 Whenever you read a book by someone who has very strong feelings about the person that they're writing about, either positive feelings like they're a big fanboy or negative, they just loathe this person. And they're writing a biography about that person. You need to be careful. Hey everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we are back with another edition of Tactical Book Review. And today's book is Such Troops as These, the Genius and Leadership of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson by Bevin Alexander. I picked up this book because it was referenced in my tactical leadership book that I have reviewed previously on this channel. And it seemed like an interesting book. There are a couple of cool quotes from it. So, you know, I thought I'd get it and grab it. And I got about that far, probably about, you know, two thirds of the way. Two, I'm on page 191. There's about 270-ish pages. And I quit. I just stopped reading. There's a couple reasons for that. The first one is that it just lost its joy if there was joy to begin with. It was kind of boring. The author references a lot of different names and places. There's a severe lack of maps in this book to be able to, I mean, he goes through battles in detail. And this person went here. And this person did this. And this person went here. And that's great. But one, all the names are confusing. I don't know who's on the side of the north or the south. So that's really easy to lose track of. And then two, there's not enough maps in this book. I mean, if you're gonna walk through battles in detail, you need to have maps. This book should be maybe about twice as thick and just have maps all the time so that you can reference and look and show you who moved where. But that doesn't really get explained all that well in my opinion. Which leads me to the last and the biggest issue with this book. Bevin Alexander never read any of his other books. Maybe they're great, no idea. But he is a massive, massive fan of Stonewall Jackson. And which is fine. And this book seems to be written entirely to prove that Stonewall Jackson was the only competent, smart person general on either the side of the north or the south and that everybody else was a complete incompetent moron who did not belong within a thousand miles of a leadership position. I mean, he hates on Lee, he hates on Jefferson Davis. He paints Lincoln in the bad light. I never got, maybe when he gets to Ulysses S. Grant, maybe he paints him okay. I don't know. But he hates on all the northern generals. And granted, to be fair, a lot of these people, he gives good reasons of why they're stupid, right? Or why they're not as smart as Jackson. Okay. But I don't know if I need a whole book to just bemoan the point that everybody's so stupid and that Jackson is your only hope. You know, I just, again, I just, I got, I was reading it while I was at my son's jujitsu practice and I'm sitting there and I'm reading it. And I'm like, I'm not even, I'm not even enjoying this anymore. What am I doing? And then I looked and I'm like, I still have a hundred pages left of this. I'm like, forget it. Forget it. I threw in the towel. So that's it. That's my review. It's a partial review. I'm gonna go through the whole book. So take that for what it's worth. I will say, look, there are some very small things to glean here. We do need to read biographies about generals, okay? It helps us understand what makes leaders great and what makes leaders not great. And we can then avoid the latter and embrace the former. So if you're at all interested in general ship and stuff like that, don't read this book. Read a different one, because hopefully that will start to give you an even better understanding of that. Again, wouldn't personally recommend this. I do wanna read more books on Stonewall Jackson. I think he's an interesting guy. I just don't think this is the book. Do brave deeds and endure.