Jim, thanks for the kind words. I'm glad you're enjoying the book. I haven't received any word recently on how well it's doing. It came out at a rather odd time so few schools had time to adopt it for the upcoming semester. I know that this past spring semester about a dozen schools adopted it. This fall semester will give us a better idea on how sales will go but schools probably won't be making orders until next month.

I'm not working on anything right now because I'm sort of burned out after writing two textbooks back to back (the other was a Louisiana History text). I occasionally write articles for the Louisiana Sportsman magazine (have 2 in the August issue) and some book reviews but that's about it.

I also went through Chattanooga in May while driving to New England on vacation but didn't get to stop. Got to visit Fort Warren, Massachusetts, where Richard Ewell and other Confederate generals were kept prisoners. I mentioned to a ranger that I wrote "Campbell Brown's Civil War" and told him stories about Brown's and Ewell's imprisonment there. I was hoping to find the actual room they were kept in but he said they didn't know which rooms housed which prisoners. But he did take my wife and me off the tourist trail and unlocked a room he said might have been their quarters. It was pretty neat to look around it.

Chattanooga's an interesting place with lots to see besides Civil War sites. If you haven't done so you should get a copy of Stuart Salling's book "Louisianians in the Western Confederacy" (McFarland Press). It's a history of the Adams-Gibson Louisiana Brigade. I'm reading it now and it's quite good. Haven't gotten to the Missionary Ridge chapter yet, but Stuart's coverage of Shiloh and Murfreesboro was very detailed and interesting.

And, by all means, if you come to the area let me know and we'll try to get together. By the way, one of my colleagues in the history department wrote a book on the life of Sol and his experiences in the WWII concentration camps and fighting with the resistance.