FOR such sentimentalists as mourn the end of wars fought by men and strategy and view with disfavor the advent of chemical gas, motorized armies, and entrenched nations, Jackson must always be a favorite hero.

Here is a book concerned almost wholly with problems of war which nevertheless makes very absorbing reading for the laymen. Devoting but three well written chapters to the uninteresting youth of Jackson, Mr. Tate almost immediately swings his hero into action--at West Point, in the Mexican War, and finally in the Civil War which was to bring him his great fame and his death from pneumonia shortly after his great flank march at Chancellorsville.

Mr. Tate has studied his character closely. In Jackson he finds something akin to madness-perhaps the madness of a genius. Jackson has sometimes been compared to Cromwell, and though the analogy does not fit very closely, Mr. Tate shows that Jackson studied the Bible even more thoroughly than he did Napoleon.

The futility of Jackson, as of Lee, lies in the fact that he was on the wrong side. Infinitely ambitious, a born leader of men, his destiny made him the puny obstacle to a movement greater than men--the economic revolution which doomed the South and exalted the North.