The book has all the historical subtlety of a Confederate reenactor explaining why his battle flag is actually about heritage. More than a century and a half after the Confederacy's defeat, its admirers are still trying to sell the same old fantasy: that the Confederacy was a noble little country of honorable gentlemen, that its armies were defending hearth and home against foreign invaders, and that the central tragedy of the Civil War was the suffering of white Southerners rather than the institution of human bondage they took up arms to preserve.
Readers deserve better than Confederate apologetics dressed up as an adventure story. History is complicated. The moral status of a rebellion launched to preserve slavery is not. And no amount of sniper lore, personal tragedy, or nostalgic prose can make the Lost Cause true.
