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This is actually a fairly short biography; about 190 pages, and a lot of room is taken up by photographs.

Frankly, I wish more biographies would devote the amount of space to pictures as this one does. To give an idea, there’s ten just in the first appendix (on P.G.T. Beauregard’s oldest son).

So, don’t go in expecting a lot of analytical detail, as there’s just not room for it. But Sean Chick does well with the space he uses.

Naturally, the ACW takes up the bulk of the attention, but the first three chapters cover Beauregard’s family background, and his early life. There is some discussion in here, and later, about creole culture’s tendency towards braggadocio, and how that shows up in many of Beauregard’s wartime pronouncements, but there’s not enough room to really dig into this aspect of his background, and how it was expressed in his writings.

The central thesis of the book is Beauregard as under-appreciated tactician. This is the sort of thing that needs more detailed analysis than this book can provide to really defend, but there is plenty of material here with his disagreements with Jefferson Davis and other Confederates around him. This also could use some more digging, but it is more than apparent enough (and well-known elsewhere) that political feuding helped keep him out of the spotlight. There’s some discussion of Davis’ moves of various top people, but with more room really looking at what options were open, and if he could have assigned people differently could be interesting.

Similarly, there is a good amount of attention to his defense of Petersburg before Lee understood how close Grant was getting to taking it. Part of the trouble is Beauregard’s own vacillating over his position, constantly contradicting himself in messages to Lee. While this is the natural result of the stresses of battle and seeing despair in every reverse and triumph in every advance, these are the tendencies that a good commander must master. While he held on with good positions and inadequate troops, events mastered him instead of the reverse.

This is a good overall look at P.G.T. Beauregard and his immediate family, and will certainly lead to me paying more attention to him in other books. The photographs and illustrations, and a few maps are also worth the price of admission.