Just so you know, this and Dave Powell’s accompanying volume in this series, “All Hell Can’t Stop Them” are a duplication of his “Impulse of Victory”, written for the “World of Ulysses S Grant” series. The three books even all use the same excellent Hal Jesperson maps. So buy these two or that one for the Chattanooga Campaign, but not all of them. There are only minor differences.

This volume is the expected excellent treatment from Powell. There are a few interesting appendices. A couple of well described auto tours, a fascinating Frank Varney discussion of whether things before Grant’s arrival were really as bad as has been portrayed in pro-Grant histories, and one on civil war tourism of lookout mountain. ( )

Battle Above the Clouds is the first of a planned two-volume series on the fighting that followed the battle of Chickamauga; the second will cover the battle of Missionary Ridge. It is brief but contains many illustrations. Of course, the photographs are all in black and white. The period photographs are often too small and/or too dark to enable the reader to tell for sure what he is looking at. The modern photographs, by Harvey Scarborough, are generally better, although one has to question the picture, on p. 122, of the Walmart parking lot. Although from here one is said to have an excellent view over the Wauhatchie Valley, where some significant fighting occurred, none of that is visible in the photo. It looks like a hundred other Walmart parking lots one has seen.

Two major battles are covered in the book. One is the night action at Wauhatchie, and the other is the one for which the book is named, the “Battle Above the Clouds” on Lookout Mountain. The maps for these two battles, by Hal Jespersen, are almost excellent. My only criticism is that the Lookout Mountain map is a little bit confusing, as it is not always easy to tell which way the contour lines are facing.

One final word concerns the appendix by Dr. Frank Varney of Dickinson State University in North Dakota. Entitled “The Myth of the Cracker Line,” in it Dr. Varney argues that, despite what Grant writes in his memoirs, the celebrated “cracker line” supply route into Chattanooga was not Grant’s idea, and that the supply situation of the Union troops in the city was not really that desperate. ( )