Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I knew I was going to have problems with this book when I found George Washington, who died in 1799, on a list of participants in the War of 1812. Moreover, the title and the jacket blurb are misleading. They indicate that the book is a naval history of the war. It isn't - it covers the land campaigns as well. However, while there are maps of some of the naval actions, there are none of the land battles, which need them more than the ship-to-ship actions. Unfortunately, those are the least of this book's problems. One of the endorsements on the back of the jacket says that the author "draws on previously overlooked material" about the War of 1812. Not so. The book is based mostly on secondary sources, with only a scattering of published primary sources such as memoirs and diaries. There is absolutely no original research. Consequently, the author has nothing new to say about the war which has not previously been said by other historians whose works he has drawn on. Some of the secondary sources are general surveys, like Samuel Eliot Morison's "Oxford History of the American People" and Thomas A. Bailey's "A Diplomatic History of the American People," which is basically a text book. Other secondary sources on which Utt relies heavily date back to the 19th century, including books by James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Adams, and Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, there are so many direct quotes from Roosevelt that I was tempted to give up on Utt and read Roosevelt's book on the naval war of 1812. At least Roosevelt did some serious research. The same endorsement congratulates Utt on providing an account of African Americans who served in the war, as if nobody had ever noticed this before. Actually, Gene Allen Smith has written an entire book on black participation in the War of 1812. Many important secondary sources were overlooked, including Andro Linklater's biography of General James Wilkinson, Harry Ammon's life of James Monroe, and Irving Brant's magisterial biography of James Madison. Because he has done no original research, Utt offers few opinions of his own on many subjects. He often tells us that some historians say this about some event and others say that, but since has not really delved into the sources, he never takes a position of his own. The book is full of annoying errors in names and ranks. James Lawrence, of "Don't give up the ship" fame, also appears as David Lawrence, which is the name under his picture in the first section of illustrations. Both names appear in the index. Kentucky cavalry commander and future vice president Richard Mentor Johnson becomes Robert Johnson at the Battle of the Thames, but appears only under his real name in the index. The first names of many participants in the war are never given. Robert Henley, one of the American ship commanders in the Battle of Lake Champlain, is listed first as a master commandant, then a few pages later as a lieutenant. Another officer's rank is given as lieutenant commander, a rank which did not exist in the US navy at the time. Whatever his rank, don't look for Henley in the index. He isn't there. Neither are scores of other people mentioned in the text. The index is a pathetic. You can open the book at random, pick out a name on the page, and chances are, unless the person is someone of the stature of Andrew Jackson or Stephen Decatur, he won't be in the index. Of seven senior British officers at the Battle of New Orleans mentioned on pages 493-494, only three appear in the index. And then there are the omissions. In giving the background of the war and the naval buildup, Utt fails to discuss President Jefferson's badly-conceived policy of relying on fleet of small gunboats rather than real warships to defend the American coast. Utt mentions this only in passing toward the end of the book. A battle at Beaver Dams is mentioned several times, but no details are given, even though the American defeat there affected the campaign along the Canadian border in 1813-1814. In the section on the British attack on Baltimore, there is much about the land campaign and very little about the British fleet's bombardment of Fort McHenry - a curious omission in a book which purports to be a naval history of the war. Emphatically not recommended.