarter of the book (her story took up several chapters with countless entries from another book).

I was hoping to hear from a lot of different stories involving ‘women warriors’ and it did not live up to my expectations.

This is still a well written novel and I enjoyed what I read but I was left shorted and annoyed. I feel that the author ‘lied’ about what this book was about and that it should’ve been advertised differently.

[Courtney · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a good resource, quoting periodicals, diaries, letters and memoirs of Civil War soldiers to document women as soldiers, nurses, and spies on both sides of conflict in the Civil War.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eh. The writer gives me information without really supporting it, and the information he presents and claims is fact, I am unable to verify, so it makes me uncomfortable to use those bits of information. On the other, he does present information I can verify, but unfortunately, that same information is already easily contained in other books of the topic. The great thing though, was that he went into a lot of detail about Loretta Velazquez, since I can't find a copy of her memoir, the bad thing is, again, because he set up a precedent for not providing references for his facts in the Emma Edmonds chapter(he said her family was Irish, but doesn't say where he got that info from and Emma herself never says she's irish) I can't fully trust his claims about her.
It was very interesting read, I enjoyed reading about the different women who went to war disguised as men, he's a good storyteller.

[Roberta · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one book in my large collection about imposters. The book was entertaining. The author's writing style is not stilted or academic. Like many books of its kind, it is very poorly documented. In his notes the author claims that he "did not want to be a party to reporting fiction as fact, or to help to develop a mythology about women in the Civil War" and then proceeds to do exactly that. There is only a selected bibliography. There are notes in the back of the book for each chapter but, if you check the author's sources, background historical information about battles or local history come from well-researched sources but specific facts about individual women tend to come from sources even more poorly documented than this book. In his notes on Loreta Janeta Velazquez he admits that the evidence is circumstantial. He also states in the notes that when he did check primary sources he found major discrepancies.

[Felix · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book as a source for a school project. I got most of the info I needed and appreciated the primary sources and references to many different people, not just one woman.
However, what I did not like was the writing style and plot that jumps around to cover all the people.
The book accomplished my goal for it which was to get information, however, I think it could have been written and formatted better.

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poorly organized. Hard to get through.