cover image Storming Little Round Top: The 15th Alabama and Their Fight for the High Ground, July 2, 1863

Storming Little Round Top: The 15th Alabama and Their Fight for the High Ground, July 2, 1863

Phillip Thomas Tucker, Philip Tucker. Da Capo Press, $40 (344pp) ISBN 978-0-306-81146-3

Tucker (Burnside's Bridge) is chief historian of the 81st Training Wing at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, and his latest book attempts to settle one of the enduring controversies about the battle of Gettysburg: which Confederate unit made the deepest incursion into Union territory? Whereas most of the glory has fallen on Pickett's Charge, Tucker argues that the honor of the ""high water mark of the Confederacy"" belongs to the 15th Alabama, and that the ""forgotten story of the 15th Alabama's achievements on July 2 needs to be told in detail for the first time,"" with full knowledge that it was a devastating loss for the South. This he does, revising previous histories by using unpublished letters and combing the archives for other testimony of the Confederates' storming of that famous rocky hill. Tucker brings the battle to life with thick descriptions of these dramatic events in a volume sure to please Civil War buffs.