Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #664708 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

About the Author
JAMES I. ROBERTSON JR. is Alumni Distinguished Professor in History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is an award-winning author of the biographies of Stonewall Jackson and A. P. Hill and numerous books on the Civil War. His great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier and a cook for Robert E. Lee. Robertson appears frequently in Civil War programs on the Arts and Entertainment Network (A&E), the History Channel, and public television. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Customer Reviews

sloppy hackwork
James Robertson has eeked out a career selling rewarmed and often inaccurate anecdotes from the life and career of Stonewall Jsckson. This copy and paste job, sadly, is nothing new.

sloppy piece of racist nonsense
Once again, Robertson slaps together a poorly sourced work championing the slaveholding South. True to form, he neglects to mention the source of many of Jackson's maxims, Benjamin Franklin, in whose autobiography many of them can be found -- as any competent American historian would know.

Self Assessment Delineated by a choice of Maxims...
If you're seeking military maxims with applications in business or personal life... along the line of Sun Tzu... you won't find them here.

Unlike Lord Chesterfield's "Letters to his Son", from which many of the maxims herein were extracted, and George Washington's hand-copied "Rules of Civility...", both of which represent selections offered up as a lesson plan for the edification of youth; Jackson's collection provides a portrait of the man himself, defined by those particular guidelines he selected as necessary to fill the gaps he perceived in his social upbringing.

Jackson's well known social awkwardness and reticence in public is clearly delineated by his choices. Anyone seeking to understand Jackson will benefit from this book. However, Dr. Roberston errs by delving deeper into Chesterfield's work, and others, in seeking to add supporting text to each maxim, rather than exploring why Jackson chose it. The treasure here is not the maxim, but Jackson's selection of it.