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With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North. By Carol Reardon. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. 183. Cloth, $30.00.) book review by Donald Stoker professor of strategy and policy for the U.S. Naval War College's program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, is the author most recently of The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2010), which won the 2010 Fletcher Pratt Award for the best nonfiction Civil War book of 2010. ; Carol Reardon's most recent book is made up of three strong essays held together by an introduction and an epilogue. Her fi rst essay assesses a number of military writers and theorists of the Civil War era who are almost universally ignored. Her discussion of German immigrant Emil Schalk is particularly good—his work on military theory, as well as his commentaries on various aspects of the war. Filled with original research, often from generally untapped sources, and backed by intelligent analysis, With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other is a fi ne piece of scholarly work.

Jefferson Davis is credited with authoring an offensive-defensive Confederate strategy. This pillar of Civil War historiography is incorrect, having been derived from a misunderstanding of the levels of policy and war, and the misreading of scant primary source documentation.

Carl von Clausewitz''s masterwork, On War, is generally considered the greatest text on military theory ever written. Clausewitz is a touchstone for the field today, and is read by scholars, students, and military personnel around the world. And yet to Clausewitz himself, far more important than achieving recognition for his scholarly and theoretical contributions was achieving glory on the field of battle-winning renown not with his pen but with his sword. Military historian Donald Stoker''s perceptive biography of Carl von Clausewitz moves skillfully between Clausewitz''s career as a soldier

Compares the military strategies of Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, suggesting that the Union could have won much earlier had they followed the grand plan of George B. McClellan