Books like As If It Were Glory — picked by fans

In my opinion, this is one of the best Civil War memoirs ever written.

Rufus Dawes (the great-grandson of William Dawes, who alerted colonial minutemen prior to the Battles of Lexington and Concord, along with Paul Revere and Samuel Prescott) was only 20 years old when he was commissioned a Captain in the 6th Wisconsin Infantry (a regiment in the “Iron Brigade”). He served his three-year term of service and resigned his commission in August 1864; taking part in all of the regiment’s battles up to that point (and some of the bloodiest of the war).

He often led the regiment in battle; taking command at the battle of Antietam when the regiment’s colonel, Edward S. Bragg, was wounded and at Gettysburg, when Bragg was absent. After his resignation, he was brevetted a brigadier general for meritorious service. 

Drawing extensively on his diaries and letters, Dawes published Service in… show more.

Published in 1993, the book is part of Fordham University Press’ “The Irish in the Civil War” series. The book is a collection of James P. Sullivan’s newspaper reminiscences published in the 1880s in the Milwaukee Sunday Telegraph. 

James Patrick Sullivan, born in Ireland, was a 17-year-old farm hand in Juneau County, Wisconsin when he first enlisted. Sullivan fought in most of the regiment’s battles and was wounded at least three times; enlisting on three separate occasions (the only soldier in the regiment to do so). The “Rebs” just couldn’t keep Mickey down (He was called “Mickey,” in his company).

In his memoir, Dawes wrote that Sullivan was not only “a heroic soldier” but “For genuine sallies of humor at unexpected times, I have never seen his equal.” He had an “unconquerable good humor and genuine wit. Such men,” Dawes wrote, “are of priceless value in an army.”

Sullivan’s… show more.

Herdegen’s fairly new history of the Iron Brigade, published in 2012, rightfully supplants Alan Nolan’s classic history, The Iron Brigade.

Published some 60 years after Nolan’s history and coming in at 656 pages, Herdegen is able to include previously unpublished archival material, letters, photos, journals, and other primary sources. Where Nolan’s history basically stops after the battle of Gettysburg, Herdegen’s book tells the history of the Iron Brigade all the way to Appomattox and beyond; including information about memorial and reunion activity.

Herdegen’s extension of the story of the Iron Brigade into the 1864 Overland campaign through Petersburg and Appomattox provides an important element to its story that has been given short shrift in many of the previous works on the Iron Brigade.

As somebody who tends to use too many quotations in my writing, I appreciate that Herdegen frequently uses quotes. I like hearing the “voice” and reading… show more.

Published in 2025 (hot off the presses), Marten’s book, as he says in his Introduction, is not a regimental history but a regimental “biography.”

As a “biography,” Martin looks at the regiment as a “living organism.” Using a construct that I have often thought about, Martin notes that there were “multiple ‘Sixth Wisconsins.’” As illness, wounds, and transfers took their toll on the initial 1,000 men, another 1,000 joined during the course of the war. This turnover of men; the replacement of veterans by enlistees, substitutes, and draftees, “created an instability,” Martin notes, that must be appreciated in order to fully understand the history of the Sixth.

Using the framework of the “long Civil War,” a long duration view of the Sixth Wisconsin from the creation of the regiment to the death of the last surviving member, Martin explores the history of the regiment “from peace to war and back… show more.

What about writers more like me? In this book, an Ohio small-town banker turned Union volunteer describes race relations not as Delaney thought they should be but as they were in Union armies commanded by officers who were often anti-Black as well as anti-slavery. It made me feel I was there.

Beatty was a sort of good Union man—no politics at the start of the war, but Radical (Republican) politics at the end of it.

This book reminds us of the human aspect of surgery, aging, and disease.

The brain is superbly complex, and its innermost workings of the brain lie beyond our grasp. I love the thwarted circularity of how we can use our brain to think about how our brain thinks without really understanding how it thinks.

In many people the brain goes wrong, this is often caused by cancerous tumours growing there. Where drugs and radiotherapy fail, surgeons are often the last resort. Marsh describes his experience as a literal brain surgeon and the effect on him of having to make life-altering decisions. 

I love Tellessen’s writing style. It is honest, brutal at times, and often beautiful. I began my Marine Corps service as a Marine Grunt and share a kinship with Tellessen. Many of his stories feel like stories that I lived or could have lived.

I think that is the gift of a great storyteller. He tells the good and bad of what it means to be a Marine in a way that makes me wish I was young enough to do it all again.

The best thing about reading this book was that it shone a light–if you can forgive the pun–on the otherwise unseen world of the nighttime air battles over Germany.

Before I read it, I admit I thought of the night war as some sort of game of chess, somehow fought at a comfortable distance. Boiten’s book shredded that distance and brought me face-to-face with the reality of it all in a gratifyingly unsentimental way.

Perhaps the most powerful image it left me with was of young British (and allied) airmen suddenly being blown out of the sky by an enemy they all so often never saw until their aircraft was turned into a horrifying fireball.      

I am gripped by this account of the real impact of Ireland’s short but very bitter civil war, which left the new state fractured long after the war ended in 1923.

Aiken is the great-granddaughter of a former “terrorist” who later became foreign minister of the Republic of Ireland. She mines fiction as well as historical records to produce a lively work relevant to any war.

Reading these messages in a bottle discovered buried under a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, I am staggered and amazed at the indomitable human capacity for resilience and creativity.

I read these harrowing literary masterworks, which report on the most hellish degradations, and I am stunned that Zalmen Gradowski, from deep within his suffering, could wrest from the horrors before him and from his own despair, a literary art that is beautiful and solacing. I am reminded of the human capacity, which we all must certainly share, to snatch shreds of beauty from the darkest of circumstances and of the human hope that somewhere beyond one’s own hell lives a sympathetic ear.